The humble beaver could become one of America’s hardest working allies in the race to adapt to climate change.
Beavers are natural engineers. They instinctively build dams and canals of water to keep themselves safe because they’re clumsy on land. And capturing that water creates ecosystems for other animals to survive, earning beavers the moniker of a “keystone species.”
A growing movement of nonprofits, experts and government agencies see a potential to take a lesson from beavers’ natural engineering prowess to capture more of that water for the places that desperately need it.
“Beavers benefit a lot of things in the context of climate change,” Emily Fairfax, assistant professor of environmental science and resource management at California State University Channel Islands, told ABC News.
“The ones that are most directly sort of in our eyesight right now is the beavers’ ability to protect ecosystems during droughts, during floods, during wildfires, during extreme disturbances. And in those patches of habitat that they’re protecting, there’s a huge amount of biodiversity”
This heat wave, and the threat of wildfires, makes me appreciate #beaver engineered fire refugia even more. This complex is on Little Last Chance Creek up in N. California – in some ways these ponds were a "little last chance" for all the critters during the fire here last year. pic.twitter.com/badIjn55Kx
In addition to storing water, Fairfax’s research has shown that areas with beaver dams are more resilient to wildfires because the plants and trees are so wet they don’t burn. And she said they could help capture water from extreme rain events like the atmospheric rivers in California to be accessed by those water systems later.
“Beavers sort of figured this out instinctually over 7 million years of evolution that their dams and their canals work because they take the whole hydrologic cycle and they just make it more stable, more consistent,” she said.
Beavers haven’t always been recognized for their benefits. Fur trapping dramatically reduced the population starting in the 1700s and even today beavers are sometimes seen as a nuisance and killed. The animals are sometimes relocated away from urban areas where their dams could cause disruptions and flooding, which experts like Fairfax said can sometimes be appropriate but is not always the right approach.
Instead of treating them like pests, groups like the National Forest Foundation are looking to take a lesson from beavers’ work to find a nature-based approach to adapt to impacts of climate change like worsening drought conditions.
“There’s a lot of streams and headwaters to the Colorado River that used to run perennially, year-round, that we now see have stopped. And so we might be able to, as we do enough of these, turn some of those stream flows back on on an annual basis. And seeing those regular additions throughout the year could have huge benefits to the system as a whole,” said Marcus Selig, chief conservation officer with the National Forest Foundation.
Photos show an area near the headwaters of the Colorado River before and after the installation of beaver dam analogs by the National Forest Foundation.
The National Forest Foundation is a nonprofit created by Congress to support national forests. Selig said their work building man-made “beaver dam analogs” can help capture more water in the Colorado River, which has been struggling with historically low water levels after more than two decades of drought.
The analogs are a manmade version of what beavers would instinctively build, using sticks and mud to create a natural barrier to slow water down and create a wetland area that feeds into the river.
“The work we do with beaver dam analogs and low-tech process-based restoration is holding that water in the higher elevations as the snow melts and so that it can be released slowly throughout the year, giving more continuous, dependable flows to downstream users,” Selig said, adding that it can help communities downstream receive water more consistently.
“Our big dream is that we can restore every headwater, every watershed that feeds into the Colorado River on national forest lands. And so we’re working on creating that pipeline of projects right now,” he added.
Selig said this kind of work hasn’t been scaled up enough to identify how much of a larger impact it could have and they still need more funding to do so, but said the foundation is working with the U.S. Forest Service to add projects in 14 different national forests around the Colorado River.
Fairfax said river systems like the Colorado have lost a lot of the wetlands that would have existed 200 years ago so replicating them either by creating man-made beaver dams or relocating beavers to streams in the area can help make the river more resilient to the impacts of climate change.
“Bringing back beavers and restoring the wetlands, it’s not like we’re introducing something new to save the Colorado River Basin. We’re just trying to get it back to the state it was in when it was stable and when it was healthier,” she said.
Similar projects are growing around the country, some with support from states or the federal government. California has dedicated $1.6 million to hire staff to start similar projects in the state.
A key legislative committee has approved new limits on killing beavers in Oregon, which will now be considered by the full House. A last-minute amendment allows beavers to be killed without a permit during emergencies, but the Oregon Farm Bureau remains opposed to the bill.
A proposal to strengthen Oregon’s beaver protections is headed for a House floor vote after a last-minute amendment secured its unanimous approval by a key committee.
Beavers would no longer be considered predatory animals under House Bill 3464, allowing state wildlife officials to manage the species on private lands instead of farm regulators.
Supporters of the bill argue that as “nature’s engineers,” beavers make improvements to waterways that are particularly valuable as the state faces increasing droughts and wildfires.
“Despite these clear benefits, Oregon law currently allows unlimited beaver killing year-round, including during breeding and rearing season, without a permit — even if the beaver is not causing any damage,” said Rep. Pam Marsh, D-Ashland.
Under the original version of HB 3464, the changed designation meant landowners would need to obtain permits to kill beavers. Such permits aren’t required for predatory animals, including feral swine, coyotes and rodents.
While the bill would ensure “lethal removal is still an option,” permits would allow beaver populations to be managed and tracked by the state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife similarly to fur-bearing animals, Marsh said.
“This is just another species that will be added to the list,” she said.
Though the bill’s proponents claim these permits can be obtained over email free-of-charge within about 30 minutes, the new requirement didn’t sit well with critics who said they’d impose a time-consuming barrier during pending disasters.
If an irrigation canal is failing, for example, urgent repairs may require taking the life of a beaver to prevent flooding that endangers people and property, said Gene Souza, executive director of the Klamath Irrigation District.
“There are emergency situations that occur at two in the morning, sometimes on Sundays, sometimes on Saturdays,” Souza said.
The bill’s supporters acknowledged that beavers can be damaging but said their usefulness justified regulating their lethal removal more strictly.
Beaver dams reconnect creeks and streams with their floodplains, buffering against drought effects and creating “refugia” that shelter wildlife, livestock and habitat from wildfires, according to proponents.
Unlike human efforts to restore impaired waterways, which can take significant investments over decades, beavers can perform the work within years without charging a single dollar, said Emily Fairfax, an assistant professor of environmental science at California State University.
It will be an improvement but sheesh -lethal removal?- we’re not really that difficult to move to where we’re wanted! Read or listen the whole report.
Dr. Rick Lanman stands in Adobe Creek in Palo Alto on March 31, 2023. Photo by Magali Gauthier.
When Dr. Richard Lanman purchased his Los Altos home in the 1980s, Adobe Creek, which snaked behind his backyard, was at best a rivulet of trickling water in the summer. In good winters, a rushing torrent carried logs, leaves, silt and debris out to San Francisco Bay.
But his neighborhood’s old-timers remembered Adobe Creek as a year-round fly-fishing paradise until the 1950s. His 80-year-old neighbor Herb Bickell told Lanman in 1987 that he’d caught fish from his backyard.
“So too, did Sen. Alan Cranston, who lived just a little bit upstream from us,” Lanman said.
But now Adobe Creek is dry for half the year, and there are no fish. Bickell wondered why the creek had undergone such a drastic change.
“Maybe there were beavers,” said Lanman, a Los Altos-based physician scientist, historical ecologist and president of the Institute of Historical Ecology. “One of my theories is there were beaver ponds or percolation ponds that raised the water table so that in our dry season, when the water table is high enough, it recharges the creek.”
Lanman’s urge to answer that question became an additional career in ecological history, leading to research into the Midpeninsula’s and south San Francisco Bay’s missing links. Now he and his colleagues have published groundbreaking findings confirming the past existence of local populations of Chinook salmon, American beavers and Tule elk.
They’ve also suggested possible ways to bring the species back.
Little is understood about California’s historical ecology prior to the arrival of the Europeans, whose actions wiped out animal populations, he said.
“A lot of the species are already gone by the time the U.S. takes California from Mexico, who had just taken over from Spain,” Lanman said.
Zoological records from the time were also not plentiful.
. . .
Hunting for beavers
A beaver swims in a creek in Palo Alto on Sept. 16, 2022. Courtesy Bill Leikam.
Another species that has intrigued Lanman are beavers.
Scientists traditionally dismissed the beaver as a nonnative to the Bay Area, he said. This stance was largely influenced by the 1937 book “Fur-bearing Mammals of California,” written by Joseph Grinnell. Grinnell was the University of California, Berkeley’s first director of its Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and one of the most well-known figures in American natural history in the early half of the 20th century. Grinnell maintained beavers never lived in the Coast Range and Sierra Nevada watersheds, Lanman said.
“And then I met an archaeologist who found a buried beaver dam in the Sierra Nevada. And that was my first historical ecology publication in 2012. It was a buried beaver dam about 12 feet down, and (we) radiocarbon dated the sticks and it showed this dam had been there for hundreds of years and was rebuilt probably by successive generations of beavers,” Lanman said.
“But it ends around 1850 by radiocarbon dating. Of course, 1850 is the gold rush right? And that’s when all these Anglo Americans hunted everything out,” he said.
By the time Grinnell wrote his book in 1937, the beavers were gone.
“He’s suffering from what we call ‘shifting baseline syndrome,’ where you think the way things look when you were born is the way things always were,” Lanman said.
Lanman searched literature, historical accounts and archaeological evidence for the beaver’s historical presence in local waterways. He didn’t find any beaver specimens in early California museum records.
“But if you look in the Smithsonian, it turns out there’s a beaver skull collected on Saratoga Creek around 1855. So that was the first physical evidence of beaver in the Bay Area in a tributary of the south bay,” he said.
Lanman and colleagues published the findings in the fall 2013 California Fish and Game journal. They studied museum specimens, zooarchaeology specimens, place names, documents and words for “beaver” in local California Native languages for evidence of beavers throughout western California from the California-Oregon border to San Diego and to the southern Sierra Nevada.
The researchers found evidence all over the state. In the Bay Area alone, they found 24 records from Healdsburg to Saratoga and from Bodega Bay to Fremont. These included a zooarchaeological specimen from the Emeryville Shellmound, which included a 1,500- to 1,700-year-old beaver tooth, a more than 2,000-year-old beaver incisor and three beaver bones, dating between 700 and 2,600 years old.
Historical literature also abounds with references to beaver hunts and acquisitions from Native Americans. A 1776 account of the second De Anza Expedition noted that Native Californians wore capes of beaver pelts and pelican feathers.
The famed frontiersman Kit Carson held rights in the 1840s to trap them in the east bay. In Santa Clara County, a 1962 study found historical evidence of beavers “in small numbers at least” in Coyote Creek in Santa Clara County among other places, Lanman and his colleagues noted.
How those beavers might have traveled around the bay and up tributaries in Santa Clara County and perhaps San Mateo County is beginning to be understood due to the presence and growing population of reintroduced beavers.
The semi-aquatic rodents were introduced in the early 1980s to upper Los Gatos Creek near Lexington Reservoir and have been slowly making their way northward. The beavers have expanded their territory by swimming up San Francisco Bay to Coyote Creek to the east; the San Tomas Aquino Creek where it reaches the Sunnyvale Water Pollution Control Ponds; Moffett Gate; and Charleston Slough, just east of the Adobe Creek levee, according to Lanman.
Nine years after the beavers research was published, Palo Alto resident Bill Leikam, co-founder and board president of the Urban Wildlife Research Project and native gray-fox expert, documented the first modern evidence of beavers in a remote section of Palo Alto’s Matadero Creek, where he found two beavers in April 2022. If they are a compatible pair, they could begin colonizing the creek and perhaps slowly lead to a population that would move on to other local creeks, Lanman and Leikam said in November.
Lanman is eager to see how beavers might help revive locally collapsing fish populations. Flood control efforts have altered natural channels, such as San Francisquito Creek, which is dammed by Searsville, the Guadalupe River in San Jose and Palo Alto’s Adobe Creek. Lanman wondered how changes to those habitats have affected fish species such as Chinook and steelhead — and whether nature could reverse the damage.
“Beavers are the one thing we haven’t tried. They have these important ecosystem benefits, not just for our trout and salmon, but for all kinds of critters: red-legged frogs that are federally endangered; birds that are federally endangered that depend on the hunt over water and bats that hunt over water,” he said during a November interview.
Join us in JULY for two days of knowledge sharing, highlighting some of the great work within the field of beaver coexistence in Alberta and surrounding regions. Topics to be covered include: ecological and watershed benefits, coexistence solutions, beneficial management practices, beaver-mediated restoration, and more!
July 13 – all-day, indoor event with presentations, panels, and plenty of time for question-and-answer period and networking (8:00am – 6:00pm)
July 14 – field trip to view nearby coexistence tool installations (8:00am – 2:00pm)
Food included with ticket:
Day 1: Continental breakfast, lunch, snacks, tea/coffee, evening appetizers for networking event
Day 2: Bagged lunch with snacks and water
Please note this is an in-person event. We are unfortunately not able to offer virtual attendance, however, PowerPoint presentation slide decks will be posted on our website following the symposium
*Detailed agenda is coming soon*
A block of standard rooms have been set aside at the hotel venue for $109.49 + taxes per room, per night. If you are interested, these can be booked by using the booking link. The hotel provides a complimentary shuttle to / from Edmonton International Airport as well as complimentary high speed wireless throughout entire hotel.
