Beaver bright spots don’t often come from Virginia. Admittedly there are a few true believers there, and that one awesome paper from Stephanie Boyles but in general it is not the best place in the world to be a beaver.
Ryan Bradley’s nice long article might change all that. I’m not sure I understand the timing, since he mentions Rachel Poliquin’s book and quotes Frances Backhouse but not Ben Goldfarb. But it’s a wonderful read. Here are some highlights but go check out the whole thing.
What the Beaver Can Teach Us About Innovative Conservation
The next morning, after my drive up the mountain, at the Mineral Lodge Restaurant, I met Kristen Wilson, an ecologist at the Nature Conservancy and one of the overseers of the BDA project. Soon we’d be heading out to Child’s Meadow to see the beaver dams she was looking after. Over breakfast, she outlined the broader implications of the project. What I had to understand, Wilson said, was that something seemingly as simple as a small dam constructed out of woven willow branches, blocking up a thin creek, was not quite so simple.
The dam was meant to perform several tasks. A few of these, such as habitat restoration and water retention, were fairly obvious. But one of the most important things the dam would be doing was trapping carbon in the murky, silty, slow river bottom behind it. This task—carbon capture—was what paid for the dam’s existence. The BDA pilot project in Child’s Meadow had received the bulk of its funding via California’s cap-and-trade program, which in 2018 paid out $1.4 billion to fund a huge range of projects, everything from rebates for buying environmentally friendly cars and buses, or for solar panels, to grants for planting trees in urban areas, to simply buying up land to preserve and restore it.
The BDAs were, Wilson explained, a newer and cheaper form of meadow restoration. The usual process of restoring a wetland in a meadow was simple construction: dig a pond, plug up the downstream end, watch the water fill it in. Pond-and-plug, it’s called. Of course, this requires some big machinery, but using big machines—engineering our environment—is something we are good at, and it results in a picture-perfect mountain meadow with a pond at its center. One problem with pond-and-plug is that it is expensive, easily four or five times the cost of BDAs, if not more.
Ryan is vising the site of that series of BDA’s that won the coveted grant money in 2018 for climate change projects. BDA’s capture carbon. That’s the whole point. All the other good things they do for fish and wildlife is just an added bonus.
Farther down the creek was a strand of dead trees. I asked Wilson what was going on down there and she told me that’s where the real chaos was, because a family of beavers lived there. We walked down toward the dead trees and, as we neared, Wilson and I spotted a woman hunched over a section of creek bank, staring intently at the water. The creek here was indeed chaotic. The beavers had dug channels, as they do, to avoid awkward passage over land. The waterways cleaved the landscape into jigsaw-puzzle pieces. It was easier just to stick to the waterways, rather than chance it on land and trip into an unseen channel.
The woman, Wilson whispered to me, was Karen Pope, a wildlife biologist who studies frogs. Specifically, the Cascades frog, a very endangered species that lives precisely within the beaver-induced chaos. We watched her watching the river, hunting for a frog, until she stood up, noticed us, and beckoned us over. She and Wilson immediately got down to it. Wilson wanted to know what Pope thought about the sections of dam that had blown out, where the water was coming over and the dam was no longer doing what we think a dam is supposed to do.
Pope pointed downriver slightly from one such damaged section, to where a small bite had formed from the flow of water hitting the bank and scooping away at its side, creating a still little pool. “That’s where the frogs breed, right there,” Pope said. “And here—in these little channels the beavers create, that’s perfect frog habitat too. This frog is tied completely to this environment.”
There were many such species. A bird called the willow flycatcher, also endangered, hunts in the beavers’ ponds and nests in the beavers’ willows. There were insects and muskrats, fish and waterfowl, and anything that needs an excess of water in an often dry landscape. It struck me then, as Wilson described species after species that benefits from beaver engineering, that the lesson of the human-built beaver dams, and of being more beaver-like generally, was one of deconstruction.
That is, instead of our built landscape existing as a way to live apart from nature, of keeping it at our doorstep, we should accept the fact that nature is inescapable. The whole climate is changing, and large swaths of the globe are becoming inimical to human life. Nature is a problem we can’t engineer our way out of. But, like the beavers, we might engineer our way back into it.
Isn’t that nice! Yup there’s a lot more than sequestration on a beaver’s resume! I like to come across the passage as if by surprise in any article. It took Ryan a page and a half to get there. But that’s okay. He’s there now.
The whole of nature—which is to say, all of the world—is like the beaver’s patchwork quilt: dynamic, changing, chaotic. Beaver dam analogs and their champions often find themselves in uneasy coexistence with regulatory agencies responsible for keeping rivers manageable and controlled. The very purpose of a BDA is to add a bit less control—a bit of untidiness—to the river. The dams help the river burst its banks, begin to meander, and reenter the old floodplains. But then, it’s often a flood-control agency rubber-stamping such projects, and these agencies are inherently skeptical of introducing an object meant to bring about the very thing—a flood—they have been tasked with preventing.
“People are really attached to stasis. It’s the unfortunate result of human nature,” is how Kate Lundquist explained the resistance to BDAs. Lundquist is a director at the Water Institute at the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center in Sonoma, California. She and her colleague Brock Dolman describe themselves as being part of “the whole beaver dam analog movement,” which is also a movement toward what’s known as process-based restoration. The idea behind process based restoration is both simple and radical. Rather than reconstructing an ecosystem based on our ideas of how that ecosystem appears, to us, why not try to kickstart some of the primary drivers of that ecosystem and let nature take it from there?
Yes, it’s true. We like things to be the way we left them. We like our creeks in straight predictable lines and we don’t like them to jump their banks. And beavers change all that. It’s what they do. Change is every beavers middle name.
Dolman mentioned a place where the kind of regenerative disturbance and process-based restoration he and Lundquist were talking about had accomplished some extraordinary transformations in a very short amount of time. About three years earlier, some BDAs had been placed in a small creek outside of Lincoln, California, just north of Sacramento. It was hot, dry, brush-filled rangeland that had, a long time ago, been marshy floodplain pockmarked with beaver ponds. Gold miners came in, dynamited the creek, and named it Doty Ravine. It had been tamed ever since. But in just a few years, Dolman said, “a very large chunk of land has been turned back into an insane beaver habitat.” The place was, he told me, like going back in time to a prehistoric, practically prehuman landscape.
Damion Ciotti is a rangy man who speaks with the quiet enthusiasm of someone prone to spending long bouts outside the office whenever possible. Ciotti was driving a pickup through winding roads in the Sierra foothills, out toward Doty, while telling me about his early experiences in hydrology, when he really began learning a river. Ciotti is a restoration specialist at US Fish and Wildlife and is the reason there are BDAs in Doty. When he was in graduate school in Oregon, and becoming obsessed with fly-fishing, he’d skip class and hit the river, watching it very closely for hours—all day, more or less. That’s where he learned how to watch moving water.
Nice to see Damion in an article. He’s usually a quiet behind the scenes mover and shaker. It’s also nice to read about ANY GOOD BEAVER PROJECT IN PLACER COUNTY the trapping capital of the state. In fact I think Lincoln was the site of the most beaver permits issued for trapping. Ahh memories!
He hoped it had somehow managed to spawn, as the new wetlands made for perfect salmon hatcheries. Salmon, frogs, birds, and a seed bank for native aquatic plants—the beaver-built wetlands were nutrient-rich nurseries for all sorts of critters. And the cows, even though they didn’t have much to graze, seemed to enjoy hanging out near the water’s edge too. It certainly was cooler down there in the summertime.
We reached a locked fence by the side of the road and Ciotti pulled up to it, jumped out, unlocked it, and drove us onto the rangeland property. In the distance stood a strand of cottonwoods. This was where the wetlands began. Ciotti parked on a bluff above the strand and we quietly put on waders to trudge through the sludgy muck. In the silence, I noticed the air was alive with birdsong, coming from the cottonwoods, willows, rushes, still waters, a ringing that emanated from this oasis. We dropped down into it and the birdsong grew near cacophonous.
I love to think about the transformations beavers bring, both to the landscape they alter and to people lives who cherish them. There are rewards we all expect to see. But there are others, that we could never have imagined.
I asked Ciotti what had been the biggest surprise about the whole project, expecting him to say something about the extraordinarily low cost. “It’s the beavers, they did something so monumental. This, all this, was oak savannah. Now, in three years, this is the largest connected wetland in the whole Sierra foothills. These aren’t especially big creatures, they’re not burning a crazy amount of calories, and just look at all this!”
I thought, then, of the final words from the woman-turned-beaver in the Haida legend: “We have returned to our home in the water.” The story seems to be less Agreedabout how beavers are like us, and more about how we might become like them.
Agreed.
