Pennsylvania considers the difficult “Chicken and egg question”: Is more wildlife a sign that our creeks are cleaner? Or are their just more people seeing the wildlife because they’re not at work? Or hey, how about this one. Do beavers THEMSELVES improve our waterways and make for more wildlife?
Beavers and sturgeon and bass, oh my! What wildlife tells us about watershed health
In the beginning, Cathy Heckler didn’t know what, exactly, was swimming around in the creek. “When we first saw it, we were wondering, ‘What the heck is this thing?’” she said. “We were looking with our binoculars, trying to figure out what it was, and then it started building a dam.”That’s when she and her puzzled neighbors realized they were looking at a beaver.
There are plenty of people who think of beavers showing up in a stream as a sign that the stream is getting cleaner. Not me. Beavers didn’t show up in Chernobyl or Mt St Helen’s after the explosion because things were cleaner. They showed up because there was adequate forage and it looked good enough. And then they made it better.
Everyone else just followed.
The Game Commission relies on local reports, farmer complaints, and animal impacts to gauge animal counts every season, he said. That means every wildlife population estimate it makes is an educated guess, not a precise statement.
“No state can really do surveys to that detail, where we can give you one number this year, another number next year, and say, ‘Oh, well, the population is rising,’” Morgan said. “What we do is, we look at things that are impacted by populations.”
Then the commission adjusts hunting and trapping seasons accordingly, he said.
“I think it’s great when people report seeing wildlife … as long as [those] wildlife aren’t being a nuisance, aren’t being destructive, I think it’s wonderful,” Morgan added. “And it could mean that numbers are up. But again, if you get into the statistics of doing surveys, we don’t really know.”
Let me get this straight. You are too busy filling out forms and collecting fees to actually count the numbers of beavers or dams in your state. So you count the number of farmers or landowners who COMPLAIN about them instead, and use that information as a proxy for how many there might be in any particular area.
Hmm. I think I’ve spotted the flaw in your little plan.
Sure, I guess on the one hand more complaints about beavers might mean more actual beavers, but it could also mean there are MORE PEOPLE to complain about them in the first place. When subdivisions spring across the county you might end up with 12 calls about the same beaver family, but that doesn’t mean the population has increased 12 percent. Or that more permits should be issued to kill more beavers because of it!
Where the beavers Rademaekers and Heckler see are living, for example, he would expect to find young forest growth of aspen, willow or alder situated around rivers or creeks.
The wildlife, then, point to something bigger: the health of the environment around them.
“It’s just anecdotal, but I never thought I would see something like river otters and beavers in the city,” Rademaekers said. “Further up the watershed, it gets cleaner and cleaner, but down here, just to see the health of the watershed even in our most urban areas … it’s really encouraging and beautiful.”
You know a million years ago I had a fascinating chat with the legendary Hulet Hornbeck about our own beavers in Martinez. He told me about the great 50-year effort that had gone into cleaning up the mouth of Alhambra Creek and what a huge success it was that things looked decent enough that the beavers had stuck around at all. He also privately admitted that many people at EBRP felt it was a kind of sign or reward for their hard work – even though the city didn’t see it that way.
It was a magical conversation, and I even though I didn’t really know then anything about what a legend he was, I could tell it was important. (Especially when he sought ME out at the event and laughingly said he wanted to meet the “little lady that all the fuss had been about!“) In retrospect I think that other than planting a few willow trees we didn’t really earn the beavers. They are pretty used to hard times and are happy enough to try their lot in the most unlikely of places,
We earned what came after. In the beginning Martinez just got lucky.
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