Month: May 2021

BEAVERS SEND SMOKE SIGNALS

Don’t you sometimes get the feeling that we’re nickling and diming this beaver thing to death? Chipping away at how beavers are good for salmon, For drought, For flooding. For erosion. For Wildfires. When all the while what we should just be saying is: BEAVERS ARE GOOD!!!

Maybe this is the next step step.’

Beavers can affect wildfires

Their infrastructure raises the water table and creates wetlands used by many other species, and because of their effect on other organisms in the ecosystem, they are considered a keystone species. This storage of water can change the vegetation type as well as the moisture content in the live and dead fuel. Wetlands usually do not burn in a wildfire and they can serve a barrier to its spread.

Well this HAS to make its way to the governor. Don’t you think?

Sio
Sometimes its when you have ZERO IDEA how to solve a problem that you finally take advice from the ones who you’ve been ignoring all this time.

The BeaversandBrush.com website is a not-for-profit publication, “Created by Californians seeking to protect California from wildfire. We can help one another to safety by welcoming back native beavers and traditional prescribed burning of brush.”

Photos from their website show the change in a creek after beavers moved in.

They then go on to talk about Lucy Sherriff’s article in the Sierra club website – the one that I learned yesterday she couldn’t GET THE SMITHSONIAN to pay for or even be interested in. Her article in that magazine was paid for by a grant from SEJ (The society for environmental journalists). Because why on earth would a science magazine pay for information about an ecosystem engineer that can protect the environment?

[Dr. Emily] Fairfax began to carry out the scientific research that she had hoped to find. Using satellite images, she mapped vegetation around beaver territories before, after, and during wildfires (footage of wildfires in progress can show how a fire moves through a landscape). She visited field sites in California, Colorado, Idaho, Oregon, and Wyoming and found sections of creek that did not have beavers were on average more than three times as affected by fire—burning a bigger area—than areas where beavers had built dams.

“I expected some of the time beaver dams would work,” says Fairfax. Instead, she found the presence of beavers had significant effects. “It didn’t matter if it was one pond or 55 ponds in a row. If there were beaver dams, the land was protected from fire. It was incredible.”

Beavers are sending up smoke signals. If we don’t get the message soon it may be too late.

DAY 2: CLIFF NOTES VERSION

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver Conference May 5, 2021

Day 2 done at last. I never thought I could get tired of hearing all the good things beavers do, but making a short film where you have to hear it over and over and over again will do it to you.

Enjoy! And please share with all your super busy friends.

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WHAT THE SMITHSONIAN SHOULD HAVE WRITTEN

heidi08 Beaver ecological impact, Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Fire Prevention May 4, 2021

Now THIS is the article that should have been in the Smithsonian. Plus a link to the California beaver Summit.

Killing is easier than paperwork

If a farmer, landowner, or property developer wants to get a beaver out of a certain area, it’s easier to kill the beaver than to apply to move it elsewhere. Across the states, it’s common for landowners to dynamite beaver dams, with whole forums dedicated to the topic and dramatic instructional YouTube videos.

In 2019, the California Fish and Wildlife Department issued 187 depredation permits to kill beavers across the state. In 2020, that number rose to 204. While not all permits are necessarily fulfilled, it’s also true that multiple beavers in a single area can be killed under one permit. Despite the fact that beavers once roamed far and wide across the state’s waterways, it’s illegal under California law to release one into a new location. Though beavers are native to the state, they weren’t recognized as such by California Fish and Wildlife until 2013.

BOOM! This is the article that she wanted to write in the Smithsonian. I’m sure of it. This is the article ALL of california needs to read. Great thinking to start with the Sierra Club.

The beaver does more to shape its environment than nearly any other animal on Earth. They can cause incredible amounts of destruction to infrastructure; downing power lines, and blocking and rerouting waterways. But their dam-building also can improve water quality, reduce flood risk, and create the conditions for complex wetland habitats to form —providing refuge for wildlife and storing carbon in the process.

“It’s not that complicated,” says Joe Wheaton, an associate professor at Utah State’s Department of Watershed Sciences, who developed the university’s BRAT project (short for Beaver Restoration Assessment Tool.). The initiative serves as a planning aid for researchers and restoration managers who are looking to assess the potential of beavers to restore watersheds. Wheaton has worked on the Tule River Tribe’s reintroduction project and many others across the States. “If you wet up the sponge of your valley bottom you have the potential to at least slow the spread, if not at least have the land act as livestock and wildlife refuge during wildfires. If you have a wide enough valley bottom, and beaver are present, it can be big enough to actually stop the advance of these wildfires. That information just needs to get out there.”

Articles like this are going to help. I can tell you that.

Dr. Emily Fairfax and the case of the missing beaver research

One thing that has been missing in the discussion of beavers and wildfires has been science connecting the two. But that is beginning to change. In 2018, Emily Fairfax, a young PhD student studying hydrological science at the University of Colorado Boulder saw a tweet posted by Joe Wheaton, of the wildfire-scorched landscape following Idaho’s Sharps Fire, with a small patch of green at the center. “Why is there an impressive patch of green in the middle of 65,000 acres of charcoal? Turns out water doesn’t burn. Thank you beaver!” wrote Wheaton.

But she found herself struggling to find any previously published research on the subject. “It was no man’s land,” says Fairfax, who found plenty of research on beavers, fish, and waterways, but none on beavers and fire. “When you try to do new research it really helps when you can stand on the work of previous scientists,” says Fairfax. “After a certain amount of time, after a question hasn’t been studied, you start to think ‘oh, it’s because there’s nothing there.’”

Instead, her leads came through people like Wheaton, and an educational site called Beavers in Brush, which aggregates information about prescribed burns, as well as rewetting the lands through beaver protection. “That made me realize this has merit, there are people who are aware that this can work,” says Fairfax “I don’t know why people haven’t studied this, but obviously this is a thing.”

Yes it’s a thing, If you pay attention you’ll realize how much of a thing. Now let’s write the article that SHOULD be written Lucy, Beaver help salmon, help drought, help erosion, help fires, help frogs. When is California going to HELP THEM?

Fairfax hopes her research will help change California’s strict rules around beaver relocation, the way policy is already changing in Washington, especially as wildfires in California have reached record-breaking levels over the past several years. In 2017, while McDarment was still trying to get permission to relocate beavers to tribal lands, the Pier Fire consumed 8,800 acres of Tule River tribal lands, including several giant sequoias.

Meanwhile, Fairfax’s research on beavers and wildfires is only beginning. “I set out to ask a question: Do beavers keep the land green during fires, yes or no?” she says. “The answer was yes. But that’s not the end of the story. Why? How? Does this happen everywhere? What if you have a tight canyon? I’m digging into the specifics now, so people can implement this and actually use beavers for fire prevention. I would love to be able to call someone up and tell them how many beaver dams they need in their creek.

Here endeth the lesson. Allow me to leave you with a special explanation of why beaver habitat is 3xs more protected from fire.

BEAVER BENEFITS IN THE SMITHSONIAN

heidi08 Beaver relocation, Beavers and salmon May 3, 2021

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.

WHAT OREGON NEEDS TO TEACH US

heidi08 Beaver ecological impact May 2, 2021

If you were from a large family you know what it means to wait for the hand-me-downs. Along with the horrific items you never wanted there was always some really popular jacket or sweater that you saw make its way from sibling to sibling before it was finally YOUR TURN. I was the youngest so I had to wait a long time and I could keep it as long as I liked. Which means I’m used to this. I’ve always said that beaver wisdom on the pacific starts in Washington, trickles down to Oregon and will eventually get to California. Which means that even though Oregon is behind their older brother, they are still way, way, smarter than us.

Here’s another example of how much smarter Oregon is than California.

Bringing beavers back to the Beaver State

C’waam and Koptu were once a staple meal for the Klamath Tribes. They’re a rarity now — members are allowed to catch only two of the suckerfish a year. The ray-finned C’waam, with its long snout and the smaller white-bellied Koptu, with a large head and lower notched lip, are only found in the Upper Klamath Basin.

The tribal government has tried various tactics to restore fish populations: raising young fish to older ages before releasing them in the lakes, monitoring water quality, working with landowners to restore riparian habitat, and bringing a lawsuit, which was eventually dropped, against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to save the C’waam and Koptu. Now the tribes are turning to an unlikely hopeful savior: the beaver.

“Their activity is a driver for the productivity and diversity for the whole ecosystem,” said Alex Gonyaw, senior fisheries biologist for the Klamath Tribes in Southern Oregon and Northern California.

Well isn’t that a true thing! Thanks Alex whom I’ve never met but feel we’re going to be fast friends soon enough! Yet another reason to appreciate beavers. Will the list ever be completed?

Two bills currently moving through the Oregon state legislature would respectively prohibit the taking of beavers on federally managed public land and exclude beavers from being classified as predatory animals.

“We hope fish biodiversity would increase and we would have an opportunity for tribal fishing rights to return,” said Alex Gonyaw, a senior fisheries biologist with the Klamath Tribes.

“Our aim is to work with nature not against it,” Gonyaw explains. The tribal government, which hopes to establish a stable fish population as a food source, wanted to reshape the land to provide healthy fish habitats. But they didn’t want to use bulldozers to reshape the Williamson River. “We needed to hold the water back, and beavers do that naturally.”

There’s a lot of things beavers do naturally, you better sit down while I review then, Restore fish, save water, improve birds, remove nitrogen, prevent fires. Oh I could go on and on.

Beavers, a keystone species, have been found to help mitigate the spread of wildfires, thanks to their water-damming habits.

Gonyaw hopes the tribes’ efforts at attracting beavers — by using natural posts and woven willows to give the animals a foothold to make dams — will start to hold back water and that the historic vegetation, of local lily pads and bulrushes, will return.

“And we’ll eventually have a shallow lake wetland system again,” Gonyaw said. “If there is continuous standing water here, we hope fish biodiversity would increase and we would have an opportunity for tribal fishing rights to return.”

First you get the beavers, then you get the fishes, Yes that’s the way it works.

The two proposed laws moving through the state legislature — HB 2843, which protect beavers on public lands, and HB 2844, which would take them off the predator list, would mean stricter policies around how, when, and where they can be killed — could make an “enormous” difference in improving the health of Oregon’s landscape and biodiversity, said Suzanne Fouty, a hydrologist who helped legislators craft the bills.

“It is really serious what we are faced with, and we have very little time left to create conditions that help our wild and human communities be somewhat buffered against the impacts of climate change,” Fouty said.

Hi Suzanne! We knew you’d show up in this article eventually! Isn’t retirement fun? You get to tell the truth about beavers and it doesn’t matter whose toes you cross to do it!

Carl Scheeler is wildlife program manager for Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, Scheeler describes beavers as the “Indian Corps of Engineers,” holding the soil back during floods, creating an opportunity for water to stay longer in the system.

“They create habitats which support all other wildlife in the system,” Scheeler said. “When we’re talking about righting the wrong that has been done by past land management, we can reset things back to far enough where the beaver can then take over and recreate the habitat they used to create all over North America. We would not have the landscape that we have if it were not for beaver.”

And, he adds, the land is “without a doubt” in a better, healthier condition than neighboring land where there are no beavers.

Carl! Another friend for the making! Can I saw how impressed I am with your work and advice?

“Jakob Shockey, is executive director of The Beaver Coalition, a nonprofit working to increase public and private landowner support for beavers.

“They’re so important for the environment that we can’t afford to have them trapped out,” Shockey said, particularly when it comes to wildfires, which in 2020 were the most destructive in the state’s history, burning more than 1 million acres. Beaver dams create pockets of lush, saturated landscape that resists fires.

It’s vital (Oregonians) have the ability to make better beaver habitat and give landowners the tools they need to peacefully coexist with the animals. They’ll travel up to 100 kilometers (62 miles) to find new habitat, but it’s hard for them to start from scratch,” he adds.

“There’s a love/hate relationship with beavers in Oregon,” Lum said. “A constant push-pull. Beavers are running out of places to be because man wants to live there too.”

“We need to stop killing beavers where they choose to live,” Shockey said.

Can I get an amen?

Call this the money quote. It’s my favorite in a series of champions. Lucy Sherriff, the free lance author from California, did a fantastic job. But she needs to be doing something about California beavers next. AHEM. Maybe a certain beaver summit that changed the landscape a little.