A couple days ago I got into a bit of an argument with someone on the Beaver Management Facebook Page, which almost never happens because the group is fairly self-selected. It started when someone commented about the terrible fire in Paradise and suggested that it could have been helped by beavers. A newcomer to the group piped in (the founder of the group Animals 24-7) that there was no adequate beaver habitat in coastal california, and I said, well there used to be and gave a link to our paper. Predictable hi-jinx ensued.
Well, that argument must have jarred something lose because today there is a new post on Animals 24-7.
Could beavers have saved Paradise?
The Camp Fire in Butte County, the Woolsey Fire in Ventura County, the earlier Carr Fire in Shasta and Trinity Counties, the Mendocino Complex Fire, and many of the other 7,575 wildfires that have cumulatively burned at least 1,667,855 acres of California in 2018 might have been prevented or at least lessened if the California Department of Fish & Wildlife had authorized a raft of beaver restoration projects proposed years earlier.
Much animal suffering might have been alleviated, meanwhile, had the California Department of Fish & Wildlife distributed better advice about what people could do to help wildlife fleeing through their property.
You know that feeling you get when someone takes your side in an argument but misstates what you said in the first place? It’s like “HURRAY someone agrees with me” and then “Uh-oh that’s a picture of a nutria” and “Ahem, there are plenty of beaver in Butte county already – we don’t need to introduce more, we just need to stop killing them.”
(In 2016 depredation permits in Butte County were issued for 50 beavers, as well as 5 permits issued for an unlimited number of beavers). Let that sink in for a moment. That’s for a county that has just 41 square miles of water.
But sure, we need to talk about this, so thanks for getting this out there.
Beaver never allowed to recover
The bigger California Department of Fish & Wildlife policy issue, a probable factor in most California wildfires over the past 200 years, is that the once plentiful beaver population was trapped out between 1785 and 1841, and has never been allowed to recover to even a fraction of previous abundance.
The prolonged absence of beavers, meanwhile, has contributed to desertification in the dryer parts of California, exacerbating the effects of global warming and drought in forested regions.
“Beavers aren’t actually creating more water, but they are altering how it flows, which creates benefits through the ecosystem,” explained National Marine Fisheries Service Northwest Science Center beaver specialist Michael Pollock in 2015 to Alastair Bland of Water Deeply, a project of the online periodical News Deeply.
I like so much of this, but I’m sure Dr, Pollock would be very surprised to find himself described as a “Beaver specialist“. Just to be clear, he’s a fish research biologist. Beavers are just a means to an end.
Recharging aquifers
Elaborated Bland, “By gnawing down trees and building dams, beavers create small reservoirs. What follows, scientists say, is a series of trickle-down benefits. Water that might otherwise have raced downstream to the sea, tearing apart creek gullies and washing away fish, instead gets holed up for months behind the jumbles of twigs and branches. In this cool, calm water, fish — like juvenile salmon — thrive. Meanwhile, the water percolates slowly into the ground, recharging near-surface aquifers and keeping soils hydrated through the dry season.
“Entire streamside meadows,” [Sonoma County beaver restoration advocate Brock] Dolman says, may remain green all summer if beavers are at work nearby. Downstream of a beaver pond, some of the percolated water may eventually resurface, helping keep small streams flowing and fish alive,” and enabling shoreline trees such as willow and alder to soak up and store water.
The article follows up with comments from Brock about beavers benefiting salmon, which they do. And how beaver dams could eek out the missing snow pack in california. but quotes CDFW saying they never stay put.
They won’t stay”
California Department of Fish & Wildlife fisheries biologist Kevin Shaffer acknowledged to Bland that “Beavers can have benefits for a watershed that is temporarily deprived of rainfall,” but argued that “beavers cannot cancel out the effects of long-term drought or climate change.
“As the drought gets worse, their ponds will dry up and the animals will just move somewhere else,” Shaffer told Bland. “They won’t stay because there is no more water.”
Yet the cooling effect of thousands of acres of beaver pond surface can help to stimulate precipitation, helping to break prolonged droughts and slowing the effects of climate change.
Yes it could. And I very much appreciate you saying so. Next it launches into a discussion of beaver nativity in California through the lens of Alison Hawkes great article in Bay Nature.
Bland wrote about a year after Bay Nature writer Alison Hawkes in June 2014 traced the California Department of Fish & Wildlife antipathy toward beaver restoration to flagrant historical errors by Joseph Grinnell (1877-1939) in a 1937 monograph entitled Fur Bearing Mammals of California, and by another biologist, Donald Tappe, in a 1942 follow-up.
Grinnell and Tappe believed, in gist, that because they found few beaver in California in the early to mid-20th century, other than some who were known to have recently been reintroduced, California must never have had many beaver––and that made beaver officially “non-native” anywhere that Grinnell and Tappe failed to recognize as beaver habitat.
The playright Tom Stoppard wrote “All your life you live so close to truth it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it’s like being ambushed by a grotesque.” Yup, that sounds about right.
Since 2007, Hawkes recounted, when beaver advocate Heidi Perryman “founded the beaver advocacy group, Worth a Dam, to save from extermination a beaver family that had moved into a highly-visible pond outside a Starbucks coffee shop in downtown Martinez,” a growing army of ecologists, biologists, archeologists, anthropologists, and historians have “compiled evidence,” Hawkes wrote, “from a wide range of digital and paper archives to show that beavers were once prevalent throughout most of California, including the entire San Francisco Bay Area.”
It never stops being surprising to see my name dropped in an article I knew nothing about, but okay. Sure. Tell everyone that this can be done and that beavers can help. I’ll just be over here.
“In 2012,” continued Hawkes, “Perryman, Lanman and Brock published their first paper reviewing the evidence for beavers in the Sierra Nevadas.”
Explained Dolman, “We had to step in and address this assumption that beavers are not native, therefore we can consider them to be a danger, a nuisance, and then lethal management is justifiable.”
“The group cast a wide net,” narrated Hawkes, “searching for specimens in museums and archaeological sites, and examining historical fur-trapping records, historical newspaper accounts, geographic place names, and Native American tribal names for ‘beaver.’”
Yes we did. A very wide net indeed. Such a wide net in fact that we found evidence of beaver all over this burning state. I’m glad that people are thinking about this. They should be.
To this day the California Department of Fish & Wildlife issues depredation permits allowing hundreds of beavers to be trapped and killed each year. Ignored is the potential use of those beavers to rebuild habitat––and water resources––in areas vulnerable to wildfire, which on maps interestingly parallel historical but now sparsely occupied beaver habitat.
Water doesn’t burn. And beavers save water.
Agrees Perryman, “People need to be thinking about the animal who keeps water on the land as a resource.”
What if Paradise had been situated on a ridge surrounded in part by beaver ponds, instead of wholly surrounded by drought-dried forest?
Had the California Department of Fish & Wildlife been thinking about fire prevention, instead of possible complaints about localized flooding, enough beavers might have occupied the habitat to have kept the Camp Fire from becoming a fast-moving firestorm.
Had we all been thinking about that, maybe it would have made a difference. I don’t blame CDFW. It is very strange to read all this in an unfamiliar place after an argument on facebook, but very nice to see it sprinkled more freely into public discourse. I won’t even comment on the fact that the article ends with a request for donations “to continue their important work” because of course it does.
But I have to comment on the nutria. What’s up with the nutria?
