This was a delight to discover this morning. Leave it Washington state to even have wise myths about beavers. They don’t say which tribe this is from, I found a reference to Squamish, BUT it’s a fun story and BEAVER is the hero, so I thought you’d appreciate it. From WBUR in Washington;
Now don’t send cards and letters complaining that Beavers don’t pat mud with their tales.I know. Clams don’t have feet either.I It’s a STORY.
Well this jaunty column will hold your attention. The writing is clever even if the beaver management is…er…not.
If you live or have lived in a condominium association, nothing gets the dander of owners to rise faster than fights over pets. Some love them; some hate them. Everyone has an opinion.
But dogs and cats are not the only critters that have raised concerns at associations. There are others, sometimes not with the result you would think. And frequently not pets. In 2018 in rural North Carolina an association had a problem with beavers. Yes, beavers. (Mr. Busy is from Lady and the Tramp.) Seems local beaver dams were blocking Pokeberry Creek, causing water to rise and threatening the association’s boardwalks and bridges. (They have 24 miles of trails, so it’s large, rural and wildlife invested.)
Okay, we remember the beavers of Pokeberry Creek, in fact the people who cared about them still have a website. But this is the fun part.
It takes a lot of beavers to create such a problem and the association estimated it had three dozen beavers creating its perceived problem. The board of directors was stumped (no pun intended), and looked at alternatives such as raising or replacing the boardwalks and bridges, but deemed that solution more expensive than necessary, so it called the authorities. The U.S Department of Agriculture came, poked around, evaluated the site, and informed the board of directors that if the board wanted to go forward and solve the problem by removing the beavers, it could be done, but the beavers could not be trapped and relocated, but would have to be killed.
Three dozen beavers on a 7 mile creek? Why only three dozen. Why not a MILLION. If you’re going to pull random numbers out of your ass you may as well pick a bigger one.?
Of course a single family of beavers can build an awful lot of dams to cause condo-chaos. It’s not that hard. A single lilac mailbox can cause condo-chaos on most days. What I HATE about this is that some “experts” came in and cited that number. and everyone just believed it.
The truth is that BEAVERS ARE TERRITORIAL. There is zero way that 36 beavers worked together like furry mischief communists to cause you problems.
I’m sure the numbers were just inflated to make it seem like moving them was too hard.
Why killed and not moved? It seems in North Carolina beavers are, by law, considered a nuisance, and as such the law prohibits trapping and moving them. So they had to be killed; the board of directors was OK with that solution; and it so informed its fellow owners. But the board of directors did not expect the reaction of fellow homeowners and neighbors in the larger community. Outrage would be considered mild. So, two days later the board noted it was going to take a step back and consider other alternatives.
Ahh when the people lead the leaders will follow…they say. It worked in Martinez. Not sure whether it actually works in North Carolina condominiums, but it’s worth a shot.
Unfortunately, try as I might, I cannot find anything that details whether the beavers lived or died. The association’s website doesn’t mention anything about the beavers, though there is a picture of a new boardwalk. So, perhaps the unnamed solution was to pay to raise the bridges and boardwalks. If not, it would seem the board simply decided the beavers weren’t worth a dam. (No word on whether fur sales rose in the community.)
Let me guess what happened. I’m good at these.
There is one amusing side note to this story. Wikipedia tells me that Pokeberry Creek is a tributary to the Haw river. Which interests me because way back 15 years ago when I was frantically trying to find information about coexisting with beavers there were THREE helpful sites on the entire universe of google (imagine that!). One was Beavers: wetlands and wildlife, one was the old beaver solutions website, and the other was the Haw River Assembly.
I just thought you’d want to know.
Yesterday I suddenly had the inkling that the old bumper sticker “beaver taught salmon to jump” was only telling a PART of the story. So I made this with considerable assisstant from Kay Underwood’s artwork in the lovely Beaver’s Song. What do you think?
Well this isn’t something you see every day. A nice article about beavers from Massachusetts. And it’s not written by the beaver institute. That may be a first.
When a culvert blew out a section of East Street in Belchertown on July 18, I set out to investigate. As we walked up the closed road, we saw bits of blacktop and large branches strewn across several lawns. Large melon-sized cobbles had been transported hundreds of yards (a feat which requires very fast flowing water!) into gardens and driveways.
Sharply cut road banks testified to strong whirlpool eddies both upstream and downstream. The roadbed was cut clean through 10 feet of material down to the stream. What happened here, and why?
Rumors pointed to beavers in the Herman Covey Wildlife Management Area just upstream, but I wasn’t convinced. WMAs are set up to allow nature to do its thing, and the increasing beaver populations in the state are no exception. Beavers have happily resided on these lands for decades, creating thriving wetlands that are home to a diverse community of plants and animals.
Wow, Doesn’t the author know she’s supposed to blindly accept bad things people say about beavers? It’s practically the state motto. Who wrote this article anyway? Some beaver-hugging teenager that doesn’t eat meat? Oh no, she’s a professor of hydrogeology from University of Amherst.
In addition, their oxygen-poor ponds accumulate organic matter, storing carbon in the rich fertile depths. These wetlands clean and filter water, and can capture, slow and spread large stormflows across their wide meadows, preventing flood damage downstream — until now.
Historical maps of the wildlife management area show wetlands from as far back as the 1900s, and photos indicate the presence of beavers in the area before the 1990s, with ponds alternating between sometimes dry and sometimes wet.
Over the years, there seemed to be a string of two or three large ponds that would come and go. Beavers may relocate, be removed, or their dams may fail, causing their abandoned ponds to drain and fill with grassy meadow vegetation. Over time, these meadows may be succeeded by woodlands, which may be felled once again by future beavers. It’s all part of the cycle.
Well okay, so beavers come and go and do some good things. So do mafia kingpins right?
Enter climate change, with rainstorms delivering precipitation with a high-intensity punch. Generally, beavers maintain their dams (homes!) to weather storms, but this time, at this location, rainfall intensity (not seen since the 1938 hurricane) was just too much.
So beavers caused the flood, right?
Well, no. One of the important roles beaver dams play in the landscape is actually capturing and dissipating the flood wave during a storm, which is exactly what the second beaver dam downstream helped to do. Initially, the dam-burst flood had a lot of energy to erode and transport large material. Fortunately, the floodplain meadow between the upper and lower beaver ponds dissipated the energy. Large cobbles graded into smaller and smaller materials and finally into fine sands that abruptly stopped.
Then, all of the water entered the meadowy upstream part of the lower beaver pond. The second wetland caught the flood.
Despite the fact that twice as much water was added to the lower wetland (rain plus floodwaters), the lower beaver dam, some 20 feet upstream of the road, did not fail. At this point, storm water probably rose and spilled over the lower beaver dam, pushing some loose branches and debris over the top. Under the road, the paltry 3-foot culvert opening was no match for this volume of material. The culvert clogged, and the road became a dam. Water levels rose behind the clogged culvert, and appeared to have topped out a foot or two above the road.
So wait, you’re saying dams usually stop flooding?
Then disaster struck. With the pressure and whirling erosional force of two whole watersheds’ worth of record-breaking storm, roadbed materials were undercut and washed out. A sudden burst of water, logs, debris, asphalt and plant materials flushed through the opening, causing severe damage and flooding to downstream homes.
The burst cut a gaping slice through the road down to the streambed, taking one driveway and its culvert along with it. A 10-foot wall of logs, vegetation and debris that were piled upstream of the road, just downstream of the intact lower beaver dam, saved downstream homes from an even worse fate. We’ve guaranteed nature (and beavers) a place in our landscape; and we, and they, will need to adapt to climate change together.
Five days after the flood, downstream beavers were busy shoring up their structure, rebuilding farther back from the road in a broad arc, designed to withstand a large wave. Perhaps we can learn something from nature’s engineers. We could start by replacing the 3-foot-wide culvert with a larger, wider structure that would be more resilient to floods and passing logs and debris — for a stream this size the recommended width is more like 12 or 14 feet. If federal infrastructure money comes our way, my first recommendation will be that all culvert crossings in the state be replaced to meet a similar standard that would protect us from damaging, intense storms wrought by climate change.
So you’re saying that if it weren’t for the dams the flooding would have been WORSE? That’s the kind of crazy idea that will get you talked about in the bay state. Be careful. And oh, btw, beaver dams aren’t beaver HOMES.
“beavers maintain their dams (homes!)”
They’re like the picket fences beavers build in their front yard. Their job is to raise the water to cover the lodge. There’s nothing inside them. They are a wall to hold back water.
And floods.
Marsha Heatwole is a regular reader of the site in Virginia. She’s passionate about beavers and wildlife and a talented artist to boot. She posted this today.
