I like this illustration by Robin Lee Carlson very much, but there’s something missing. Can you tell what it is?
Robin is an amazing natural artist and author in California but from what I can snoop she hasn’t done many illustrations with beavers, She’s a buddy of Jack Laws though so I bet she’d be interested…. hmm…
Perfect. Just perfect. I wake up in the middle of the night to watch England LOSE to Spain-of-the-many-swarming-players and this is the first headline that greets me:
Thank God for the beaver name sake or the game would have been much much worse.
Once upon a time these stories were few and far between, and almost never from the likes of Calgary. I was happy to be reminded that times are changing.
From the gravel on Mountain Road you can see the beaver’s work. There’s pools of water held back by stacks of twigs and branches. And headed into the thick of the woods, more of these animal-made dams.
It’s a pretty sight cast against the West Bragg Creek scenery.
The beavers really settled into the region after the 2013 flood. When these well-meaning engineers move in, they start working. Beavers are a bit compulsive: they hear flowing water, and have to block it up.
And while it’s great for wildlife and fish — fire, flood and drought resilience — it can be a bit of a headache.
“They created one dam which really threatened to flood our Mountain Road,” said Bragg Creek Trails crew lead Michele White.
“The beavers were really industrious. Their families were growing so they were creating more dams,” she said.
At this point, typically the beavers would be relocated, their dams destroyed. It’s a common practice for land owners who see them as pests, easy to remove and difficult to live with.
Well actually no. They would not normally be “relocated”. They would have been drowned. There is nothing in Calgary that allows legally for moving beavers. Why do people keep saying that there is?
But White said Bragg Creek Trails wanted to find another way.
Meetings between Alberta Parks, The Alberta Riparian Habitat Management Society, also known as “Cows and Fish”, and the Elbow River Watershed Partnership started. Together these experts had ideas about how to coexist with the beavers.
They settled on a pond-leveller: a pipe that’s installed upstream, shrouded with metal grate fencing, and wedged into the top of the dam.
“We want to be able to live alongside of the beavers, let them continue with their good work and then we can still enjoy the landscape from whatever perspective it is,” said the Elbow River Watershed Partnership’s executive director, Flora Giesbrecht.
“From this lens, it’s for recreation and then access for some of the infrastructure and especially in the winter, this road is very popular.”
Giesbrecht has seen some land owners embrace coexistence. Something she and all the groups helping today want to see more of.
Approvals for this kind of thing take time, several years in this case.
I’m so very glad that Cows and Fish is on the scene. They understand in a very deep way why beavers matter on the landscape and will direct you to the right tools for coexistence.
Grant money helped buy supplies, but the labour — that’s all volunteer work.
Riparian specialist Kerri O’Shaughnessy with Cows and Fish used the opportunity to teach the volunteers how it’s done.
As an added bonus, her crash-course will help get the Bragg Creek pond-leveller installed
“We’re doing it as a workshop and a learning opportunity for some interested like-minded organizations that are looking to do similar things in coexisting with beavers wherever they’re working,” she said.
They bend the fence into shape, cut sharp ends off, more bending. Once all the pieces are ready, the contraption is walked to the water, and waded into place.
“So once it’s in, if all goes well, we’re not going to see it at all, it’s gonna be underwater and it’ll be sort of like a permanent leak through the dam,” she said. “That is going to be good for beaver habitat, fish habitat as well as help mitigate the road issue.”
Hurray for long term solutions and hurray for Cows and Fish. I remember being impressed with them from the very start and they do not dissappoint
One last thing to get us in the mood for tomorrow;s women’s world cup. The country of Jon’s birth will be playing Spain and it will by all accounts be an astounding game. Spain is a dynamo, but when I watch the stately England Lioness back line dominate the ball I am reminded of the word “regal” so I was very delighted to see this:
A beaver has been named after England goalkeeper, Mary Earps, in honour of the team reaching the World Cup final.
Earps is the sixth kit born at the Paddocks enclosure at the Holnicote Estate near Exmoor.
The public voted for the name in a poll on The National Trust’s social media.
A ranger from the estate said: “We decided to continue with the sporting theme for the Paddocks family due to the success of the Women’s football team in reaching the World Cup final.”
The game is aired at 3 in the morning our time so I will be flashlighting it beneath the covers. Goooooo Team!
It’s Friday and I’m ready for story time. Aren’t you? This fine article from native columnist Staci Lola Drouillard was just what I needed,
I had the honor of interviewing Milt when I was conducting elder interviews for Walking the Old Road. He generously shared many stories about growing up on the Canadian side of Saganagons, and one of my favorite tales is about the Powell family’s pet beaver named Annabelle who lived inside and outside the house, just like any pet might do.
Milt told me that in the fall when the weather started to turn cold, Annabelle would frantically go around the cabin, gathering up stray socks, bits of ticking and whatever else she could find to stop the drafts from blowing through the gaps in the walls of their log cabin. She knew instinctively when it was time to button up for winter.
It’s not a coincidence that Algonquin-style lodges and beaver dams have a similar shape. The rounded domes help to keep the rain and snow from collecting on top of the shelter, and both types of housing are built with a hole at the top that opens to the sky.
I am of course jealous of anyone that gets to live with a beaver, and annabelle is no exception. i like way she tells this story and even more that she links it to beaver value to the ecosystem. This famous photo of Grey Owl in his cabin in Canada makes my heart swell.
A study by the University of Helsinki found that wherever they live, beavers help reduce flood intensity, filter water and capture greenhouse gases. The researchers describe beaver dams as “among the most biologically productive ecosystems in the world, comparable to coral reefs and rainforests.”
Classified as a North American “keystone” species, it’s remarkable that Annabelle and the rest of the border country beavers survived the Voyageurs and fur trade era that caused the near-extinction of her kind by 1900.
Yup. Can’t improve on that in any way,
The Great Lakes beaver population has slowly recovered and today, you’ll find these prolific dam builders doing their work on waterways all across the region. But Amik is still under assault, and this time it’s because of the steelhead fishing industry which generates more than $7 billion annually in the Great Lakes region.
In the June 26th edition of the podcast Points North, my WTIP Radio colleague Joe Friedrichs reports on the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources’ plan to get rid of as many beavers and their dams as possible on the Knife and French Rivers, between Duluth and Two Harbors, Minnesota.
The DNR is in the business of hiring trappers to catch and kill beavers, on average removing 17 animals and at least 18 dams on the Knife River. Called beaver “management,” this state-funded agency uses dynamite to blow up dams, and of course, all beavers inside those dams, as well as otters and other collateral damage. I reached out to the 1854 Treaty Authority who confirmed that the Minnesota DNR did not collaborate with their agency on beaver removal.
Blowing up beaver dams isn’t just done in Minnesota, but also in Michigan and Wisconsin, where that state’s Wildlife Services department is being sued by Superior Bio-Conservancy, a Milwaukee-based nonprofit which claims that the Wisconsin DNR and Wildlife Services division is “destroying Wisconsin’s wetlands, weakening flood resiliency and exacerbating its biodiversity crisis. Through its beaver management program over the last decade, the division allegedly killed 28,141 beavers and destroyed 14,796 beaver dams through hand removal or explosives.”
Blowing up beaver dams to help trout is like blowing up banks to help money, or cutting down trees because they are blocking the shade. I’m glad to see she recognizes this:
It seems that Amik is still bearing the brunt of this brutally colonial way of doing business, pitting a keystone, native species against a non-native fish species like steelhead, which were introduced to the Great Lakes in the mid-1890s.
According to Karen Gran, a Minnesota Sea Grant/UMD researcher who studied the effects of beaver dams on the Knife and French Rivers in 2018 and 2019, the DNR’s actions might actually be making matters worse for steelhead and other trout, who spawn upriver every spring and need colder water temperatures and high-water flow for a successful class.
Monitoring water temperatures, fish movement and low-flow hydrology, the study found that having beaver dams upriver from trout spawning grounds helps keep the water cool downstream if the water flows beneath the surface of a beaver dam.
Only a very large dam has the potential to raise water temperatures, but the research group was not able to complete a long-term study on these larger dams, because the Minnesota DNR systematically destroyed them.
A separate study conducted by UMD that looked at water storage capacity over a span of 70 years on tributaries in the Lake Superior watershed (including the Knife River), confirms that over the course of time, beavers are the most efficient and effective water engineers when it comes to creating and maintaining water storage capacity and vibrant wetland ecosystems.
Well sure I know that and you know that but who is going to tell the DNR?
There’s an old Ojibwe story about Amik—a giant beaver that once roamed the land, back when the trees were allowed to grow old and the waters were rich with name (nah-may–sturgeon) and namegos (nah-may-gos–trout).
After building a dam at the narrows between Lake Huron and Lake Superior, Amik’s human adversaries Nokomis and Weneboozhoo tried to force the beaver out of the narrows, which resulted in a mighty struggle that ended with Amik destroying its own lodge.
Mewizha—long time ago, the remnants of the giant dam became a maze of islands in the narrow channel between Lake Huron and Lake Superior. This chain of islands is now known as the Thirty Thousand Islands and ever since that time, human beings and Amik have agreed to be friends and coexist on the land, recognizing that we need each other.
Just like when Annabelle the beaver did her part to keep the cold winter winds from blowing through the Powell’s homestead on Saganagons Lake.
I love the recognition that we need beavers, and I like the way this column ends. I would argue we don’t actually need each other.
Beavers would do just fine without us.
Some days the headlines alone are enough to remind me that the world has shifted since I first took on the beaver mantel. There are parts of this article I can barely read without bursting into tears. I knew change would come eventually. I’m glad I was still here to see it happen.
For millions of years, beavers have been the stewards of North American watersheds. Over a hundred million used to ply the streams of the continent. Hunting and habitat loss since colonization have reduced their numbers to somewhere between 10 and 15 million, and many ecosystems which historically relied on beaver stewardship are now absent of the aquatic rodents. In 1941, there were just 1,300 beavers in California. Symbiotic Restoration, founded in 2018 by CPH alumnus Garrett Costello, is a company which seeks to reverse this loss of habitat.
“Our mission is to improve stream and meadow conditions to bring back the beaver,” Costello said, who graduated from Humboldt with a BS in environmental protection and management.
Remember it was a Humboldt grad student that did his thesis on what happened in Martinez when we agreed to cooperate with our beavers. There must be plenty of believers up that way.
BDAs are constructed at points in the stream where flow has been interrupted by a head cut, acting to fill the depression and preventing erosion from continuing upstream.
“As water hits that pond, it slows down and drops and that will slowly build sediment behind the structure, which then strengthens the structure and then it helps reconnect the floodplain because now we don’t have this incision,” Costello said.
Once the stream has been reconnected to the floodplain, the stream is able to meander more widely around. This turns a stream flowing quickly through a deeply cut channel into one which supports a wide, dense belt of riparian vegetation with its lazy flow.
Most of SR’s project sites are in places too remote for construction vehicles, where their use would undermine restoration efforts. Costello and his crew carry out their work the old fashioned way— with sweat, shovels, and axes.
Well the super old fashioned way is to allow beavers everywhere to do it themselves, but okay.
“The program is to incentivize private landowners to do conservation efforts on their land,” Costello said.
One goal of SR is to involve the communities in which they work as stewards of the land, fostering a bottom up approach to conservation.
“Last year, we partnered with Point Blue Conservation Science… we had 50 kids a day come from local elementary through high school to build beaver dams and plant willows with us,” said Costello. For the children, it was fun to build beaver dams in their community creeks.
“And all these kids were so stoked,” Costello said. “‘Oh yeah, go in the woods around here.’ Or, ‘Yeah, my parents work for the timber company in the town. We go hunting out here’. They have that sense of place,”
Even though much of SR’s work is still focused in Northeastern California, Costello hopes to make connections with local Humboldt community organizations in the future. He recently spoke to students in a capstone restoration course, and hopes to form a dedicated Humboldt crew to work on restoration projects in the county.
Let’s just hope that part of your work with landowners is to teach them how to resolve beaver conflicts while keep beavers around.
“Our mission is to improve stream and meadow conditions to bring back the beaver,” Costello said, who graduated from Humboldt with a BS in environmental protection and management.
Beaver will come back on their own. Our job is to just get out of their way.
