Well the beaver coho story is only 30 years old. Don’t you think its time for the Smithsonian to act like they discovered it? Me too.
Scientists Are Relocating Nuisance Beavers to Help Salmon
Alves helped launch the Tulalip Beaver Project in 2014 with the aim of using beavers to boost declining salmon numbers. Since the low-cost project began, scientists have relocated more than 200 “nuisance” beavers, as they are called, and created dozens of salmon-friendly beaver ponds. While scientists don’t have statistics on salmon population changes after beaver reintroductions, they say anecdotal evidence shows the rodents reshape the landscape in a way that’s fostering more fish. Now they’re set to expand their easily scalable work into new watersheds in western Washington, and other groups in the Pacific Northwest are picking up on their successful tactics too. “I’ve heard multiple people say that Washington is kind of a leader in beaver projects,” says Kodi Jo Jaspers, a Trout Unlimited employee and manager of the recently-launched Wenatchee Beaver Project on the other side of the Cascades.
Just so you know. There are no “Nuisance beavers”. Only property-owners that can solve problems. And property owners who can’t.
The reintroductions are important because the outlook for wild salmon is dire, especially in the Pacific Northwest. About a third Tof salmon and steelhead populations on the West Coast have already gone extinct according to a 2007 study in Conservation Biology. Today, 14 more populations out of 131 remaining are at risk of extinction in Washington alone, according to a 2020 report produced by the governor’s salmon recovery office. In the heavily populated Puget Sound area, only one of 22 different populations of chinook salmon—the largest species—has exceeded population goals set by NOAA in 2007.
These declines have led to a flurry of funding for salmon recovery projects. Many of those projects are costly and logistically complex; they include tearing down man-made dams that block fish passages, removing pollutants from contaminated waters and installing new salmon-friendly bridges over spawning grounds. The salmon recovery office estimates that only 22 percent of the funding needed for these projects has been met—after $1 billion has been pumped into salmon recovery efforts.
Moving beavers for fun and profit! That sounds like a book that needs to be written. Everyone loves a good ‘moving beavers’ story. Molly has been in the New York times. The Washington Post. And now the Smithsonian.
I wonder if any of these folks ever think about the problems that COULD be solved by installing a flow device and letting beavers stay put?
Salmon need icy cold, clear water year-round, and that’s exactly what beavers provide. A 2019 study by Benjamin Dittbrenner, the executive director of Beavers Northwest, showed that each beaver relocated by the Tulalip Beaver Project created a swimming-pool sized pond of water for every 328 feet of stream. The beavers also slowed the stream down, causing more water to soak into the ground. The dams cooled downstream water by more than two degrees Celsius because the deeper water was harder for the sun to heat. And the ponds increase the amount of water available throughout the dry summer months by 20 percent because of the small reservoirs created behind the beaver dams. All of these new conditions add up to ideal habitat for salmon fry, as the baby fish are called.
I’ve been dooint this so long I have the graphic all ready for every occasion. Fancy that. This is the paragraph I like the most.
“If you have beavers in conflict with people and they will be killed if they’re not moved, then yeah. We’re gonna move them,” says Alexa Whipple. “But we’re trying to create more programs for coexistence strategies.” Biologists use tools that homeowners might not be aware of to mitigate damage. For example, scientists install pond leveling devices that prevent flooding and wrap the base of trees in beaver-proof fencing.
Now that is worth the price of admission. Hey I wonder when the Smithsonian is going to write an article about the harm people do to salmon when they trap beavers. Any time soon?
Don’t hold your breath.
Despite the success of beaver relocation programs, quantifying the projects’ impacts on salmon is tricky. Limited funding means projects don’t have the resources to count salmon numbers in the streams. Instead, biologists measure easier-to-collect data like water temperature, the number of new ponds and the size of those ponds. “Our metric of success is just whether they have impacted their environment somehow, in some way, by some structure,” says Jaspers, with the assumption that building better habitat equals more salmon.
Even though the biologists don’t have the written numbers to show it, they have witnessed direct benefits to the fish. “We’ve seen sites just completely transform to these massive beaver complexes of like 12, 13 dams and ponds everywhere,” says Alves. “Now there’s hundreds of salmon fry swimming in these ponds.”
Or you know. You could leave the beavers where they are. Solve any issues they cause with about 2 hrs of work. And have salmon populations explode across the pacific coast.
Your call.
