Anyone who occasionally reads this website knows the name and shame of Placer county. It is the county in California that issued 7 times more depredation permits for beaver om 2013 even when we had a statistician look at the numbers and control for things like water acreage and population density. Well, a few years back Damion Ciotti of US Fish and Wildlife service suggested that the Placer land trust get the rancher to stop killing beavers on Doty preserve and use some BDAs to give them a kick start instead,
And look what happened.
Pop quiz for the good students. Guess which part of this picture is the least flammable?
You know how you have some project that you’re working on, with little success. And you try one thing. Then you try the other thing. But nothing seems to make a dent in the problem. And sometimes you feel like it’s hopeless and you might as well just give up and go do something else entirely. And then something GIVES and all of a sudden success just falls into place all around you and you feel the ground shifting between your feet in a good way?
Many of the wetlands in the western United States have disappeared since the 1700s. California has lost an astonishing 90 percent of its wetlands, which includes streamsides, wet meadows and ponds. In Nevada, Idaho and Colorado, more than 50 percent of wetlands have vanished. Precious wet habitats now make up just 2 percent of the arid West — and those remaining wet places are struggling.
Nearly half of U.S. streams are in poor condition, unable to fully sustain wildlife and people, says Jeremy Maestas, a sagebrush ecosystem specialist with the NRCS who organized that workshop on Wilde’s ranch in 2016. As communities in the American West face increasing water shortages, more frequent and larger wildfires (SN: 9/26/20, p. 12) and unpredictable floods, restoring ailing waterways is becoming a necessity.
You’ll want to click on the headline and read every word over and over. This article is that good.
Landowners and conservation groups are bringing in teams of volunteers and workers, like the NRCS group, to build low-cost solutions from sticks and stones. And the work is making a difference. Streams are running longer into the summer, beavers and other animals are returning, and a study last December confirmed that landscapes irrigated by beaver activity can resist wildfires.
Bring back the beaver and let them do the work. Thanks Joe Wheaton for making this and a million other articles like this possible.
Filling the sponge
Think of a floodplain as a sponge: Each spring, floodplains in the West soak up snow melting from the mountains. The sponge is then wrung out during summer and fall, when the snow is gone and rainfall is scarce. The more water that stays in the sponge, the longer streams can flow and plants can thrive. A full sponge makes the landscape better equipped to handle natural disasters, since wet places full of green vegetation can slow floods, tolerate droughts or stall flames.
Typical modern-day stream and river restoration methods can cost about $500,000 per mile, says Joseph Wheaton, a geomorphologist at Utah State University in Logan. Projects are often complex, and involve excavators and bulldozers to shore up streambanks using giant boulders or to construct brand-new channels.
For smaller streams, hand-built restoration solutions work well, often at one-tenth the cost, Wheaton says, and can be self-sustaining once nature takes over. These low-tech approaches include building beaver dam analogs to entice beavers to stay and get to work, erecting small rock dams or strategically mounding mud and branches in a stream. The goal of these simple structures is to slow the flow of water and spread it across the floodplain to help plants grow and to fill the underground sponge.
Hey I wonder if that would work in California. What a crazy idea. We’re pretty special. Do you think it’s possible?
Fixes like these help cure a common ailment that afflicts most streams out West, including Birch Creek, Wheaton says: Human activities have altered these waterways into straightened channels largely devoid of debris. As a result, most riverscapes flow too straight and too fast.
“They should be messy and inefficient,” he says. “They need more structure, whether it’s wood, rock, roots or dirt. That’s what slows down the water.” Wheaton prefers the term “riverscape” over stream or river because he “can’t imagine a healthy river without including the land around it.”
Natural structures “feed the stream a healthy diet” of natural materials, allowing soil and water to accumulate again in the floodplain, he says.
Even in California? No wayyy…. That hardly seems possible! Hey maybe there should be a summit or something to teach people about this?
Beaver benefits
In watersheds across the West, beavers can be a big part of filling the floodplain’s sponge. The rodents gnaw down trees to create lodges and dams, and dig channels for transporting their logs to the dams. All this work slows down and spreads out the water.
On two creeks in northeastern Nevada, streamsides near beaver dams were up to 88 percent greener than undammed stream sections when measured from 2013 to 2016. Even better, beaver ponds helped maintain lush vegetation during the hottest summer months, even during a multiyear drought, Emily Fairfax, an ecohydrologist at California State University Channel Islands, and geologist Eric Small of University of Colorado Boulder reported in 2018 in Ecohydrology.
“Bringing beavers back just makes good common sense when you get down to the science of it,” Wilde says. He did it on his ranch.
Hell YA it does. Bringing back beavers makes dam good sense for all the places that need water and don’t like fires. This is such awesome news and divine timing. A person given to hyperbole might suddenly be given to exaltations.
Water doesn’t burn
The Sharps Fire that scorched south-central Idaho in July 2018 burned a wide swath of a watershed where Idaho Fish and Game had relocated beavers to restore a floodplain. A strip of wet, green vegetation stood untouched along the beavers’ ponds. Wheaton sent a drone to take photos, tweeting out an image on September 5, 2018: “Why is there an impressive patch of green in the middle of 65,000 acres of charcoal? Turns out water doesn’t burn. Thank you beaver!”
The green strip of vegetation along beaver-made ponds in Baugh Creek near Hailey, Idaho, resisted flames when a wildfire scorched the region in 2018, as shown in this drone image.J. Wheaton/Utah State Univ.
Fairfax, the ecohydrologist who reported that beaver dams increase streamside greenness, had been searching for evidence that beavers could help keep flames at bay. Wheaton’s tweet was a “kick in the pants to push my own research on beavers and fire forward,” she says.
With undergraduate student Andrew Whittle, now at the Colorado School of Mines, Fairfax got to work analyzing satellite imagery from recent wildfires. The two mapped thousands of beaver dams within wildfire-burned areas in several western states. Choosing five fires of varying severity in both shrubland and forested areas, the pair analyzed the data to see if creeks with beaver activity stayed greener than creeks without beavers during wildfires.
I’m breathing into a paper bag but I can’t seem to calm down at all. This is SUCH A GREAT ARTICLE and such good news for beavers. I am beside myself. What a great time to remind people that beavers matter.
Could I possibly be happier? Oh yes I could.
Jon found this yesterday behind Susana park. So yes. It is truly the very best beaver day ever. Oh and for those of you keeping track at home that’s a rock in the dam, a bottle of modela AND a crutch. Because beavers are the original recyclers.
This is almost a very nice story about a bay area couple moving to Oregon and buying some land to do the right thing. You see that picture and think maybe they’re putting in fascines of willow to encourage beavers! See if you can spot where they went wrong.
As a couple of self-described “tree hugging dirt worshippers,” Jolliff and Peterman were loathe to cut down any trees on their small woodland property near Scio, Ore., which they have affectionately named “Bogwood.”
But to enhance and restore Bogwood’s namesake wet prairie, Peterman said they had no choice except to remove all invasive species such as English hawthorn, Himalayan blackberry and Scotch broom.
Then they would need to thin the overstocked groves of hardwoods and conifers, allowing native plants to thrive while opening habitat for a rich diversity of wildlife including owls, hawks, bald eagles, coyotes, deer and possibly even a prowling bobcat.
“Our goal, we call it the five B’s: birds, bats, bees, butterflies and Bambi,”Peterman said. “There is so little native habitat for critters … we can’t save the world, but we can do a little bit in this little part, and do what we can.”
Yup. If you want those five you should really be working towards the sixth. Well not even the sixth. Let’s call it “Species A” Since you really need it before everything else falls into place. They almost got there by putting in some BDA’s but since the article never mentions beavers I’m pretty sure that when they show up they’ll be unwelcome.
Before they arrived, however, the property had been extensively logged, altering its natural character. Peterman said they knew they wanted to restore the ecosystem, but admitted they had no idea where to start.
They joined the Oregon Small Woodlands Association in 2014, which Peterman said unlocked a wealth of information. “It was like opening a book for the first time,” he said.
The couple also built a series of beaver dam analogs along a seasonal creek to hold back water, allowing it to remain on the property a little longer for the benefit of plants and animals.
The couple have reused branches and limbs to build the beaver dam analogs, as well as “bio-dens” scattered around the property, offering refuge to birds and deer. EQIP grants also paid for essential equipment, including a 5-horsepower electric sawmill and electric chainsaw, which Peterman has used to fashion wooden fencing and bird boxes.
So close you can almost taste it. Since they’re in Oregon and interested in fire resilience and restoring the land I can’t believe the subject of beavers hasn’t come up.
For several years, Jolliff and Peterman have also provided sturdy hardwood branches to an artisan in Eugene, Ore. who makes 19th-century style brooms. The broomsticks are especially popular with people who play Quidditch, a fictional-turned-real sport from the Harry Potter universe.
I’m sure you feel it too. That lightness and sense of freedom. The feeling that you get when after a long climb you just eased the sweaty backpack off your shoulders and suddenly feel like you might float directly upwards. The dreadful suspense of the last four years where at any moment you would read that hibernating bears could be shot in their caves with their young. or that wolves could be shot from helicopters, or that coal mine tailings could be dumped into drinking water is all suddenly gone. And replaced by responsibility an competence.
And stories like these. Posted the day Biden was inaugurated.
A natural wetland in southeast Oregon was likely saved from extinction thanks to four years of collaboration and some human-made beaver dams.
In the Oregon high desert, about seven miles northeast of the town of Crane, Alder Creek bubbles to the surface surrounded by sagebrush and juniper trees.
“It’s really the only source of water out in a long way,” he said.
“Really it was 99 percent about preventing the loss of the wetland,” said Lindsay Davies, the BLM fisheries biologist who helped manage the project.
You know what I’m thinking right? If the new head of the Bureau of Land Management understands that human made beaver dams save essential wetlands then they know that beav
“It’s amazing how green everything is and how much wetland – it’s a bigger wetland than we had originally anticipated,” said Davies.
BLM wildlife biologist Travis Miller thinks beavers will have a better chance of escaping predation in the deeper water and have the potential for long-term habitat.
“It would be really good to see those populations rebound and establish in these systems,” said Miller.
Whoo hoo! We’re still operating under an “acting director” but it’s wayyyy better than it used to be. And it’s not just BLM. The same thing is going on at FWS too.
As principal deputy director of FWS, Williams will oversee a federal agency tasked with managing wildlife and habitat across the country, and in charge of more than 150 million acres of land in the National Wildlife Refuge System. The agency also administers the Endangered Species Act.
Here’s the inside scoup from Sarah Bates at NWF
Named this week as Biden’s choice for principal deputy director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, Williams is serving as temporary FWS director under a secretarial order (E&E News PM, Jan. 21
Martha Williams, the Biden administration’s current head of the Fish and Wildlife Service, knows the Endangered Species Act both as a law school scholar and as a courtroom combatant who once fought environmentalists over the gray wolf.
Now the former director of the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks is getting a bigger bite at the ESA, including the law’s application to the long-litigated gray wolf.
Named this week as Biden’s choice for principal deputy director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, Williams is serving as temporary FWS director under a secretarial order (E&E News PM, Jan. 21)
She also recommended we be more interested in species recovery than simple “Delisting” and appears to believe that habitat is crucial in this effort. So I’m feeling hopeful that she will be interested in beavers. Aren’t you?
And of course it falls under this exciting umbrella appointment of Native American hero and congresswoman Deb Haaland as the secretary of the Interior. Just as soon as the GOP stops sitting on its hands and appoints her.
If you want to play an exciting American version of power rangers, go look at the line up of his cabinet. Every single choice is game changing.
I mean, as long as we understand these things. That’s what really matters. These researchers at Syracuse University are making sure we leave nothing to chance.
Beavers play an important role in maintaining the habitat around streams throughout the United States. Beaver dams slow water velocity, preventing stream banks from eroding. Without these dams, the rushing water and sediment cuts the stream channel deeper into the ground, dropping the water table. If the water table drops too far below neighboring plants and shrubs, native vegetation dies off resulting in a barren landscape and a loss of biodiversity, further upsetting an area’s ecological balance.
To replicate the effects of beaver dams, a modern stream restoration technique known as “beaver dam analogues” (BDAs) has been developed. These artificial structures consist of wooden posts woven with vegetation to slow water velocity. The intention behind BDAs are to raise the water table in order to restore or maintain native vegetation and to slow water velocities to reduce erosion.
As populations of beavers have declined, municipalities, state agencies and private landowners in the western U.S. have installed BDAs, but have not necessarily monitored their effects, according to Christa Kelleher, assistant professor from the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. As a result, little is known about how these structures function in their surrounding landscape.
Yes yes,no one is researching the BDAs they are so excited about putting in but we’re here to change all that! Ladies and gentleman, may I present to you the amazing BDA researcher!
Through a grant from the National Science Foundation and in partnership with The Nature Conservancy Wyoming, Kelleher and collaborator Philippe Vidon, professor in the Department of Forest and Natural Resources at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, will investigate how BDAs affect the storage and flux of water along stream corridors. The team will look to answer the question: Where does the water go?
Topics Kelleher and her team will investigate include: if water in the stream primarily leaves as evaporation because the dams generate a large pond upstream; if water moves from the stream to recharge the groundwater aquifer (underground rock or sediment that holds groundwater); or if water simply moves around the BDAs into the surrounding land and then re-enters the stream through groundwater-surface water interactions.
“We will accomplish this by field observations and modeling to try to get at not just individual processes, but their interactions,” says Kelleher. “What we learn around these beaver dam analogues will be compared to similar observations and analysis along stretches of river that do not have these structures, to contrast our findings.”
Allow me to say that your important research of whether water in BDA’s get evaporated or hypoheic exchanges itself into groundwater, is the perfect foundation for MY RESEARCH. Which is what the fuck would happen to all that water if we didn’t kill beavers in the first place.
Anyone who occasionally reads this website knows the name and shame of Placer county. It is the county in California that issued 7 times more depredation permits for beaver om 2013 even when we had a statistician look at the numbers and control for things like water acreage and population density. Well, a few years back Damion Ciotti of US Fish and Wildlife service suggested that the Placer land trust get the rancher to stop killing beavers on Doty preserve and use some BDAs to give them a kick start instead,
As a couple of self-described “tree hugging dirt worshippers,” Jolliff and Peterman were loathe to cut down any trees on their small woodland property near Scio, Ore., which they have affectionately named “Bogwood.” 
