Good lord. It’s BEAVERTOP{A our there. Such good news to support. A fantastic article about beavers on Vox of all places which means literally everybody is talking about it and I have all kinds of civilians sending me the article and asking me if I knew? Then a friend of the Martinez beavers wrote about a potential dam she’s been watching on Grayson creek behind Target in Pleasant Hill and I got some buddies to check it out. This pholo is from Bill Feil who ran the nonprofit Lands for Urban Wildlife we were under when Worth A Dam first started. Check it out.
The woman who told me about it was happy when I agreed it was a dam and went back that evening and met another couple who’s been watching it for 2 months and said they’d seen TWO beavers at work on the dam before and saw them come out of a hole in the bank. She said her son worked for Wild Birds Unlimited and they have always kept an eye on that creek, I’ll keep you posted as I learn more about our new beaver neighbors.
Beavers are heat wave heroes
During an intense heat wave, humans have a number of tools to stay cool, such as air conditioning, swimming pools, and ice cream. Wild animals, meanwhile, have beavers.
Yes, beavers. These web-footed, fat-tailed amphibious rodents help countless other critters survive a heat wave. They not only drench certain landscapes in cold water but also help cool the air. They even make forests and grasslands less likely to burn.
This is especially important right now. In the last two weeks, an oppressive heat wave has been roasting much of the US and Europe, putting both humans and wildlife at risk. The UK saw its hottest day on record. Temperatures in parts of Oklahoma and Texas hit 115 degrees. And there are still two months of summer left.
The fact that most people know about beavers is that they build dams. But these structures are more than just a pile of sticks laid in a stream. They’re hydrological wonders.
Dams form ponds, widen rivers, and create wetlands, building all kinds of aquatic habitats that many other animals like birds and frogs rely on. That’s why beavers are often called ecosystem engineers.
Oh boy. Really really good news for beavers.I’m rubbing my hands together eagerly, which makes typing very difficult as you can imagine., Its worth it,
More than just spreading water around, however, beavers also help cool it down.
Dams can deepen streams, and deeper layers of water tend to be cooler. As streams run into these structures, they can start to dig into the river bed, according to Emily Fairfax, an expert in ecology and hydrology at California State University Channel Islands. So there can be, say, a six-foot-deep pool behind a three-foot-high beaver dam, she said.
Dams also help force cold groundwater to the surface. Made of sticks, leaves, and mud, dams block water as it rushes downstream, forcing some of it to travel underground, where it mixes with chillier groundwater before resurfacing.
“That is really important for a lot of temperature-sensitive species like salmon and trout,” Fairfax says.I aIn one recent study, scientists relocated 69 beavers to a river basin in northwestern Washington state, and found that, on average, their dams cooled the streams by more than 4 degrees Fahrenheit (2.3 Celsius) during certain times of the year. Another study, published in 2017, saw similarly large drops in temperature after beavers built dams.
Are you super excited yet? I am. Send this to all your uncles who like to fish and your friends who can’t be bothered,
Remarkably, beavers can also help chill the air.
“If you’re standing near a beaver meadow, pretty much anywhere, it’s going to be way cooler,” said Christine Hatch, an extension associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
As all that water in a beaver habitat starts to evaporate, the air cools down. That’s because turning water into vapor requires energy, and some of that energy comes from the heat in the air, Fairfax said. (This is how swamp coolers, or evaporative coolers, work; it’s also the same reason sweating cools the body down.)
“It’s like an AC system sitting out there in the landscape, keeping the air temperature, you know, 10 or 15 degrees cooler — which can make a big difference,” Fairfax said.
We gave screwed up our planet so badly and have so little will to fix it that at this point we are shrugging and saying, sure maybe the rodents can help. Give it a shot.
By inundating land with water, beavers can also create fire breaks
Intense heat waves can also fuel other problems like droughts and wildfires.
Beavers, again, can help.
There’s one obvious benefit that comes from beaver dams flooding the landscape with water: Wet things don’t burn as easily. “The plants are effectively irrigated year-round,” said Fairfax, who led a study published in 2020 that showed that areas full of beaver dams are “relatively unaffected by wildfire,” compared to similar but dam-less habitats.
LOVE LOVE LOVE THIS.
“Beaver damming plays a significant role in protecting riparian [i.e., river-adjacent] vegetation during wildfires,” Fairfax and her co-author wrote in the study, titled “Smokey the Beaver.”
During wildfires, areas with beaver dams essentially can function as “a refuge for absolutely every critter that can get in there,” Hatch said.
And it’s not just fires. Beavers also provide insurance against droughts, by helping replenish the groundwater that humans rely on, Hatch said. Their dams generally slow water that’s traveling downstream, allowing it to percolate deep underground, where it’s less likely to dry up.
(By slowing the flow of water, beavers also help mitigate the severity of floods — yet another natural disaster that climate change can make worse.)
