This article made me very happy yesterday. I had once believed that the plight of salmon would change things for beavers immediately. I had no idea it would take this long/ But I’m glad we finally are getting there.
Newsom’s new plan puts the governor’s guarantee on actions that only a few years ago appeared radical, such as taking down multiple old dams, or building infrastructure that would allow salmon to skirt them and reach the streams where they lay eggs. The plan also emphasizes creative means of restoring salmon habitat. Many of the projects build on long-term efforts by tribes and conservation groups, and some, like a program in which Central Valley rice farmers allow their flooded fields to be used as rearing habitat for fish, offer hope that agriculture and restoration can be combined.
Well yes there’s a lot of ways we can help are struggling salmon, but here is my favorite way:
The plan emphasizes that dam removal and other salmon restoration efforts should be done collaboratively with tribes. These activities include an idea that came from the Karuk Tribe, as well as other Indigenous groups, to reintroduce beaver, which act as natural engineers of stream habitats that benefit fish.
Chuck Bonham, director of California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW), acknowledged that this is a major shift for his agency. Until recently CDFW refused to treat beaver as a species native to California, despite ample historical and biological evidence.
IN OUR PAPER WHICH WE MAD HAPPEN BECAUSE HEIDI MET AN ARCHEOLOGIST THRU WORTH A DAM’S EXHIBIT AT THE FLYWAY FESTIVAL.
When I die just make sure someone says that at my funeral. Okay?
“Lord, give me chastity and continence, but not yet!” Augustine of Hippo (354-430)
This infamous prayer to be made chaste eventually (preferably sometime around old age) popped in my head when I thought about CDFW’s new found love of beavers and saw this article in lake county news, Maybe they are not in such a hurry to change their ways all at once.
Q: Is there a way for the public to get involved in CDFW’s beaver restoration program?
A: CDFW welcomes information from the public as the department strives to gain a better understanding of the current range of beavers in California. The first comprehensive beaver population survey conducted in California can be found on CDFW’s website. The California Beaver Observation Survey includes questions on the date, location, type of activity, and the number and size of the beavers observed. Photos of the beaver activity, location and lodgecan be submitted through the survey page as well.
This was VERY exciting news so of course I rushed to the website to see the survey.
Um…Crickets..
There was no survey or even a note to say “Survey coming soon”. I can;’t imagine why they decided to release the story before the actual roll out but go figure. So I guess the very minimal effort needed to get other people to count beavers for you hasn’t even begun,.
Oh God make me appreciate beavers. but not yet.
The Beaver Restoration Program is a result of shifting attitudes toward the benefits of beaver families in the environment. There’s a growing recognition of the ecological improvements linked to beaver activity, as opposed to the animal being considered a potential nuisance species by some in the past.
CDFW considers these animals ecosystem engineers by playing a role in restoring watersheds while increasing resiliency to climate change and wildfire.
The development of the survey comes after CDFW launched the initial phase of its beaver translocation activities, recently conducting the first beaver conservation release in nearly 75 years with the goal of re-establishing a breeding population.
Geeze, we just released 7 beavers and Chuck Bonham cried. Isn’t that enough for you people? It takes TIME to do these things. And we all agree that we need to treat beavers like they matter.
So on thursday of this week three very important things happened at once. The first was that I finished writing about American Prairies suggesting beavers live in the dam and got a few comments from kindly readers who thought they were well meaning and my post was too snarky and should be softened.
Well yes I am snarky about beavers not living in the dam. it’s a failing I cannot fix. Unless they fix it first I offered helpfully.
At at the same time I was reading Ben’s fantastic article about google and realizing what that meant for California and then the phone rang.
And it was Virginia Holsworth sitting in a tree in the beaver dam because the city contractor was trying to cut the willow out of the dams and what did I thmk she should do?
Because its the week between Christmas and New Years and if there is one thing I learned in my many years battle with the city over beavers is that this is the week city contractors are brought in to do squirrely bullshit to the beavers because staff will all be gone, people are sleepy with eggnog or visiting relatives and the city phone lines are going to voicemail.
I told Virginia to call some friends and send me a photo of herself in the tree.
FAIRFIELD — Virginia Holsworth had planned to go shopping on Thursday.
Instead, she found herself sitting on a willow stump – the remains of a tree the local Laurel Creek beavers had built a dam around – and watching the city’s contracted workers as they cut down a second tree that was not part of the dam structure.
I think it would have looked a lot different,” Holsworth said if she had not protested to keep the beaver dam from being compromised.
She said the workers told her they were just paid to do a job by the city, and she told them she was not moving until the Fairfield representatives came out to talk to her.
Sniff, I’m do proud of Virginia She is a beaver heroine! Better than that. A Willow heroine! See that tree was sitting smack dab in the middle of one of the largest dams. It was the dams anchor and without it, well things just might wash away, lowering the water level and uncovering the beavers lodge.
Holsworth has been advocating for the local beaver population since 2020.
“I came out, sat down and they stopped working. The city manager came out and talked to me and a few neighbors, and the end result is they stopped cutting down trees that could compromise the integrity of the dam,” Holsworth said.
She said over the years she has developed a pretty good relationship with Fairfield, and was very pleased with the response from City Manager David Gassaway and the offer from Public Works Manager Daniel Camara to continue the discussion at a later date.
One thing Virginia is excellent at is incorporating very polite smoothness into her resistance. She acts like a professional and like a mom and city leaders aren’t sure how to fight back.
City officials could not be reached for comment on Thursday.
ead out of Laurel Creek in Fairfield, Wednesday, Aug. 11, 2021. (Aaron Rosenblatt/Daily Republic)The offer to do a walking tour of the creek area and to talk about their differing perspectives on the creek and beaver issues came after another creek neighbor, David Pratt, started asking questions about the city’s rational for cutting down the trees and about why those particular trees were selected.>Holsworth said Pratt has a history in the forestry industry.
The dam is still up. We did stop them,” she said.
Hurray for tree roots that hold dams steady. Hurray for Virginia and all the residents of Laurel Creek that care about beavers and trees in their neighborhood. We are with them in spirit!
Heidi Perryman, leader of Worth A Dam, a beaver advocacy group out of Martinez, also was on site.
“Residents are concerned that the trees anchor the dams and their removal could cause a washout – threatening the beaver safety and wildlife that depends on the dams … Research has shown that willow trees actually increase flow and help prevent flooding,” Perryman noted in an email to the Daily Republic.
Ohhh well if we have any weight to toss around we are happy to do it to save beaver dams and beavers. To be fair I didn’;t actually say I was THERE but maybe in some sense I was.. I was on the phone. :Listening to Virginia and the contractor. I was on facebook., Posting about it so that folks in Fairfield could know what was happening. Maybe I’m like Elijah, The unseen guest at every water table..
“Where ever there’s a city taking out a dam and a woman sitting in a tree, look over your shoulder and I’ll be there”
Back in August of 2021 I wrote am ambitious little post called “Incent-a-beaver” saying that beavers were so important to the golden state it behooved the powers that be to pay landowners to keep them on their land. The idea was based on the incentives farmers are given to keep their fields wet during the flyway season.
Well I thought it made sense anyway and it must have been a little interesting because afterwards I got an email from Dan Ackerstein who worked with the sustainability team at Google and he said they were interested in how Google mapping technology could help beavers and could we talk.
I was about as excited as I could possibly have been to think that a big power like google could turn their skills to beavers but I was sworn to secrecy and could say nothing. (Which I’m sure as you can imagine was hard for me.) In the end I gave hm some other names and a photo of a beaver that had been taken on the Google Campus a few years back but helping eavers wasn’t the direction they wanted to go in. I thought that was it, an interesting blip on the radar and nothing else.
Until I saw this:
For the first time in four centuries, it’s good to be a beaver. Long persecuted for their pelts and reviled as pests, the dam-building rodents are today hailed by scientists as ecological saviors. Their ponds and wetlands store water in the face of drought, filter out pollutants, furnish habitat for endangered species, and fight wildfires. In California, Castor canadensis is so prized that the state recently committed millions to its restoration.
While beavers’ benefits are indisputable, however, our knowledge remains riddled with gaps. We don’t know how many are out there, or which direction their populations are trending, or which watersheds most desperately need a beaver infusion. Few states have systematically surveyed them; moreover, many beaver ponds are tucked into remote streams far from human settlements, where they’re near-impossible to count. “There’s so much we don’t understand about beavers, in part because we don’t have a baseline of where they are,” says Emily Fairfax, a beaver researcher at the University of Minnesota.
But that’s starting to change. Over the past several years, a team of beaver scientists and Google engineers have been teaching an algorithm to spot the rodents’ infrastructure on satellite images. Their creation has the potential to transform our understanding of these paddle-tailed engineers—and help climate-stressed states like California aid their comeback. And while the model hasn’t yet gone public, researchers are already salivating over its potential. “All of our efforts in the state should be taking advantage of this powerful mapping tool,” says Kristen Wilson, the lead forest scientist at the conservation organization the Nature Conservancy. “It’s really exciting.”
You got all that? Beavers are so important we need to know where they are and how many there are. And we can make a computer formula that tells us the answer.s, Oh and just for extra credit notice that the author of this article is Ben Goldfarb.
The beaver-mapping model is the brainchild of Eddie Corwin, a former member of Google’s real-estate sustainability group. Around 2018, Corwin began to contemplate how his company might become a better steward of water, particularly the many coastal creeks that run past its Bay Area offices. In the course of his research, Corwin read Water: A Natural History, by an author aptly named Alice Outwater. One chapter dealt with beavers, whose bountiful wetlands, Outwater wrote, “can hold millions of gallons of water” and “reduce flooding and erosion downstream.” Corwin, captivated, devoured other beaver books and articles, and soon started proselytizing to his friend Dan Ackerstein,a sustainability consultant who works with Google. “We both fell in love with beavers,” Corwin says.
Corwin’s beaver obsession met a receptive corporate culture. Google’s employees are famously encouraged to devote time to passion projects, the policy that produced Gmail; Corwin decided his passion was beavers. But how best to assist the buck-toothed architects? Corwin knew that beaver infrastructure—their sinuous dams, sprawling ponds, and spidery canals—is often so epic it can be seen from space. In 2010, a Canadian researcher discovered the world’s longest beaver dam, a stick-and-mud bulwark that stretches more than a half-mile across an Alberta park, by perusing Google Earth. Corwin and Ackerstein began to wonder whether they could contribute to beaver research by training a machine-learning algorithm to automatically detect beaver dams and ponds on satellite imagery—not one by one, but thousands at a time, across the surface of an entire state.
…So there it is. laid out and clear for us all. The origin story and the key players. So what happened? What is going to happen next?
After discussing the concept with Google’s engineers and programmers, Corwin and Ackerstein decided it was technically feasible. They reached out next to Fairfax, who’d gained renown for a landmark 2020 study showing that beaver ponds provide damp, fire-proof refuges in which other species can shelter during wildfires. In some cases, Fairfax found, beaver wetlands even stopped blazes in their tracks. The critters were such talented firefighters that she’d half-jokingly proposed that the US Forest Service change its mammal mascot—farewell, Smoky Bear, and hello, Smoky Beaver.
Fairfax was enthusiastic about the pond-mapping idea. She and her students already used Google Earth to find beaver dams to study within burned areas. But it was a laborious process, one that demanded endless hours of tracing alpine streams across screens in search of the bulbous signature of a beaver pond. An automated beaver-finding tool, she says, could “increase the number of fires I can analyze by an order of magnitude.”
With Fairfax’s blessing, Corwin, Ackerstein, and a team of programmers set about creating their model. The task, they decided, was best suited to a convolutional neural network, a type of algorithm that essentially tries to figure out whether a given chunk of geospatial data includes a particular object—whether a stretch of mountain stream contains a beaver dam, say. Fairfax and some obliging beaverologists from Utah State University submitted thousands of coordinates for confirmed dams, ponds, and canals, which the Googlers matched up with their own high-resolution images to teach the model to recognize the distinctive appearance of beaverworks. The team also fed the algorithm negative data—images of beaverless streams and wetlands—so that it would know what it wasn’t looking for. They dubbed their model the Earth Engine Automated Geospatial Elements Recognition, or EEAGER—yes, as in “eager beaver.”
Wow that’s a lot of work to come around to the acronym EEAGER but okay. I get it. Now for the icing on the cake.
It’s only appropriate, then, that California is where EEAGER is going to get its first major test. The Nature Conservancy and Google plan to run the model across the state sometime in 2024, a comprehensive search for every last beaver dam and pond. That should give the state’s wildlife department a good sense of where its beavers are living, roughly how many it has, and where it could use more. The model will also provide California with solid baseline data against which it can compare future populations, to see whether its new policies are helping beavers recover. “When you have imagery that’s repeated frequently, that gives you the opportunity to understand change through time,” says the Conservancy’s Kristen Wilson.
GOT THAT? California is first and sometime this year we are going to finally know how many beavers the are in the state. And not just be able to infer from depredation permits. This is big news. The biggest.
When beavers count you figure out how to count beavers.
Yesterday was he real deal. Proof positive that CDFW ha s finally changed its tune for good or for a while anyway, . Even my gloomy perspective was lightened. just ;look what happened:
Beaver Reintroduction Conducted in Cooperation with Local Tribes
Media Note: A link to download photos and video of the beaver release is available at the bottom of the news release.
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) has launched the initial phase of its beaver translocation activities, recently conducting the first beaver conservation release in nearly 75 years. Working with the Maidu Summit Consortium, CDFW released a family of seven beavers into Plumas County, in a location that is known to the tribal community as Tásmam Koyóm.
The new family group of beavers join a single resident beaver in the valley with the ultimate objective of re-establishing a breeding population that will maintain the mountain meadow ecosystem, its processes and the habitat it provides for numerous other species.
Humans have so admired the skilled work of beavers they have spent millions of dollars trying to replicate the benefits they create. Thanks to Governor Gavin Newsom’s leadership and the State Legislature for supporting that leadership with funding in the state budget, beaver restoration is now part of a larger effort to help mitigate the impacts of wildfires, climate change and drought.
Seven beavers. SEVEN I’m generally not very supportive of beaver relocation and it often doesn’t work out like you’d hope but SEVEN is respectable. That means they really took time to get the whole family. It means they didn’t do what was easy. They did what was right.
“Thanks to the leadership of our tribal partners and years of preparation, beavers are returning to their original homeland around the state,” said Governor Gavin Newsom. “California is restoring wildlife and critical habitat by working hand-in-hand with the tribes who have stewarded these lands.”
The historic release represents the first phase of CDFW’s North American beaver (Castor canadensis) restoration project, releasing beavers into the waters on the ancestral lands of the Mountain Maidu people. Soon to follow is a beaver reintroduction effort on the Tule River Reservation in the southern Sierra Nevada.
“Beavers help retain water on the landscape, which increases groundwater recharge, improves summer baseflows, extends seasonal flows and increases fuel moisture during wildfire season, effectively creating green belts that can serve as wildfire buffers or breaks and provide refugia for wildlife,” said CDFW Director Charlton H. Bonham, who joined the historic beaver release. “We look forward to duplicating these efforts on the Tule River Reservation in the southern Sierra Nevada mountains this spring.”
“This is the first time in decades our state agencies have reintroduced beaver into its original homelands with the leadership of our tribal partners at the Maidu Summit Consortium,” said California Natural Resource Agency Secretary Wade Crowfoot who also attended the beaver release. “Beaver relocation will help both to restore the environment and preserve traditional culture of our tribal partners who have stewarded these lands since time immemorial. I’m excited to watch how beaver will improve the health of landscapes in coming decades and support traditional lifeways for our diverse tribal communities.”
Someone from OAEC shared some photos of the operation. I have no idea what endangered species the beavers were threatening in Sutter but we know hay county is in the top 3 od beaver trapping so I guess its better they have a chance.
The translocation follows multiple years of site preparation that ensured adequate beaver habitat that provides protection from predators and can support beaver population establishment. These preliminary efforts were conducted through Maidu Summit Consortium’s collaboration with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Occidental Arts & Ecology Center’s WATER Institute, Lassen National Forest, Plumas Corporation, Swift Water Design, Symbiotic Restoration, Feather River Land Trust, The Sierra Fund, CalPBR Network and several others.
“Getting to this moment of our first reintroduction really is a product of so much leadership from so many people. We would not be here without the Tule River Tribe of California who have been out front advocating for these actions for years, tribes around the state like Karuk, and, of course, Maidu Summit Consortium leaders. The future looks much better because of these leaders,” Bonham said.
In alignment with CDFW’s new beaver depredation policy, the translocated beaver family was relocated from Sutter County, where their activity was damaging lands supporting several threatened or endangered species. To date, the entire family group, which consists of a breeding pair and their offspring, has survived. After exploring miles of habitat throughout the valley and locating the resident beaver’s territory, the family settled into the release area and has established shelter for the impending winter. The translocated beavers and receiving ecosystems will be monitored for multiple years following their release to assess the population, movement, habitat utilization, behavior and activity, potential conflicts, mortalities and the need for additional translocations, as well as the ecological changes that result from beaver engineering on the landscape.
I’m so old I can remember when CDFW said that beaver weren’t native to Plumas county and didn’t belong to the landscape. I guess those days are gone for good, or for at least another century.
