It isn’t every day that a beaver article I am alerted to makes me burst into tears. Jon could hear it in my voice and came rushing in from outside. In a canoe sometimes you paddle and paddle against the wind and feel you are barely standing still. Your arms ache and you know you can’t stop for one minute or things will get even worse. It’s horrifying but familiar, like a bad dream you’ve had over and over again.
And I guess sometimes this happens instead.
Beavers are being summoned to help national parks restore wetlands/NPS file
Under The Willows: Beavers Partner With National Parks For Landscape Restoration
For centuries beavers have been seen as nothing but pests. They inundate fields, plug culverts, flood roads, and chew down forests. They’ve stood in the way of progress. These rodents were hunted for their fur, their meat, and just generally extirpated from North America as Europeans terraformed the country for agriculture and settlement. In 1929, naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton guesstimated that there were at least 60 million beaver in North America, but by the end of the 19th century there were only about 100,000 remaining.
But now beavers are recognized as key to helping restore wetlands, replenish aquifers, and provide habitats in the National Park System. With a little help, nurturing and money, they’ve been successfully combating climate change, one twig at a time, across the nation.
Properly managed, these large rodents are coming back, from Acadia to Yellowstone, Voyageurs to Rocky Mountain, and in many other national parks. Beavers are opportunistic and resilient, reshaping the landscape from the tropics to the subarctic to the high mountains. Left to themselves, they can repair deep gullies cut by overgrazing, flood meadows to encourage willow growth, and provide habitats to dozens of other species. Their ponds not only hold back the spring snowmelt during an era of drought and climate change, but also act as firebreaks and, in general, repair an ecosystem back to its original state. From scientists to ranchers to anglers to hunters, beavers are now seen as beneficial in many areas. It’s thought they might save the West Coast salmon as well, as the fish easily bypass dams.
In some respects the Beaver is the most notable animal in the West. It was the search for Beaver skins that led adventurers to explore the Rocky Mountains, and to open up the whole northwest of the United States and Canada. It is the Beaver to-day that is the chief incentive to poachers in the Park, but above all the Beaver is the animal that most manifests its intelligence by its works, forestalls man in much of his best construction, and amazes us by the well-considered labour of its hands. — Ernest Thompson Seton, Wild Animals At Home
That whooshing sound you hear is the noise the wind makes when it finally starts turning in the other direction. Once we canoed out schooner landing from oyster point to the ocean. It was a tough but beautiful paddle. Tiger sharks on full display below the surface. Just when we turned the boat around around the tide came in and it seemed like we soared effortlessly back to our car on a floating finger of ocean. At a certain point the truth about beavers becomes self-evident. Maybe we are at that point?
Elsewhere in the park system scientists are encouraging beavers to homestead on their creeks by building what are known as “beaver dam analogs” (BDAs). These structures mimic beaver dams, holding back water, flooding terrain and nurturing trees and willows as a food source. A few of these were just installed along Strawberry Creek on the north side of Great Basin National Park in Nevada. Similar actions are being taken along the Mancos River in Mesa Verde National Park.
Beavers are incredibly adapted, and don’t ask for much, just a food source, perennial stream and wood to build dams. They live in twig lodges with underwater entries, for protection from predators, where they’ll produce one to two kits per year. Their brown-stained teeth absorb iron to make them hard enough to chew through wood. They do what they do, and they do it well. With proper management in a warming climate, they just might be the answer to rewater the parks’ landscape
You know some grumpy old NPS superintendent is shaking his head as he reads this article and vowing that it won’t happen on HIS land any time soon. But this is where we are. We hold these truths to be self-evident. Our climate is so messed up that we are officially ready to try anything. And Beavers are finally getting a real chance.
No wonder I felt like crying. I still do.
