The National Resource Defense Council gets on the beaver bandwagon thanks to Ben’s book. I like that headline a lot. Squeeze in boys, it’s starting to look crowded back there.
Beavers Are the Working-Class Heroes of Their Ecosystems—America Should Appreciate Them More
As the climate warms, beaver dams could help the arid West store water and lock up carbon. Doesn’t sound like the work of a “pest” to me.
The tale of how the North American beaver was saved from the brink of extirpation is just one of the unexpectedly gripping stories found in a new book, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter. In it, author Ben Goldfarb chronicles humanity’s unusual relationship with these animals, which has had its share of ups and downs. For instance, no sooner had conservation efforts begun to bear fruit in the last century than beavers became rodenti non grata among farmers and ranchers who hated the creatures’ penchant for building their dams in irrigation ditches. People no longer killed the animals for their pelts; now they were perceived as pests, to be exterminated on sight. Even as wildlife managers and habitat experts tried to make the case for beavers as a keystone species, critical to the health of their ecosystems, their public reputation suffered and their ranks continued to dwindle.
That’s the truth – although I don’t know about the idea of any ‘specific time’ being responsible for their negative press. It seems to me that folks have always been fairly negative about the animals. Even when Morgan wrote his glowing beaver book for the railroads I’m sure the railroad trapped out plenty to make sure the tracks would stay put.
But according to Goldfarb, things are starting to look up for beavers here in the 21st century. (Full, semi-boastful disclosure: Goldfarb, who also writes about nature and wildlife for Mother Jones, Scientific American, Smithsonian, and Audubon, among many others, is a former onEarth intern.) The pro-beaver gospel that he and other “beaver believers”—his term—have been spreading seems to have finally broken through.
Oh I dearly hope so.
How so? “A farmer’s most important resource is water,” says Goldfarb, and “nothing stores water quite like a beaver.” That’s why, over the past decade or so, a small but growing group of ranchers has begun advocating for restoring beavers in the arid West. Goldfarb cites the case of Jon Griggs, a ranch manager in Elko County, Nevada, whose grazing lands were recolonized by beavers back in 2003. “They turned Griggs’s stream into a spectacular cattail marsh that sub-irrigated the surrounding meadows, improving grass production for his cattle,” Goldfarb says. When drought hit the region in 2012, the rancher was able to water his cows with the beaver ponds, “even as his neighbors had to pay through the nose to truck water to their livestock.” Since then, Griggs has become a vocal proponent of beavers’ agricultural value, and now, Goldfarb says, “there’s a little cluster of progressive, pro-rodent ranchers in one of the most conservative corners of the country.”
In some of the West’s driest precincts, wetlands cover just 2 percent of the land, yet they support 80 percent of its biodiversity. And beavers, Goldfarb says, are master wetlands architects. The ponds and pools formed by their dams support just about everything that flies, crawls, hops, and swims in this country. “Swans and ducks nest in and around beaver wetlands and ponds,” he says, launching into a litany of the beavers’ beneficiaries. “Moose cool off in them. Frogs spawn in them. Baby salmon and trout grow up in them. Mink and herons hunt in them. Woodpeckers and flying squirrels nest in the dead trees killed by rising water levels. Songbirds perch in the willows. Bats snatch insects out of the open airspace above the water’s surface.”
And the bad news?
In spite of all the data suggesting that beavers do more good than harm, Goldfarb admits that for every newly minted beaver believer such as Jon Griggs, “there are probably a dozen folks who still shoot beavers on sight.” Public ambivalence, alas, is reinforced by governmental ambivalence. He notes that Wildlife Services, the branch of the Agriculture Department that manages troublesome animals, still kills more than 20,000 beavers across the country each year, “even though there are plenty of nonlethal ways to handle beaver conflicts.” At the same time, he says, “the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is restoring beaver populations in the Pacific Northwest to create ponds and wetlands for juvenile salmon. Sometimes it doesn’t seem like the left hand knows what the right hand is doing.”
Before the colonization and industrialization of North America, beavers had millennia to shape our physical terrain into the Edenic landscape encountered by the pilgrims back in the early 17th century. We should treat them well. We may soon find ourselves in need of their services again.
Nice article, Jeff Turrentine. Just one correction. We ARE in need of their services. Right now. How ever many new beaver believers are shaped by this book, (and I do believe there will be plenty!) they are going to be just barely in time. We need the water they save, the species they nurture and the wetlands they create,
And hey, we’d like it very much if the Nature Conservancy stopped killing them to save trees, okay?
