Month: June 2022

BEAVER BENEFITS ACROSS THE COUNTRY

‘The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter’ on Thursday’s Access Utah

Beavers are a keystone species whose existence supports entire ecosystems. In earlier centuries they were killed by the millions in North America. There is a growing group of scientists, ranchers, and enthusiasts called ‘Beaver Believers” who advocate for these important rodents. Today we’ll talk with environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb, author of “Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter,” and Cache Valley resident Nate Norman, who works with the USU Beaver Ecology and Relocation Center.

BeaverCON 2022 to Demonstrate How Beavers Help Build Climate Resilience

“Low diesel”, process-based restoration using Beaver Dam Analogs. Photo by Ecotone.

HUNT VALLEY, Md., June 9, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — BeaverCON 2022, an international conference for environmental professionals and practitioners that will explore the ecosystem services provided by beavers, will be held from June 14-16, 2022, at the Delta Hotel Baltimore Hunt Valley in Maryland. This year’s conference theme, “Building Climate Resilience: A Nature-Based Approach,” will highlight the important connection between beavers and climate resilience. Beaver-created wetlands boost climate resilience by increasing biodiversity, storing water that recharges groundwater while creating natural wildfire breaks, improving water quality, and reducing storm flood events.

Co-hosted by Ecotone, an ecological restoration firm in Maryland, and the Beaver Institute in Massachusetts, BeaverCON topics will include land management issues, co-existence strategies, hydrologic impact of beaver on water systems, beaver dam analog in restoration, and many more. Forty-three speakers have committed from Canada, Norway, England, Wales, and across the United States.

The keynote speaker will be Hilary Harp Falk, President and CEO of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF), the largest nonprofit conservation organization dedicated solely to preserving, protecting, and restoring the Chesapeake Bay. She has spent her career building strong, authentic partnerships, and is a proven expert in large-scale ecosystem restoration and leading organizational change. During her time at CBF, she has led programs including wildlife conservation, coastal resiliency, water policy, greenhouse gas reduction, and environmental education.

Although beavers have been considered a nuisance for decades – and often killed – an emerging field of research suggests beavers deliver natural benefits that, at worst, compliment the design and construction provided by restoration professionals – and, at best, are more sustainable, more cost-effective, and offer less disturbance. Several presenters will discuss modern tools for human-beaver conflict management such as flow devices and pond levelers. Another hot topic this year is recent research that beavers help prevent the spread of wildfires and provide refuge for wildlife during wildfires.

THE SECOND BEST THING FOR BEAVERS

The very best thing to do with beavers is to do nothing and let them choose where they want to be. The very second best thing might be this.

Modern-day trappers are using beavers to fight the effects of drought

A partnership between governmental agencies and university researchers has modern-day trappers searching Utah for beavers. But they aren’t after pelts. Instead they’re using the large rodent to lessen the effects of drought. From KZMU in Moab, Justin Higginbottom has more.

Sandbach is one a number of modern-day trappers searching the state for beavers in a partnership between governmental agencies and university researchers. But they aren’t after pelts. Instead, they’re using the semi-aquatic animal to lessen effects of drought in the region.

In Sandbach’s time trapping she’s gotten to know quite a few of the large rodents.

“It’s interesting, they really do have different behaviors. We just released our last one… He was super aggressive like the whole time. He was a big male. He was kind of scary. He would hiss and lunge at us,” says Sandbach.

But the beaver today is calm with her back turned. Sandbach named her Ice Baby after finding her in the cold waters of a high-elevation canyon. Ice Baby had contributed to an impressive complex which the land’s owner thought was getting out of control.

Although Ice Baby now finds herself some 60 miles south of her home waters, she’s actually lucky.

“Before this project, usually the solution would be lethal removal,” says Sandbach.

Now the hope is that Ice Baby will go to work for the state. Prolonged drought is drying up sections of this river and threatening its fish, including three endangered species. Sandbach and others think beavers can help.

It’s a nice story with a fun little audio clip that I can’t figure out to embed. Click on the headline to go listen for yourself.

Although Ice Baby now finds herself some 60 miles south of her home waters, she’s actually lucky.

“Before this project, usually the solution would be lethal removal,” says Sandbach.

OH THE FARMER AND THE BEAVER SHOULD BE FRIENDS

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beavers and Flooding June 8, 2022

Spoiled for choice is a phrase that I don’t often get to use describing beaver news. But this morning, I’m very very spoiled. Maybe its because BeaverCon 2 starts next week. Or BeaverFestival 13 starts in 17. But days. But whatever it is. I LIKE IT.

Check out the article this morning from GRIST.

Your new neighbor flooded your yard. What now?

To protect Jubilee Farm, Haakenson is looking to an unlikely ally: Beavers. Because it turns out, beavers might actually offer some real protection against climate impacts like flooding and wildfires — if people can learn to live with them.

Farmers and beavers don’t often get along. Even Haakenson has had his share of conflicts with the local family of beavers who regularly turn his field into what he calls “Lake Jubilee.”

“The beavers have their goal in life and I have my goal in life,” Haakenson said. “My job is to farm and there is some friction there. But if I were to remove the beavers, more beavers would just come over because it is like a beaver paradise.”

Okay this article is about a farmer in Washington State so I bet you can already guess how it ends.Turns out the thing a farmer wants less of there is floods. And what can help with that? I’ll give you a hint. It starts with a “B”.

“It was all without beavers in mind. Without thinking about how they could affect our infrastructure, our roads, our yards, our driveways, our homes, our farms,” said Jen Vanderhoof, a senior ecologist for King County in Washington state. “They weren’t here. And we didn’t have to think about them.”

But in the last few decades, beaver populations have started to rebound — only to a fraction of their previous levels, but enough to cause trouble when they flood properties, wash away roads, or chew up trees.

“People are always like, ‘We didn’t used to have beaver problems,’ or ‘We didn’t used to have beavers and never saw beavers here before,’” said Vanderhoof. “But things are changing and they’re not going away at this point.”

“A lot of people get kind of irate about beaver dams, because beavers have one joy in life: and that is stopping water,” said Haakenson. “They probably have other ones. I’m sure they lead rich inner lives. But they really like stopping water from flowing.”

I believe I said it myself in the urban beaver handout with the title “Recess is over”. You may not have seen beavers in your creek or stream before. But you’re going to keep seeing them now. Better figure out how to live with them.

Now, as rising global temperatures make rainstorms more intense and frequent, Haakenson thinks that beavers’ ability to stop water might be able to actually help his farm.

To understand how that might work, let’s take a trip to a hypothetical creek. Like a lot of creeks, it’s just a single narrow channel. During winter storms, water rushes downstream. During summer, the creek dries up to a trickle. Climate change is making those floods and droughts even more extreme.

But here’s what happens if a beaver moves in: The beaver builds a dam, and water starts to back up into a pond. During a flood, a lot of that water can get stored in the pond, and in the soil underneath the pond, where it permeates through the ground and eventually comes out downstream. During summer droughts, when everything on the surface is usually dried up, there’s still water stored in the ground under the beaver pond, creating a lush oasis in an otherwise dry landscape.

An oasis that can even stand up to wildfire. One recent study looked at five streams that were hit by wildfires, comparing damage in areas with and without beaver dams. In every single case, the stream sections with beaver dams experienced only a third of the fire damage. All this matters, because climate change is contributing to more severe droughts, fires, and flooding, and beavers can help communities with those problems, just by doing what they do.

Ohh I sure love a beaver article that just ticks through the list of their benefits. It’s like those old movies where the smitten songwriter sits down at the piano and starts singing praise to his beloved standing at the other side of the piano. “Go, on…Please, tell me more.”

“I feel like it’s going to be the thing that eventually the farm will go under because of – flood water,” Haakenson said. “The flooding is getting worse. The beavers might actually be able to help with that.”

One study estimated that on the Snoqualmie River, more beaver dams upstream could help store over 6,000 Olympic swimming pools worth of water.

On his farm, Haakenson keeps an eye on the dam, trying to keep it from overtaking his field. But beyond that, he pretty much lets the beavers do their thing.

“There’s kind of two ways to approach nature, and one is to fight it and the other one is to try to figure out how to coexist,” Haakenson said.

As beaver populations return, more people are following that strategy: Using tools like pond levelers or fences to protect the things that matter to them, but also letting beavers be when they’re not hurting anyone.

Ohh my goodness. This article just keeps getting better and better. I better pinch myself to see if I’m dreaming.

Americans are used to a world without beavers, but that’s changing, whether we like it or not.

Sure, beavers can be frustrating. But if we can learn to get along with these giant aquatic rodents, they might even turn out to be helpful neighbors.

I don’t know. Storing cleaner water. Preventing flooding. Creating biodiversity. Removing Nitrogen. Preventing Fires. Sequesting Carbon. Raising groundwater. Would you really go SO FAR as to call them helpful?

“The Farmer and the Beaver Should be Friends!” I’m working on new lyrics right away!

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“CAN DEE FISHY YUMP OVER DEE BEEVER DAM?”

heidi08 Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout June 7, 2022

I don’t know how much proof people need and why we need to spend our time publishing studies like “Beavers Don’t Cause Beaver Fever More than any Other mammal” or “Don’t eat fish”. Some things you shouldn’t HAVE to prove. But I was glad to see this headine anyway,

Field experiments to assess passage of juvenile salmonids across beaver dams during low flow conditions in a tributary to the Klamath River, California, USA

Although the use of beaver ponds by numerous fish and wildlife species is well documented, debate continues as to the benefits of beaver dams, primarily because dams are perceived as barriers to fish movement, particularly migratory species such as salmonids. In this study, through a series of field experiments, we tested the ability of juvenile salmonids to cross constructed beaver dams (aka beaver dam analogues). Two species, coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch) and steelhead trout (O. mykiss), were tracked using passive integrated transponder tags (PIT tags) as they crossed constructed beaver dam analogues. We found that when we tagged and moved these fishes from immediately upstream of the dams to immediately downstream of them, most were detected upstream within 36 hours of displacement.

By the end of a 21-day field experiment, 91% of the displaced juvenile coho and 54% of the juvenile steelhead trout were detected on antennas upstream of the dams. In contrast, during the final week of the 21-day experiment, just 1 of 158 coho salmon and 6 of 40 (15%) of the steelhead trout were still detected on antennas in the release pool below the dams. A similar but shorter 4-day pilot experiment with only steelhead trout produced similar results. In contrast, in a non-displacement experiment, juveniles of both species that were captured, tagged and released in a pool 50 m below the dams showed little inclination to move upstream. Further, by measuring hydraulic conditions at the major flowpaths over and around the dams, we provide insight into low-flow conditions under which juvenile salmonids are able to cross these constructed beaver dams, and that multiple types of flowpaths may be beneficial towards assisting fish movement past instream restoration structures.

Finally, we compared estimates of the number of juvenile salmonids using the pond habitat upstream of the dam relative to the number that the dam may have prevented from moving upstream. Upstream of the dams we found an abundance of juvenile salmonids and a several orders of magnitude difference in favor of the number of juveniles using the pond habitat upstream of the dam. In sum, our study suggests beaver dams, BDAs, and other channel spanning habitat features should be preserved and restored rather than removed as perceived obstructions to fish passage.

Are you paying attention WISCONSIN? Or do you stop reading when you saw all those long words. Let me make it clearer with a little graph. How’s this?

Just to clarify, on the first day only ONE fish had cleared the beaver dam. But two weeks later most of them had. And we’re talking salmon AND steelhead. Or to put it in the simplest terms. Do you remember the Swedish chef from the muppets? I think he would put it something like

“Can dee fishy yump over de beever dam? “Dee fishy is var tasty und dee dam est var hi. Mork Mork Mork! Yes! We can see dat the fishies all yumped over the beever dam!“

Are you following along? Look about those fine scientists blowing up beaver dams so that salmon and trout can get by, JUST STOP IT. You got that?

Overall, we suggest that unless there is clear and compelling evidence that a beaver dam or BDAs are preventing the movement of fishes and that this is likely to have a population-level effect, such structures should not be removed. Options such as temporarily notching may be an alternative under some conditions, such as the presence of adult salmon stacking up below a dam, but guidelines need developing. For human-built structures such as BDAs and other weirs, we conclude that our data provide some guidance as to what constitutes a passable structure, but that more examples from the field are needed under a wider range of flow conditions.

Kind of mealy mouth for my tastes, I wish you didn’t have to be so cautiously scientific about everything. JUST STOP IT. That’s what I’d say. But then I don’t work for NOAA Fisheries and nobody pays my salary.

BRONSON BEAVER HOSTS A FESTIVAL

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver Art June 6, 2022

Amy sent her beaver montage design for the festival this year. And I thought you would appreciate a preview. Imagine how beautifully this is going to unfold in chalk art.

Beautiful, eh?
We’ve entered the dramatic surprises portion of the festival countdown. It will all be very good news or very bad news from here on out. Last week I received an email from Teko Bernard, the author of “Bronson Beaver Builds a Robot“. He talked about living in Kansas and being inspired by his own beaver story which prompted him to check our website. He was touched by the description of the Great Beaver Giveaway and wanted to donate copies of his book as well. He also asked if I might review it.

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I’m a sucker for hard working beaver stories, but just check out his video about how he came to write this book and what books inspired him. Smile.