Sometimes we get positive beaver articles from doubtful places. Like when people can’t quite believe their own eyes about the differences beaver-pests can make. This article struck me that way. Damming with feint praise?
Backyard Naturalist: Audrey Dunn – Beavers can provide a great benefit
Turning my attention to a certain semi-aquatic mammal, on the other hand, has been more gratifying. I’m referring to an animal with webbed hind feet, a slap-happy tail and a notorious reputation for causing floods – the North American beaver.
First of all, you don’t have to wait for snowfall to create a canvas for tracks in order to find signs that we share our landscape with these stout little engineers. And because evidence of beaver activity doesn’t quickly disappear, you can visit the same beaver marsh in every season and take note of slight changes. Walk along the banks of a beaver pond in late summer, for example, and you’ll be able to make out beaver-sized channels running perpendicular to the bank — pathways out of the water and onto land.
Beavers definitely have an address you can return to. That’s nice of them.
Take the same walk in winter, and you just might find that these channels have turned into snowy, two-foot-wide trails that lead all the way to the beaver’s next felling project or favorite grove of tasty trees. If you’re lucky, you might see drag marks from a branch or sapling that was brought back to join the other birch, willow or maple meals cached outside their den in preparation for ice-over. train helps rescue Mt. Washington hiker in brutal conditions
Beaver dams obstruct the movement of a river or brook, forcing the water to spread over the landscape. The result is a shallow, slow- moving and nutrient-rich marsh or pond where plant species can take root and thrive in places they otherwise could not. This creates a complex vegetative structure that attracts a diversity of fauna. In effect, when beavers create habitat for themselves, they are creating habitat for countless other species too.
An additional benefit of beaver dams is, perhaps counterintuitively, flood mitigation. Because water moves at a slower rate and lower volume through beaver habitat, their dams actually serve as a stabilizing force, protecting downstream communities from flash flooding while also reducing erosion and improving water quality.
Yes these annoying little kayak-blockers save water and prevent flooding. Can you believe it? It’s like finding out that using roundup cures cancer!
With that in mind, let’s zoom out for a moment, all the way out to the scale of satellite imagery. Yes, that’s right — evidence of beavers is visible from space. The very hydrological changes that mitigate flooding also make their habitat relatively drought-resistant, to the extent that their watery ecosystems have even been observed functioning as firebreaks and likely wildlife refuges during wildfires out west.
For instance, after a fire swept across Idaho in 2018, charring 65,000 acres of land, one lush pocket of emerald green was observed by satellite — a beaver wetland. Ensuing studies found that, post-wildfire, beaver ponds improve water quality and promote native plant species recovery. Scientists are now optimistic about the role that beavers might play as a nature-based climate-change solution.
Well well well. Who would have guessed that this water rat can actually help the planet. I mean other than anyone who has been paying attention and all of us.
So, the next time you come across an approximately five-inch-long, webbed footprint in the snow, I hope you’ll take a moment to observe not only the nearby gnawed trees and fresh wood shavings, the lodge and the dams, but also to look around and wonder what else is beaver evidence. To question which plants became established there because of beavers, which animals took up residence there because of those plants, and which species might be able to thrive there in the future, despite a changing climate. And, finally, to understand that you are simply one of many individuals who has entered the domain of the beaver.
To answer my oft-asked tracking questions, Where are they now? What are they doing? In winter I like to imagine beavers warm in their lodge, surrounded by all they’ve created, taking a well-deserved rest.
Beavers hunker down in winter and bide their time. They know spring is coming soon. Yesterday we could feel it and birds started looking thru the nest boxes, When I watched this melting wonderland I had to smile very wide indeed.
