Sometimes I read an article and can’t decide how I feel about it. Inspired? Deflated? Confused? This is one of those because of all the things the navy has ever done with beaver population this has to be among the nicest. But it leaves me very, very frustrated.

For beavers, tall dams don’t always make good neighbors

Naval Station Everett and the Tulalip Tribes teamed up to remove a family of beavers. Now, they’re restoring salmon habitat.

It wasn’t difficult for Alicia Higgs, the station’s natural resources manager, to determine the cause. A family of beavers had set up camp in the drainage between the two lakes and gotten as busy as, well, beavers in building a dam to call home.

She reached out to the Tulalip Tribes. Since 2014, the Tulalip Beaver Project has relocated “nuisance” beavers to strategically chosen spots in the upper Snohomish watershed. Dylan Collins, assistant wildlife biologist for the Tribes, said the transplanted beavers can then serve an important purpose: restoring critical salmon habitat.

When beavers start building in spots where water flow is low due to drought or human impediments, Collins said, the dams that caused problems in the beavers’ former homes help to create the clear, cold streams needed for salmon to thrive. A 2019 study showed each beaver relocated by the Tulalip project created about 2,600 square feet of surface water storage.

“It really comes down to the system that we are living in,” Collins said. “Salmon and beavers have coexisted for thousands of years, and dams in those natural systems rarely impede salmon migration, but that isn’t always the case in human-created systems.”

Hmm okay. Well. First of all BEAVERS DON’T LIVE IN THE DAM. Excuse me for that. I feel better. Just had to get that off my chest before I could even read your interesting proposal that Human infrastructure + beaver infrastructure = bad salmon populations.

I guess it’s impractical to move the humans.

Collins said the majority of removals performed by the project are in urban or suburban areas where beavers have set up shop in ditches or streams. These steep-sided, shallow waterways aren’t like the rivers where the critters might normally build a dam. Collins said dams here can be up to 7 feet tall and have almost no water passing under them, creating an “unnatural” blockage for fish and, often, flooding in their human neighbors’ yards and homes.

This wasn’t the case for the dams causing trouble at Twin Lakes — the beavers had just picked a rather inconvenient spot. Regardless, the Navy needed to send them packing.

Do you ever run into someone who tells you how bad things can get and warns you not to do X or Y or leave your trash cans in the street or whatever because the REALLY BAD THING will happen and then says quietly, well sure it didn’t happen THIS TIME but that’s just because you were lucky!!!

So urban beaver dams can reach seven feet high and ruin things for salmon, but not here. This time they’re just bothering the navy. And that isn’t allowed, ma’am.

This was the shocker though.

But just because one beaver family is out of the picture doesn’t mean another can’t move in and take their place, Higgs said.

The naval station is now working with Beavers Northwest, a Western Washington-based conservation group, to make sure future dams don’t wreak the same havoc. They’ll install devices, aptly known as “beaver deceivers,” to allow water to flow through a dam without its builders ever noticing the difference.

Collins said the Tulalip Beaver Project encourages anyone dealing with pesky beaver neighbors to reach out to the project. The team doesn’t charge for their services, and chances are the dispute can be resolved to everyone’s liking.

So you’re taking this family away and dismantling the dam. But then hiring beavers northwest to put in a deceiver? How on EARTH can you install a flow device BEFORE you know where the beavers are going to build their dam? And why on earth would you want too? If you wanted to fix the problem and keep future beavers away you should have called beavers northwest and did it THIS TIME.

I am so confused.