I like this illustration by Robin Lee Carlson very much, but there’s something missing. Can you tell what it is?
Robin is an amazing natural artist and author in California but from what I can snoop she hasn’t done many illustrations with beavers, She’s a buddy of Jack Laws though so I bet she’d be interested…. hmm…
Once upon a time these stories were few and far between, and almost never from the likes of Calgary. I was happy to be reminded that times are changing.
From the gravel on Mountain Road you can see the beaver’s work. There’s pools of water held back by stacks of twigs and branches. And headed into the thick of the woods, more of these animal-made dams.
It’s a pretty sight cast against the West Bragg Creek scenery.
The beavers really settled into the region after the 2013 flood. When these well-meaning engineers move in, they start working. Beavers are a bit compulsive: they hear flowing water, and have to block it up.
And while it’s great for wildlife and fish — fire, flood and drought resilience — it can be a bit of a headache.
“They created one dam which really threatened to flood our Mountain Road,” said Bragg Creek Trails crew lead Michele White.
“The beavers were really industrious. Their families were growing so they were creating more dams,” she said.
At this point, typically the beavers would be relocated, their dams destroyed. It’s a common practice for land owners who see them as pests, easy to remove and difficult to live with.
Well actually no. They would not normally be “relocated”. They would have been drowned. There is nothing in Calgary that allows legally for moving beavers. Why do people keep saying that there is?
But White said Bragg Creek Trails wanted to find another way.
Meetings between Alberta Parks, The Alberta Riparian Habitat Management Society, also known as “Cows and Fish”, and the Elbow River Watershed Partnership started. Together these experts had ideas about how to coexist with the beavers.
They settled on a pond-leveller: a pipe that’s installed upstream, shrouded with metal grate fencing, and wedged into the top of the dam.
“We want to be able to live alongside of the beavers, let them continue with their good work and then we can still enjoy the landscape from whatever perspective it is,” said the Elbow River Watershed Partnership’s executive director, Flora Giesbrecht.
“From this lens, it’s for recreation and then access for some of the infrastructure and especially in the winter, this road is very popular.”
Giesbrecht has seen some land owners embrace coexistence. Something she and all the groups helping today want to see more of.
Approvals for this kind of thing take time, several years in this case.
I’m so very glad that Cows and Fish is on the scene. They understand in a very deep way why beavers matter on the landscape and will direct you to the right tools for coexistence.
Grant money helped buy supplies, but the labour — that’s all volunteer work.
Riparian specialist Kerri O’Shaughnessy with Cows and Fish used the opportunity to teach the volunteers how it’s done.
As an added bonus, her crash-course will help get the Bragg Creek pond-leveller installed
“We’re doing it as a workshop and a learning opportunity for some interested like-minded organizations that are looking to do similar things in coexisting with beavers wherever they’re working,” she said.
They bend the fence into shape, cut sharp ends off, more bending. Once all the pieces are ready, the contraption is walked to the water, and waded into place.
“So once it’s in, if all goes well, we’re not going to see it at all, it’s gonna be underwater and it’ll be sort of like a permanent leak through the dam,” she said. “That is going to be good for beaver habitat, fish habitat as well as help mitigate the road issue.”
Hurray for long term solutions and hurray for Cows and Fish. I remember being impressed with them from the very start and they do not dissappoint
One last thing to get us in the mood for tomorrow;s women’s world cup. The country of Jon’s birth will be playing Spain and it will by all accounts be an astounding game. Spain is a dynamo, but when I watch the stately England Lioness back line dominate the ball I am reminded of the word “regal” so I was very delighted to see this:
A beaver has been named after England goalkeeper, Mary Earps, in honour of the team reaching the World Cup final.
Earps is the sixth kit born at the Paddocks enclosure at the Holnicote Estate near Exmoor.
The public voted for the name in a poll on The National Trust’s social media.
A ranger from the estate said: “We decided to continue with the sporting theme for the Paddocks family due to the success of the Women’s football team in reaching the World Cup final.”
The game is aired at 3 in the morning our time so I will be flashlighting it beneath the covers. Goooooo Team!
Some days the headlines alone are enough to remind me that the world has shifted since I first took on the beaver mantel. There are parts of this article I can barely read without bursting into tears. I knew change would come eventually. I’m glad I was still here to see it happen.
For millions of years, beavers have been the stewards of North American watersheds. Over a hundred million used to ply the streams of the continent. Hunting and habitat loss since colonization have reduced their numbers to somewhere between 10 and 15 million, and many ecosystems which historically relied on beaver stewardship are now absent of the aquatic rodents. In 1941, there were just 1,300 beavers in California. Symbiotic Restoration, founded in 2018 by CPH alumnus Garrett Costello, is a company which seeks to reverse this loss of habitat.
“Our mission is to improve stream and meadow conditions to bring back the beaver,” Costello said, who graduated from Humboldt with a BS in environmental protection and management.
Remember it was a Humboldt grad student that did his thesis on what happened in Martinez when we agreed to cooperate with our beavers. There must be plenty of believers up that way.
BDAs are constructed at points in the stream where flow has been interrupted by a head cut, acting to fill the depression and preventing erosion from continuing upstream.
“As water hits that pond, it slows down and drops and that will slowly build sediment behind the structure, which then strengthens the structure and then it helps reconnect the floodplain because now we don’t have this incision,” Costello said.
Once the stream has been reconnected to the floodplain, the stream is able to meander more widely around. This turns a stream flowing quickly through a deeply cut channel into one which supports a wide, dense belt of riparian vegetation with its lazy flow.
Most of SR’s project sites are in places too remote for construction vehicles, where their use would undermine restoration efforts. Costello and his crew carry out their work the old fashioned way— with sweat, shovels, and axes.
Well the super old fashioned way is to allow beavers everywhere to do it themselves, but okay.
“The program is to incentivize private landowners to do conservation efforts on their land,” Costello said.
One goal of SR is to involve the communities in which they work as stewards of the land, fostering a bottom up approach to conservation.
“Last year, we partnered with Point Blue Conservation Science… we had 50 kids a day come from local elementary through high school to build beaver dams and plant willows with us,” said Costello. For the children, it was fun to build beaver dams in their community creeks.
“And all these kids were so stoked,” Costello said. “‘Oh yeah, go in the woods around here.’ Or, ‘Yeah, my parents work for the timber company in the town. We go hunting out here’. They have that sense of place,”
Even though much of SR’s work is still focused in Northeastern California, Costello hopes to make connections with local Humboldt community organizations in the future. He recently spoke to students in a capstone restoration course, and hopes to form a dedicated Humboldt crew to work on restoration projects in the county.
Let’s just hope that part of your work with landowners is to teach them how to resolve beaver conflicts while keep beavers around.
“Our mission is to improve stream and meadow conditions to bring back the beaver,” Costello said, who graduated from Humboldt with a BS in environmental protection and management.
Beaver will come back on their own. Our job is to just get out of their way.
I was so happy to see this great article featuring Stephen Anderson’s awesome beaver album. His fantastic work deserves recognition and acclaim. But for the life of me I can’t understand why the headline applies. I guess because the article talks about flow devices, but it talks just as much about music?
LA GRANDE — With guitar in hand, Stephen Anderson is helping people discover that beavers have the potential to be an environmental superhero.
Anderson, a Eugene resident with deep La Grande roots, has released a CD called “Beaver Celebration” that is part of his drive to heighten the awareness the public has of the good things beavers can do for the environment.
Beaver Celebration contains nine fast-paced songs telling stories about the North American Beaver.
“All of the songs were inspired by the ability of beavers to create a wildlife neighborhood from flowing water,” Anderson said. “Nobody else but humans can create their own environment the way beavers can.”
Anderson, who lived in the La Grande area from 1960 through 1997, wants to convince the public and farmers and ranchers that beavers can play a valuable role in restoring and enhancing watersheds, something that is becoming more critical than ever in this age of climate change.
Tadaa! Fantastic press for Stephen. You can bet I’m already fantasizing about what these songs would sound like on stage at the beaver festival. Ooooh.
Use of a deceiver often results in beavers constructing a series of smaller dams on streams that leave meadows in their wake. The meadows are created from the water that leaks out from them.
“Greenways are created,” Anderson said, adding lush meadows appear because water tables are raised and vegetation, including willow, aspen and cottonwood appears, providing shade that reduce temperatures.
The technology that ultimately makes this possible is a device that tricks nature’s dam builders into making smaller ones, one known as a beaver deceiver. Anderson said the deceiver keeps water levels down to an acceptable level for farmers and ranchers and high enough for beavers to remain. The deceiver allows water to exit the pond not by overflow but by an intake pipe located below the surface of the water. Anderson said water exits the pond through a covered drain located below the surface of the water and a large diameter black pipe. The key is the draining process the deceiver allows is silent.
Well not exactly. Being unable to feel the suction because the 6 foot filter keeps them away from the intake matters too. They can still hear the outflow much of the time.
Anderson said farmers and ranchers are receptive to the idea of building beaver deceivers when they are introduced to the innovative invention.
“When we get the information to them, farmers and ranchers are discovering the blessings in the system,” he said.
Anderson wants the state to begin making funding available to farmers and ranchers for installation of beaver deceivers and later hopes that money can be made available for them by the federal government.
“We want to take this to a national level,” he said. “We want to take this as far as we can.”
Anderson said that one of big pluses of the series of smaller dams beaver deceivers can help create, is that the dams can remain in place for years.
“They will improve water in a sustainable way,” he said.
Anderson hopes that the availability of the deceivers will ultimately result in fewer farmers and ranchers trapping beavers to protect their land. This, he said, could spark a comeback of the beaver, an animal that almost became extinct in Oregon and in many parts of the United States in the 1800s due to heavy trapping. Anderson said it is estimated that there were once at least one million beavers in Oregon, many of which were in Northeast Oregon. He said it is not known today how many beavers are in this region or the state. However, he said the total is a small fraction of what it once was.
I like the idea of triggering a beaver renaissance across the state. Save some of that good vibe for California too, will you?
Today it is only fair, Anderson said, that a full-fledged effort is made to help restore beavers throughout the United States because of the role their dams have played in the development of ecosystems across the nation.
“They built this environment and then we took them out of it,” he said.
I don’t know about that, humans don’t seem to care much ab0ut what is fair. How about pointing out it is in our OWN SELF-INTEREST to make sure they come back.
We for sure care about that.
The public can listen for free to songs from Beaver Celebration at Anderson’s website, bringbackbeaver.org. The Beaver Celebration CD is available locally at La Grande Stereo and Music.
Anderson made the CD with the help of many musicians, including three of his classmates at La Grande High School in the 1960s who were members of the Sceptres, a band that first performed in 1964. Those three musicians are Robert Bailey and Dan Ross, both of The Dalles, and Cal Scott, who resides in Portland.
As long as I’ve been writing about beavers, and probably long before that there have been two stares where fish and wildlife has been diligently blowing up beaver dams to “protect trout’. Explosives must be very fun because they have ignored all the data from Pollock and Wheaton that show how essential beaver habitat is to rearing salmonids and how the dams keep temperatures low. I figured that the single blessing of Emily Fairfax leaving California for Minnesota might be to push this argument to the forefront. Along with Bob Boucher’s fantastic Milwaukee research and subsequent legal action who has finally pushed it into the light.
As Madison endures a long, hot summer of drought and wildfire haze, maybe it’s time to embrace what beavers have to offer.
These industrious hydrologic engineers are champing at the sticks to restore the 50% of Wisconsin wetlands that were drained for farming, including much of Madison’s isthmus. Their ponds slow flooding during rainy seasons, store water for times of drought, create a swampy barrier against wildfires, and build habitat for other species ranging from woodpeckers to fish to amphibians.
Because of beavers’ documented ability to mitigate climate change, western states are encouraging beaver populations, and protecting them with new laws. In June, California declared beavers a “keystone species,” Seattle has installed pond levelers so beavers can build dams in its parks without flooding them, and groups such as the SLO Beaver Brigade document the health of local populations.
Europe, where beavers were wiped out during the craze for beaver skin hats, is restoring beavers into wetlands from Scotland to Russia. And with a documentary called The Beaver Believers, and the publication of two recent books extolling their virtues — Beaverland by Leila Philip and Eager by Ben Goldfarb — beavers are having their moment of fame.
Except, not so much in Wisconsin.
“We’re the only state that has a budget to destroy beavers; we’ve spent $15 million in the last 20 years to kill beavers,’’ says Bob Boucher, who claims the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources is pursuing “a policy of beaver holocaust.” In the past decade, Boucher says U.S. Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services statistics indicate that federal and state policies have killed 28,141 Wisconsin beavers and blown up or destroyed 14,796 beaver dams through hand removal or explosives, accidentally killing 1,091 river otters in the process.
Good for you Bob. This is taking the fight right into the lion’s den. The department of natural resources in Wisconsin has been repeatedly shown the truth over the years, I know because I and other believers have personally have received letters back from them. They know better. It’s high time they do better.
But Midwestern attitudes may be changing and there are moves afoot to rethink beaver management. Boucher’s group, Superior Bio-Conservancy, filed notice in late June that it intends to sue the wildlife services division of the USDA, which carries out the DNR’s orders to remove beavers along 1,800 miles of trout streams in Wisconsin. Boucher, who was co-author of a 2021 study that proposed using beavers to build $3.3 billion worth of flood-proofing along the Milwaukee River watershed, says he’s made 17 requests to meet with the DNR on its beaver policy, only to be rebuffed.
“I hope that a stern talking-to from a judge may get them to pay attention,’’ he says.
And beavers in northern Wisconsin trout streams will be the topic of the annual trout stream improvement workshop Aug. 15, co-sponsored by the DNR and UW-Stevens Point. Another Midwest beaver and trout management conference, sponsored by the American Fisheries Society, is set for a week later in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Dynamiting beaver dams to “improve” streams for trout has long been a DNR policy.
Sometime, when you’ve ignored information for so long it’s become automatic, and everything still isn’t working even though you have poured buckets of money into your projects, sometimes when that happens and you’re at a loss to know what to do next, it’s time to try something NEW. Maybe even listening.
Trout biologist Ray White, who will be a speaker at the August event in Hayward, grew up in Madison and remembers watching a nature movie at the Wisconsin Historical Society in the 1940s that showed game wardens ridding Wisconsin of beavers to encourage trout.
“I knew even as a kid that Wisconsin wanted to remove beavers,’’ says White, who worked at the Wisconsin DNR before going on to faculty positions at Michigan State and Montana State. “And then I became a biologist and I became involved in it. We felt beavers were messing up our work.”
Today, White, 88, sees the issue as less clear cut. Eastern brook trout, Wisconsin’s native species, and beavers evolved together in Wisconsin. While trout improvement dogma declares that beaver dams cause trout streams to warm up and silt up behind the dams, White says that isn’t necessarily a problem for trout spawning.
“It turns out that eastern brook trout spawn where groundwater comes up through the gravel, they seek out places where they can feel the upwelling water,’’ he says. “If the silt is thin enough at the edge of a beaver pond, they can still spawn there.”
Whoa. He’s very close. Is this story going to have a happy ending?
Still, White doesn’t oppose removing beavers from trout waters, saying, “we don’t need beavers everywhere.”
Nope. Maybe not that close.
Another workshop speaker Emily Fairfax, a hydrologist at the University of Minnesota, says that her research shows that beaver dams can have a beneficial effect, forcing moving water downwards, where it mingles with chilly groundwater and remerges much colder.
“I’ve felt this, walking down beaver-dammed streams, and suddenly you’ll feel this ice cold stream of water coming up,’’ Fairfax says. “So beaver ponds will have super cool pools that trout love, warmer pools that turtles and amphibians love, there’s something for everyone in this habitat. Beavers are really, really good at creating these biodiversity hotspots.”
Fairfax, who did her beaver research in California and other western states, says Wisconsin lacks solid data on its beaver populations because the DNR does not track the number of beavers killed by private landowners. (In his complaint, Boucher notes the USDA wildlife services kills three times more beavers per year than planned in its 2013 environmental assessment plan.)
Go Emily. Go Bob. Go Beavers.
“We have what I call ‘ecological amnesia,’ because it’s been 200 or 300 years since beavers were really abundant,’’ Fairfax says. The first Europeans who arrived in Wisconsin were fur traders, and they encountered a wet, paleo landscape of braided streams that would flood during wet seasons and contract during dry times.
Based on her California experience, Fairfax says it may take a lawsuit to get Wisconsin’s beaver believers working with the trout fanciers. It also may take a climate-fueled disaster or two.
“The West was confronted with climate disasters much sooner, and those are situations where you really see the benefits of beavers,’’ Fairfax says. “If we want to be climate resilient, we need more wetlands, and beavers are great builders of wetland
Just remember, first they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight with you. Then you win.
I would say the badger state has officially moved into stage 3. Stay Tuned.
