This issue of the New Yorker magazine has a fascinated and detailed read about California’s “super-fires” and the work to combat them. The entire thing is worth your time, but one part stood out to me in particular.

A Trailblazing Plan to Fight California Wildfires

Megafires are huge, hot, and fast—they can engulf an entire town within minutes. These fires are almost unstoppable and behave in ways that shock fire scientists—hurling firebrands up to fifteen miles away, forming vortices of superheated air that melt cars into puddles within seconds.

Sagehen forest manager Jeff Brown secured grants, hired a professional facilitator, and brought together loggers, environmental nonprofits, watershed activists, outdoor-recreation outfits, lumber-mill owners. Sometimes there were upward of sixty people at meetings. Scientists from all over the region presented the latest findings on beaver ecology or the nesting behaviors of various bird species.

That sentence! Oh I wish I was a fly on the wall to hear what beaver ecologists said about megafire prevention. I would even be excited to learn who it was! The article says no more about this, and I’ve yet to track down the author, but I have put the question to all our smartest beaver friends. I will let you know if I hear anything back.

Someone knows who this was, Maybe for their power point they just showed this:

Well I hope someone is thinking this way, because beavers could help us with so much if we just stopped killing them so quickly. Now let’s go to Ashland Oregon where people know just what beavers bring to the table.

Blackberries and beavers: restoration in progress

At Lomakatsi, we’re constantly faced with decisions on how to best restore ecosystems that have been degraded by years of mismanagement and neglect. Often, a good strategy is to use historic conditions as a reference point as we work to restore landscapes to health.

Before European settlers diverted creeks for agriculture and cut down trees for grazing livestock, most of our local waterways, including the banks of Bear Creek at Willow Wind, were lined with tall trees of various species and ages. The trees created habitat and provided shade that kept water cool during the hot summer months, supporting ideal spawning conditions for coho salmon and other fish.

Now, many of our waterways are lined with something different, the invasive Himalayan blackberry.

Okay, l saw immediately that they wanted a shaded creek and were going to rip out blackberries to plant trees and just assumed that when beavers came to eat those trees they would kill them for ‘damaging’ their restoration,

Silly silly girl. Always assuming the worst.

This summer, Kaiya and Harbor are spending 30 hours per week removing invasive species, watering newly planted natives, and serving as watchful stewards of Willow Wind and several other Lomakatsi streamside restoration sites throughout Jackson County.

Thanks to Niki, Kaiya, Harbor and many other community members who have been working to keep blackberries at bay, we’re already seeing positive ecological results at Willow Wind, including an increase in beaver activity.

“I started seeing signs of beaver here a year ago, when we first cleared out dense blackberry along Bear Creek,” said Niki. Kaiya and Harbor have been able to experience it firsthand too.

“It’s pretty cool that we now have beaver at the Willow Wind site,” said Harbor. “We noticed it right after the Lomakatsi youth crew cleared a bunch of blackberry here earlier this summer.”

While we are excited about the return of beaver — it shows our restoration efforts are working — sometimes the return of wildlife can set other processes into motion and create challenges in our urban watersheds. So we have to get creative.

Okay, here it is. Just exactly how did you get creative?

Ironically, left to their own devices, these beaver might actually gnaw through many of the shade-providing trees we’ve spent so long cultivating. Fortunately, we can mitigate this by wrapping the bases of surrounding trees with coverings to prevent the beavers from chewing them, as we have done successfully at other sites, including the confluence of Ashland Creek and Bear Creek.

Forgive me for being astonished when ecologists do the right thing. After all this is Oregon, and they’re much smarter about beavers than California. I remember once hearing the defamed nefarious Mary Tappel of the waterboard in sacramento telling people to PLANT blackberries around their trees because it would discourage beavers from chewing them.

Of course in Martinez we know that beavers gladly chew blackberry bushes. We learned that from the special and very rare kind of science where you discover things by actually WATCHING them.

Ahh we were all so young once.