The great news is that I heard from EBRP last wee that they want to come and bring their mobile fish tank to the festival again this year! Remember how cool that was? Whoo hoo!
Things are in the crazy planning stage for the festival. I was sad to hear that the Alhambra Valley Band isn’t going to be joining us again this year. There was a generous offer from Hope Savage for her new trio “Savage Bond” to join us, and the UnConcord will of course finish the day. I did a bit of begging and got Extended Roots to play in the middle.
Dave Kwinter will kindly bag pipe us again through the children’s parade.
But how to start? I was in a quandary until I thought about asking the dynamo that is Voena. A famous children’ chorus from Benicia, they have performed at the Whitehouse and at the 2012 Olympics. I thought for sure they should visit a beaver festival. I dusted off my manners and pitched my best volley and guess what? The visionary director Annabelle Marie wants the children to be there! So for the first time in our history they will start the day.
So far so good, but I still hadn’t heard from our sound guru John Koss that he could be there again. Since there’s so many things to set into motion at the same time that there’s a part of organizing a festival that is a bit like the story of “Stone Soup”. You ask people for things based on the promise of other things coming that haven’t actually been secured yet. And if that doesn’t work you just ask for something else until it does work. Just between us. The pessimist in me thought wouldn’t be ironic if I got the full day of music lined up and then we had no audio? hahaha.
But of course he called the other night and wants very much to join us. So there art thou happy!
Here they are singing for Dr. Maya Angelou…
Meanwhile are valiant artist FRogard Schmidt is back after knee surgery and ready and willing to help, We schemed about the idea of having children water color the INSIDE of beaver lodges for the art project and when I suggested making the outline of the lodge for kids to fill in she roared with laughter and insisted no no no they would tear the paper themselves just like beavers into the correct shape.
She just sent these that some students did last week to practice.
Something tells me that part is going to come out just fine…
It’s not just Chernobyl where beavers are reclaiming huge wastelands for their own and slowly making it habitable for other wildlife. They’re doing it in Detroit also.
Shoreline bushes chewed back. Nearby trees felled and demolished. Hundreds of branches piled near a mound damming up a river and flooding the area. To some people the scene looks like environmental havoc.
To the beaver, it’s home.
Using trail cameras, FOX 2 photojournalist Coulter Stuart caught one of these rodents building his own den. It was spotted at an inlet on Stony Island in the Detroit River. In one scene, the beaver can be seen packing mud into the side of a mound – fortifications for his hut.
In another clip the beaver is seen walking on his hind legs, carrying sticks from one end ot the other.
Capturing this ingenuity on display can be tough since the rodents are nocturnal and only build at night. During the day, the only evidence are their footprints in the dirt and the discarded wood that surrounds their homes.
There’s evidence of another kind of activity on Stony Island, too. Scrap metal and sunken barges now shape the shoreline, while beer cans and shotgun shells litter the land. One dilapidated building has a message spray-painted on its side telling visitors the island smells like urine.
Yup trashy metal and a creek that smells like urine. That’s not so far off from the fine home our beavers once enjoyed. From the beaver perspective large chunks of metal aren’t that different from heavy wood and rock. They’ll do just fine to keep things anchored to the dam.
Once the home base for a massive project that transformed the Detroit River and Great Lakes shipping traffic, the 100-acre plot of land is slowly being reclaimed by wildlife.
“Wildlife is resilient. If you give it half a chance, you’d be surprised,” said Bob Burns who does conservation work with the Friends of the Detroit River group.
It may be a surprise that beavers have returned at all. They were harvested to near-extinction when fur trappers arrived from Europe during the colonial era. The added pressures of pollution and habitat loss from Southeast Michigan’s rapid growth in the early 20th century would have made any return to the area extremely difficult.
But in the past 10 years, he’s also seen mother nature’s response when it’s offered an opportunity to recover. The reemergence of beavers is a sign of that progress.
“I’m not saying things are perfect, far from it,” he said. “But from the days of dumping oil and grease and having fires on the river to now with improvements in water quality – it’s really starting to pay off over the past decade.”
Mr Burns is my favorite kind of naturalist. One whose eyes and ears are fully opened to the here and now of wildlife. I really enjoyed this short video with clips of Ben and Dan Flores talking about what the landscape was and could be again.
We ruin a waterway so badly that no one wants to live anywhere near it. And then because its neglected and free of human threats beavers move in and start to improve things so it looks nice again. And then people move BACK because it they want their pretty river back and suddenly they want to get rid of the pesky rodents.
Of course you know how the story goes. First it’s WOW BEAVERS ARE BACK! and then its Ugh Beavers are back. Those rats ruining our culverts or eating our cherry trees.
Their population growth has also led to an increase in nuisance complaints related to beavers – though not to the point they’re management requires a larger response.
“It’s still not to the point that it’s a growing problem, but it’s a tight rope to walk,” Cooley said. “People like having beavers around. It’s a good indication you have good habitat. But there does come a point where they start backing things up. That’s in their nature.”
Beavers are now regular sight at the Bayview Yacht Club. They’ve also found suitable habitat at the Conner Creek Power Plant where the Rouge River opens into the Detroit River. The DNR keeps watch of them on Belle Isle while a few have prompted animal trapping calls on Grosse Ile.
The environment’s conservation will likely spur more interactions between humans and beavers as their numbers continue to grow. But Cooley says the beavers taking up residence on the islands that border Grosse Ile may not be such a bad thing.
“Being in the Detroit River, there’s not as many opportunities to cause problems. So that’s a good place for them to live,” he said. “If you build it, they will come.”
You know how it is, you have to strike a balance. Just like they did when they filled the river with ships bringing toxic supplies and then turned the entire boatway into a rusted dump. I guess that was a balance between pocketbooks. His and Theirs.
This new idea you’re suggesting, a balance between humans and nature, that sounds a little crazy to most people.
First you find out where they are and where they aren’t. And then you do things to make them more likely to stick around, like planting trees and kicking out the trappers. And then you sit back and let beavers do the work.
A beaver census is just downstream, to be administered by the White River National Forest this summer through October.
The Pitkin County Board of County Commissioners on Wednesday unanimously approved an agreement to allocate $50,000 of the Healthy Rivers and Streams Fund to partially finance a study into beaver activity and habitats Roaring Fork Valley headwaters.
“This agreement is to investigate and implement actions to promote beaver utilization of our headwater streams up on federal land in order to promote watershed health and occupation by native aquatic species,” said Lisa Tasker of the Healthy Rivers and Streams Citizen Advisory Board.
The money will go to hire two seasonal employees to visit high-elevation sites across federal land in the valley. Clay Ramey, a fisheries biologist with the White River National Forest, said he compiled 200 randomly generated sites, including Thompson Creek, Castle Creek, Snowmass Creek, eastern Maroon Creek, Hunter Creek, Woody Creek, and the upper Frying Pan area.
Now that and a beaver festival to teach everyone why it matters sounds like a really really good idea. Heck talk to Ellen Wohl and fund a couple graduate students doing the same thing while you’re at it.
“I’m really enthusiastic about this,” Commissioner Greg Poschman said. “And it’s this sort of activity that helps, you know, turn our kids on to preservation in the natural world and protection of important resources.”
“I imagined that we might use it for getting some beavers introduced into some river areas that maybe used to have them in the past but don’t have them now,” he said. “Because I see beavers as a way of backing the water up and helping the high-elevation wetlands become more of a sponge to hold water for later in the summer. To me, it’s really a good thing to do to keep the water back and up in the high country as long as possible.”
Ecologically, beavers dams and the pools they produce allow a healthy, vibrant riparian zone in areas they might not otherwise exist. And they hold runoff water at higher elevations for longer.
Ramey said that once the U.S. Forest Service knows where beavers already live and where they would improve the ecosystem, they can relocate beavers to sites that make ecological sense.
Okay I can tell you right now where they make sense. EVERYWHERE. And including all those nice places you’re relocating them from too. Every place where you want the water cleaner.
Sure if you have some places where you want to keep the water dirty, good ahead and move those beavers.
“Beavers were native here. And so, before the gringos showed up and killed them all, there were beavers everywhere. And more or less every stream that’s less than something like 5% slope was just chock a block with beaver dams. The animals adapted to that, and the plant communities adapted to that. And the water that came out of these watersheds probably a lot slower than it did once we took all the beavers out,” Ramey said. “It’s using beavers as a management tool in this way; it’s attempting to re-create what was the existing natural, ecological context for the way water came off of the mountains here.”
Beaver dams also help in wildfire mitigation, as their pools encourage greater ground water retention and a refuge for wildlife in the event of a fire.
Once USFS has a complete data set of beavers and potential habitats throughout the forest, Ramey said that he will be able to inform Colorado Parks and Wildlife where to relocate beavers that have set up shop in residential areas.
“It’s not a beaver re-introduction project,” he said. “We’re just looking around.”
Well sure. First look around. And find out what’s currently happening in these places. Maybe streams are so damaged by the beaver shortage that you’ll need to help them along with some beaver dam analogs. Maybe there’s some scrubby places that could use a little more willow or aspen before you get a healthy beaver population.
The entire discussion was pretty congenial, even when one commissioner talked about disscecting a road kill beaver in his daughter’s fourth grade class…children love to learn about nature ya know.
It always feels like getting the beaver festival to happen is like pulling up an ancient creaking sunken ship from the bottom of the ocean by only spider web threads. Impossible. Unlikely. Not going to happen. Not enough music, too many no’s on the silent auction front, missed deadlines and escaped exhibits, but then finally it starts, painfully, slowly to take shape. Just the beginnings, mind you. Just the barest hint of an outline in the fog.
Slowly it transforms from flatly “impossible” to “Potentially possible.”
Cover in progress by Amelia Hunter
I read once a quote from American author Mignon McLaughin.
“Even cowards can endure hardship, only the brave can endure suspense.”
This report is a fine reminder that no matter how well intentioned you are or how much money you have, its a good idea to bring your neighbors along with your project from the very beginning. Whether that means having a barbecue or hosting fieldtrips or just answering phone calls. It takes a neighborhood to save a stream.
One of Ian Wilson’s greatest joys is going down to the short stretch of the Wallowa River on his family’s ranch to fly fish.
“For me, it’s the equivalent of … church for someone who is deeply religious,” he said.
But as a fish biologist, he’s also long known there was something off about the river as it cut across his property: The Wallowa was oddly, unnaturally straight. And because of that, it wasn’t very hospitable for fish. Rather than stop and spawn, salmon and steelhead tended to swim through the property.
Salmon like clean, shallow gravel beds to lay eggs. And smolt, or baby salmon, prefer lots of little still-water pools where they can relax and fatten up on insects. Basically, they need the kind of meandering river system that naturally occurs in a floodplain.
Over the years, Oregon’s farmers, road builders and developers cleared many of the state’s floodplains by cutting trees and filling in channels. Doing so maximized their ability to use land.
All those neighbors didn’t take too kindly to that stream stuff undoing all their hard work. But not everyone is privy to the stream of thought that can see what a river should be. Fortunately he just kept right on working.
But now, because Chinook, steelhead and trout are listed under the Endangered Species Act, the Bonneville Power Administration is trying to rebuild floodplains using revenue from electricity generation.
With help from the nonprofit Trout Unlimited, Wilson won a $1.2 million BPA grant to restore his three-quarter mile stretch of river.
In the summer of 2022, crews placed 475 trees, many complete with massive root wads, in the channel to slow water down and spread it out. They built 54 artificial beaver dams to hold water in the floodplain and create lots of little stillwater pools. And they planted cottonwood, willow and alder trees for shade.
Considering the aim was to restore the river to a more natural state, the restoration was a relatively industrial project, with excavators and dump trucks. They dug channels and filled-in deep river pools.
Wilson said the work vastly increased fish spawning habitat. It used to take him 45 minutes to look for salmon eggs in the river, “Now it takes me upwards of half a day, because there’s so much water to walk,” he said. “Same flows, but there’s just so much more area to cover.”
The restoration finished in September and lots of new animals have already shown up. Where Wilson used to see 10 ducks, he said there are maybe 100 now. He’s also spotted bald eagles, dragonflies and songbirds.
“Within two months, we had beavers return, which was beyond my wildest expectations,”Wilson said. “We’ve seen a black bear recently. We just saw a bobcat this last Sunday and there’s a lot of coyotes out.”
Beavers? Did you say you got BEAVERS? Wow that’s really lucky! And please tell me you aren’t so crazy as to think they’ll block all the salmon and decided to have them trapped out, right? So far so good.
It’s an environmentalist’s dream. But this is eastern Oregon, where endangered species listings have hurt local economies in the eyes and experiences of some residents. Land used for chinook salmon, the gray wolf, the Oregon spotted frog and other animals cannot easily be used for logging, mining or grazing, limiting economic activity.
And unlike many of his neighbors, Wilson is not reliant on his ranch income because he and his wife have other jobs. So he said when he gets the odd sour look at the grocery store he understands why, ”You know people give me a hard time,” he said. “And you just have to kind of accept that I guess, to some level.”
In hindsight, Wilson thinks he could have contacted more neighbors, even though it’s not required, “That probably would have gone a long way towards maybe a little more understanding, initially.”
To try to calm the waters, after all the work was finished Wilson held a neighborhood barbecue, to show everyone what he was up to.
“My reaction was, it was a huge project,” said Janet Hohman, Ken’s wife. She’s happy to see new riparian areas being created, but she’s withholding her verdict until it’s clear no logs get flushed downriver.
But Ken Hohman said he felt better after seeing all the work.
“I mean, it’s a good project,” he said. ” I wouldn’t spend $1 million of my money on it, but yeah.”
Sunlight is the best disinfectant, Showing your work and letting your neighbors know how it will affect them. Rivers are kind of remarkable symbols for how what I do in my little area might impact other people. You can never sneak restoration in under a cloak. Better to do it with a trumpet.
Dave Kwinter will kindly bag pipe us again through the children’s parade.
Something tells me that part is going to come out just fine…
