IOWA LIKES TO LOOK BUT WON’T BUY THE BOOK

heidi08 Beavers February 1, 2022

Change happens in stages. First slowly and then all at once. Let’s take Iowa for instance. Not exactly a bastion f ecological understanding. But even there appreciating is trickling in. Not so you’d actually feel damp yet. But so you suddenly realize you’re not totally dry either. See what I mean?

Walter Scott: Beavers, love to watch them but hate when they create floods

When our lake was first built, I thought it would be interesting to have a resident family of beavers. Since a person cannot go to the local pet store or livestock auction and buy beavers, I only hoped a pair would wander in.

It did not take too many years, and that is exactly what happened. Riding along one of the tributaries that feeds the lake, I noticed a few trees that had been cut down by beavers. I was thrilled to have beavers to watch.

A few weeks later while passing through the same area, I noticed every oak, hickory and ash tree from the creek bank to part way up the hill had been cut down. The only trees remaining were honey locust with their horrible long thorns.

See now I can already see how this is going to end, but I can’t help appreciating how it starts. This is Iowa we’re talking about and we’re definitely grading on a curve. I would even expect them to be kindly welcomed and I’m sure the beavers themselves know what they’re up against. It’s nice that he started with appreciation,

The following spring, my love of the beavers is starting to turn to hate. When it rained, water started going over their dam. This caused them to raise their dam’s level by a couple of feet. This caused water to back up, flooding the crossing that enables me to get from one side of the farm to the other. Without this crossing, I must drive around by way of the road, about three miles, which is annoying.

The lake has an outlet culvert about 36 inches in diameter. When the lake gets above normal level, excess water runs out through this tube. After a heavy rain, the beavers found this and thought it unacceptable to lose water. They promptly cut dozens of logs, approximately 42 inches long and wedged them in the tube. They finished their job by sealing it over with a mud and grass mixture.

Water backed up close to a mile. The neighbors were complaining about their pastures and hay fields being flooded. Removing wedged in logs, mud and grass while lying on my stomach on top of a cement culvert is not as easy as one would think. It is also terrifying to think, at any moment, their plug might give way and suck a person through the tube. My annoyance was giving way to a strong dislike for my furry guests.

Well the honeymoon’s over. We all knew it would be soon enough. You know how it is. You find Brenda’s laugh charming at first when you’re sharing a soda at the mall, but when she can’t sit through mass with your aunt Olive without cracking a smile you know this thing has run its course.

One day I noticed beaver activity off the one corner of the island. First, they brought a few logs from upstream and started a new house at the island. They then started cutting down the trees on the island and cutting them into 42-inch lengths.

They were working at plugging the drainage tube again and were only one tree away from cutting down my flowering pear. My attitude toward the beavers suddenly turned to hate.

It was surprisingly easy to live trap and re-locate the pair. When they went in to block to overflow, they walked right into the trap.

Beavers, with all their industrious ways and construction abilities, are interesting to watch. They can also be destructive to the point of turning a person’s fascination with them to a strong dislike.

Well who in Iowa will blame you? You were inconvenienced. Having to drive a WHOLE three miles out of your way and deal with their daily disruptions. I mean it’s not like you looked for answers first before arriving at this decision. It’s not like you wrote me first and asked what we did and how to do it in Iowa. And it’s not like you learned anything at all about live trapping or successful beaver release before you stuffed them in a box and whisked them away.

But it’s slightly better that you enjoyed watching them at first. I guess.

(more…)

THE BEAVER NON-BELIEVER SCRIPT

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers January 31, 2022

So this week I attended a zoom presentation on beavers and wetlands for the Center for Watershed Protection Network because Bob Boucher and Scott McGill were giving presentations on beavers and stream restoration and they both did very well talking about how much beavers matter to water storage and biodiversity and fire prevention and slowing floods. There was a good crowd gathered but you could tell that there were many in the audience that were like, wait, beavers?

Are you sure?

The host began the talk by saying that his son had beavers on his land in North Carolina and when he went to visit he could watch them slapping their tails angrily and realized “you really don’t want to hang around during breeding season”. (more…)

COLORADO SUMMIT READY FOR DOWNLOAD

heidi08 Beaver Conference, Beaver ecological impact January 30, 2022

Hurray! It’s Saturday! Remember what that felt like when you were a kid just waking up with the smell of pancakes and endless prospects of bike rides or playing pirates or horses or even more fun a rousing game of pirate-horses with your friends? Well your Satuday plans just got a heck of a lot more interesting because the recordings for the Colorado Beaver Summit just became available and you can now browse among your favorites. They aren’t labeled on the website so it’s a little easier to go directly to their youtube page where you can see who’s who. (more…)

EXTREME MAKEOVER: BEAVER EDITION

heidi08 Beaver ecological impact, Beaver relocation January 28, 2022

The press loves itself some beaver reintroduction. I’m not sure what exactly about it grabs their fancy. Any easily photographable moment they don’t have to wait for I guess, or a classic story of redemption, but from the Lands Council to Molly Alves and the Tulalip tribes, we’ve seen it again and again. In the New York Times. In the Washington Post. In the Smithsonian, Even in the Wall Street Journal. The Press loves stories about releasing beavers.

Even the ones that got away.

Re-Beavering a Monument

In 2019, a small group of biologists trekked to a shallow pond in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument carrying heavy burlap bags. Jacob Shockey, executive director of the Beaver Coalition, set his bag on the ground, and out popped a beaver. Docile, soft brown, and surprisingly large, it waddled toward an opening in the reeds and slid into the water, suddenly graceful. The group watched hopefully as the beavers, all rescued from the same suburban field in Medford, explored their new home.

The pond, one of the Parsnip Lakes, is also home to a rare amphibian called the Oregon spotted frog. The frog needs open water to lay its eggs, but since beavers were trapped out over a decade ago, the pond had been leaking water, and cattails were taking over. The biologists hoped this relocated beaver family would reverse those trends.

It’s hard to believe that such an unassuming creature can shape entire watersheds. Beavers and their constructions impound, clean, and slow the flow of water; fix eroded banks; create habitat for fish, birds, and bugs; and even mitigate climate change.

Unassuming? Who you calling unassuming! Beavers are so import they deserve to be plenty assuming. We should throw a fricking party whenever anyone spots them on their land. It’s like winning the beaver lottery to have them on your property.

With the Beaver Coalition, Shockey and his partners hope to drive this message home, in part through storytelling and demonstration projects on a variety of lands—private and public, urban and rural, ranch and forest.

“Our goal is to help facilitate a paradigm shift in how people interact with beaver,” says Shockey.

Thanks to a cooperative agreement between the Beaver Coalition and the Bureau of Land Management, Shockey is working with ecologist Charlie Schelz on a plan to “re-beaver” the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in southwestern Oregon. A convergence of three mountain ranges has created a tapestry of landscapes in the region, from cool north-slope forests and sunny oak savannas to spring-fed meadows and rocky scarps. Although the monument is biologically diverse, its lands are not pristine. Beavers, once abundant, now persist only at the fringes, and as a result, many wetlands have dried and degraded.

Paradigm shift. I like that. I never use that word but I like it. I guess the story of Martinez happened backwards. We felt differently about our beavers and that caused us to learn new things and try something different that happened to work and make a big difference in our town. In Oregon Jakob is hoping that people learn new things and that will cause them to feel differently about beavers.

It’s worth a shot.

The beavers Schelz and Shockey relocated to Parsnip Lakes in 2019 didn’t stay. Maybe they were trapped (Schelz is lobbying for a monument-wide beaver trapping ban). Maybe they were eaten by cougars. Maybe the early snow shocked them downstream. But that same year, Schelz and Dr. Michael Parker, the biologist who first discovered Oregon spotted frogs in the pond, built some low-tech structures there. They cut willows and dogwood branches and drove them into the ground at the pond’s outlets. They wove more branches around the posts. The branches sprouted and grew. The water level came up and stayed up, even during last summer’s soul-crushing drought.

Schelz is optimistic that beavers will eventually thrive there. He says, “If we create the right conditions, the beavers will come.”

The beavers will create the right conditions. You just need to provide the tools so their hard work can pay off. Enough willow, No trapping. A workable amount of water. Every place they live they view as a starter home. A fixer upper that they will need to repair day after day.

Beavers invest in real estate and home restoration. Extreme makeover. Beaver edition.

TELLURIDE UNDERSTANDS BEAVER BENEFITS

heidi08 BDA's, Beaver ecological impact January 27, 2022

I have read headlines with nearly every B pun possible. Beaver battles. Beaver Bites. Beaver Bitter. But I rarely get a bun in the right direction. This one pleases me.

New partnership focuses on stream and wetlands restoration

In December, Adrian Bergere was officially named executive director of the San Miguel Watershed Coalition (SMWC), an independent nonprofit established in 1997 that works to maintain and improve the ecological health of all 80 miles of the free-flowing San Miguel River and its connected watershed system, including rivers, lakes, wetlands and tributaries. Now, Bergere and Western Colorado University graduate student Paul Kieras are looking to enlist interested landowners in a processed-based restoration project that utilizes beaver dam analogues (BDAs) to achieve wetland restoration, increasing water for a healthier environment across the watershed.

“Beavers happen to be these wonderful, ecological engineers that a lot of our ecological systems are based around,” Bergere explained. “They are what we call a ‘keystone species.’ Their positive impacts far outweigh their negative impacts on environment and infrastructure. We’re looking to use beavers for regional stream and wetlands restoration.”

Whooo hoo! Something very positive to say about my very favorite subject. Just what does Adian intend to do about it?

Bergere added that by utilizing BDAs across the region as a low-tech, low-cost solution that “mimics hydrologic, ecologic and geomorphic processes” that a natural beaver dam would provide to a stream, along with post-assisted log structures and flow devices or “beaver deceivers,” SMWC hopes to establish beaver complexes which help slow the flow of water and create wetland complexes.

“What we’re looking to do is give the rivers a step-up to help store some of its natural processes so these same rivers will reconnect to their flood plain to re-charge and revitalize surrounding wetlands,” Bergere said.

Bergere and Kieras, along with the National Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, are currently identifying optimal sites across the watershed to install these BDAs. Bergere hopes to establish a program rather than a series of projects by creating a portfolio of work and a knowledge base for contractors so that this program can operate long into the future. They are also exploring multiple funding sources for the planning and execution of this program, including local and state granting opportunities.

Good work. I am thinking that’s the right direction to go in. Build it back and they will come and Build it back Better.

“Thinking to the future, I believe the program becomes a staple with a formal space in town where students, organizations, agencies, and community members can interact with one another,” Smith said.

The beaver-wetlands program will serve as Kieras’ capstone project for his MEM degree.

“Given my background, I would like to get involved in river wetlands restoration projects,” he said. “The prospect of getting an actual program going for wetlands restoration really excites me because it’s going to hopefully allow me to have a job I’m really passionate about in Telluride.”