Sure ODFW  want beavers. kind of. But they are not willing to actually read about it or put in a few BDAs to make it easier for them to stay.

Can beavers save the Klamath Marsh?

The Klamath Marsh National Wildlife Refuge looks very different today than it did 35 years ago.

Alex Gonyaw, senior fisheries biologist for the Klamath Tribes, said these are the impacts of man-made calamities on the marsh that span more than 200 years.

After settlement, the view of wetlands was to drain and convert them to something useful, even though they were perfectly useful to the people who’d lived here for 15,000 years,” Gonyaw said of activities like farming and ranching that diverted water from the area to larger swaths of arable and grazing land.

This water diversion has shortened the wet season in the marsh, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

All of a sudden, “What began as a complex, emergent wetland and open water system was converted to a couple puddles,” Gonyaw said. (more…)