The Exeter study has been making waves all around the science community. Now it stopped by our friends in Vancouver to make it’s point with the newly most famous urban beavers on the scene at the Olympic Village.

Beaver dams can filter pollution and sediment from water, study says

Living alongside nature’s engineers can present both challenges and opportunities, say B.C. wildlife experts.

VANCOUVER—Beaver dams are natural filters for the waterways they inhabit, reducing sediment in rivers and soil erosion from surrounding areas, according to new research from the University of Exeter and Devon Wildlife Trust.

But experts say it’s unlikely we’ll be installing beaver lodges upstream from our water fountains any time soon, given how often beaver engineering and human engineering are at odds with one another.

Adam T. Ford, the Canada Research Chair in Wildlife Restoration Ecology, said the human project of changing wild places into urban space renders nearby ecosystems less able to rebound from beavers’ natural appetites.

Roughly nine colonies of beavers live in the City of Vancouver — approximately 45 to 50 animals — with many more spread throughout the lower mainland.

Oh how I wish there was anyone in Contra Costa who was tracking the numbers of beavers living here, and could count how many of them there were. (I mean other than us, that is).

Nick Page, a biologist with the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation, said beavers have begun to reclaim territories around the city they haven’t inhabited in 50 — and in some cases 80 — years. He called it part of the “re-wilding” of Vancouver.

Page said while beavers’ habitats play an important role in carbon-capture and help create wetland homes for other species, Vancouverites seem to value the sight of the animal the most.

“Seeing a beaver is a unique thing,” he said, adding creatures such as herons, eagles and orcas make people feel connected to the wild from within city limits.

“All these (animals) are points of contact with nature in a very urban city, and people really value these things.”

Hurray for urban beavers! And the special biologists who recognize the powerful impact contact with wildlife in your own city (and correspondingly contact with other people who have also had contact with that wildlife) can have. If there was one thing we learned in Martinez and that the city council should have learned. It was this.

Jesse Zeman, director of fish and wildlife restoration with BC Wildlife Federation, said beavers, like any other natural force with the power to disrupt human habitats, can teach us a valuable lesson about how we live in balance with our ecosystem.

“There’s the thought of wildlife, and then there’s integrating with wildlife,” he said, “and sometimes those two things are very different.”

Because human and beavers now find themselves in conflict when making homes in the same spaces, Zeman said humans might ask themselves whether we need as much space as we think we do  Through a certain lens, he added, the issue becomes less about beaver-management, and more about managing ourselves.

“It seems like over time,” he said, “what we’re kind of learning is that some of these natural processes can actually be beneficial.”

You don’t say! You don’t say! You don’t say!

Oh it is music to my ears to read sentences like these that I have been repeating in a vacuum for the past 11 years. In Martinez we found out that having beavers move into your city makes you damned er dammed lucky! May your words roll down hill to all the dark places where cities wouldn’t imagine cooperating with beavers. And may they make a difference to the visibility of urban wildlife for years and decades to come.

Hey, what are you doing June 30th? Judy and Jim Atkinson from nearby Port Moody just booked their flight to come to the Martinez Beaver Festival and we’d love to have you.

Honestly when I see articles about the social impact of urban beavers I always think of this:

That Dam Meeting! from Heidi Perryman on Vimeo.