Beavers bring their engineering skills to Bernheim creek restoration

Two years ago, beavers moved in and are now putting their own engineering skills to work on the creek. And Bernheim officials couldn’t be happier.

“There are not a lot of beavers living in places that let beavers do what beavers do,” said Andrew Berry, the forest manager at Bernheim.

The creek now has “incredible biodiversity,” aided in part by the addition of new beaver dams that have created a couple of beaver ponds. The ponds are great for birds, amphibians and reptiles, he said. The area has attracted raccoon, river otters and birds of prey.

Before you go assuming that this ecologically minded beaver-savvy article is from Washington State or even Dr. Hood in Alberta, allow me to inform you that this is from Kentucky, the home of our dear friend and wunderkind Ian Timothy. The young creator of the Beaver Creek series and champion of the Draught Park beavers says that Berheim Forest is a great place to be, one of the places where he started his love of nature and he is not at all surprised that they recognize beaver gifts when they see them.

The altered Wilson Creek had functioned more like a swift-moving drainage channel atop bedrock, leaving it less friendly to aquatic life. It also hasn’t been restoring nutrients to the hollow’s soils.

Even Bernheim Forest had prevented trees from returning to the valley for decades by planting corn and other food crops for deer, before deciding a more natural approach would be better. Now that natural approach is in full bloom, so to speak.

The creek has room to spread out, and when it does, it deposits nutrients across the flood plain. Trees have grown tremendously during the last decade, some reaching more than 20 feet into the air.

One of the most striking features is the clarity of the water. I have seen a lot of creeks and rivers in Kentucky, and they often are choked with sediment. This water was clear enough to see the bottom a few feet down to the bottom of the beaver ponds.

Ahhh crystal clear waters and living creeks! You mean like this?

cheryl beaver kit 2013 — Beaver Kit 2013: Cheryl Reynolds

Congratulations Kentucky, you have decided to listen to your beavers and that makes you almost as smart as the 15 year old boy who made this years ago….and is now heading off to college. Sniff.

The dog that didn’t bark…

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Environmental February 27, 2013

Grand Tetons National Park is just ten miles south of Yellowstone in Wyoming and is one of the few places that boasts roughly the same wildlife population it had historically. The famous Snake River flows through it vertically and there are countless lakes formed by glaciers. It was bordered at the edges by private ranchers who were given ‘grandfather permission’ to continue to graze their cattle on park land, for their lifetime and the life of their heirs.

Apparently Wyoming is worried that it doesn’t have enough beavers in the park, and has noticed that the population is going down, not up. Beaver friend Sherry Guzzi has a sister in Jackson Hole who sent her this article.

Grand Teton Beavers Take Unexplained Dive

Number of colonies cut in half since 2006 professor says.

Mike Koshmrl: Jackson Hole News

I put the article on our website here if you want to read for yourself. It speculates that the population decline may have something to do with drought, but I’m not wild about that idea. I think if you had beavers you wouldn’t have had those streams dry up in the first place. The article described several folks scratching their heads about the population decline, but I’m inclined to wonder about their ‘wonder’.

Let’s look, for example, at the USDA beaver trapping numbers for 2009, which I happen to have access to. 58 beavers were killed in Wyoming, with methods ranging from snares to firearms. 67 beavers were killed in nearby Idaho that same year. 189 in Colorado and 10 in Utah. (The stats for Montana say that zero beaver were killed by USDA in 2009, but since it also lists 493 bison killed by helicopter I have to those doubt that beavers fared much better.)

That’s 324 beavers killed in a single year in the states surrounding Grand Tetons. Which is about 64 colonies more or less. And that’s just USDA stats, and doesn’t count the permits issued or folks who eliminate beavers on private lands. I’m not saying that all those missing beavers were killed, but adding up the impact when every stream feeding the park is trapping beaver, AND cattle are grazing on the riparian border, AND climate change is forcing them to work harder, the collective impact adds up.

I wrote Dr. Glynnis Hood about the article this morning and this was her response:

Beaver populations can fluctuate due to drought, disease, poor resource availability, and increased predation. In our area, I’ve seen cases of tularaemia cycle through following a drought – mainly because dispersal can be repressed and the lodges have more beavers in them for longer periods of time than they would in the good years. Just like with people, crowding and disease can go hand in hand. The population I’m studying right now decline to a third of what it was prior to the most recent drought (2008 -2009), but is beginning to make a comeback.

Which I’m sure is true, and I’m very grateful that I can send a question to a great mind like Dr. Hood and get an answer back, but I have to wonder. What if beaver populations are on the decline everywhere and we don’t notice because we all stopped counting? What if Wyoming is just this?

Dispersal Information and Information Dispersal!

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions, Creek Seekers Poetry Contest, Educational, Environmental February 26, 2013

The Agdenes peninsula, Sør-Trøndelag, Norway

Suffice it to say, whenever you are shown stunningly beautiful photos with mountain ranges bisected by water, it is usually Norway you are looking at, whether they mention it or not. This matters to beavers because Duncan Halley is an avid researcher there, (From Scotland originally) and a noted beaver devotee. He sent me a note yesterday announcing a new paper about population dispersal.

Why should you care about beaver dispersal of Castor Fiber in another country? Because one of the findings was that beavers travel for long distances (25 km) over saltwater and across continental divides to colonize new habitat. Which means that the world is pretty much their oyster, and California has been insane to insist for years that they weren’t in the Sierras because the hills were too steep.

Social Hour at the State of the Beaver Conference. Duncan is the vested man in the middle looking at the camera. On the far right is Adrien Nelson from Fur-bearer Defenders, then Mike Callahan of Beaver Solutions in Massachusetts. In the background are conference champions Lois Houston and Stanley Pietrowski. And to Duncan’s left is Paul Henson from FWS, the source of the very apt suggestion that we consider beaver as a surrogate species.

Which brings me to this morning, where I am trotting off to Rona Zollinger’s Habitats and Cultural Change Seminar at Vicente High School to talk to the students about why beavers are useful and how it could be smart to designate them as one of the important Surrogate Species identified by FWS. I’m thinking 30 essays from some ecologically savvy 15-year-olds, (and hopefully 10 from some genius silicon valley 8 year olds from Helios the school that did a field trip a few months ago) just might sway the judges.

Wish me luck!

Paternal

heidi08 Beavers February 25, 2013

Yesterday morning my father passed away. He was 84 years old and died in his sleep. I thought it would be fitting to mention that the very first time I saw a Martinez Beaver he was with me. It was January 2007. I didn’t know it then, but the beaver we saw was also a father.