Category: Beaver ecological impact

MOTHER MAY I? NO YOU MAY NOT. BECAUSE OF BEAVERS!

I may be sentimental, but it always touches my heart to read about cities protecting wildlife corridors. Especially when the article has photos like this;

City staff recommend denial of Alpenrose land use permit

City of Portland staff recommended denial of the Land Use permit for the proposed 263-unit Raleigh Crest development on the Alpenrose site a week ago Friday, concluding that “all of the relevant standards and approval criteria have not been met.” Although the denial was based on several issues, the most complicated of them seemed to involve a wildlife corridor located on the southernmost edge of the property.

The pinch-point of the corridor is the area just north of the intersection of SW Shattuck Rd and Vermont St. Not only is this location tricky for wildlife, it’s also not a great place to be on a bicycle or walking—but wildlife has federal and state protection.

What’s this? Denying human use because wild critters need it more? Did I just read that aloud? Someone give me a glass of water. I can’t stop whooping.

Here’s an excerpt from the decision that talks about the wildlife issue:

… the site is a critical connection point for the movement of wildlife between the upstream habitat areas along Vermont Creek up to Gabriel Park and the extensive downstream habitat areas starting at Bauman Woods and the confluence with Fanno Creek and beyond into the Fanno Creek habitat corridor.

Thus, wildlife mobility is a key functional value of the site and the ability of wildlife to continue to move through this corridor should be preserved and carefully considered in any redesign of the SW Shattuck crossing. Any increased barriers to movement (e.g., proposed retaining wall, fall protection fencing, increased vehicular traffic, etc.) and reduction of wildlife mobility through this corridor must be mitigated, as they could have adverse long-term impacts on local wildlife species, particularly semi-aquatic mammals such as beaver, river otter, muskrat, and mink as well as the flightless ducklings of locally breeding waterfowl, such as mallard and wood duck.

Beaver are of particular concern because of their status as a keystone species in wetland ecosystems and the important role they play in creating and maintaining the habitat used by a wide variety of other species in this wetland complex.

BEAVER ARE OF PARTICULAR CONCERN? Am I dreaming? Did I just fall asleep without noticing because I must be dreaming. Either I’m hallucinating or they must hate the applicant a whole hell of a lot.

The applicant is Bike Portland which while I can imagine gets on folks nerves from time doesn’t have any dollar signs associated with. I’m sure if the request was to build a starbucks or a condo unit we’d be hearing less about wildlife.

But STILL.

OREGON NEEDS TO SAVE THE WATER-SAVERS

We are just in time for the very best op ed about beavers that I have ever seen, and that includes mine in the SF Chronicle! Read every word of this, by Adam Bronstein of the Western Watersheds Project.

Protecting Oregon’s state animal would go far to help Beaver State

It is a truly sad state of affairs here in the Beaver State: Our salmon stocks are struggling mightily, biodiversity is crashing under the weight of human activities, climate change is accelerating, drought is greatly affecting regional agriculture and wildfires threaten our communities every summer.

But there is a nature-based solution that could help. Protecting our state animal could greatly assist human and wildlife communities adapt to the many challenges we face. The wetlands and habitats that beavers create work all sorts of magic for us – free of charge.

The issue is, we keep killing these beneficial animals rather than embracing their effective restoration potential as a recreational activity under the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s furbearer regulations.

Shazam! Right into the headlights. Tell it to us Adam!

The department has not budged in years past to protect beaver populations by making necessary changes to the furbearer regulations. But we have another chance this year.

In 2024, less than 200 beaver hunters and trappers are depriving 4.2 million citizens of Oregon critical-beaver benefits. Among the millions includes hundreds of thousands of hunters and anglers in the state (I am a hunter and angler myself) who would see greatly expanded fish and game populations due to habitat expansion if beavers were protected.

The mission of the department is to “protect and enhance Oregon’s fish and wildlife and their habitats for use and enjoyment by present and future generations.” I cannot think of a single action that the commission can take to “protect and enhance our fish and wildlife more than to close federal lands to beaver hunting and trapping and let these creatures improve wild habitats. The department is currently abdicating their responsibilities, and in the process, depriving the public of expanded ecosystem services by failing to take action in the past.

If you helped beavers beavers could help YOU do a better job.

Opponents of this change like to claim that just 3% of beavers are killed on public lands, a number so low it is not worthy of concern. But every beaver matters, particularly individuals that colonize new watersheds. The take of just one pair of beavers can impede the recovery across an entire watershed for decades. As it stands today, thousands of Oregon’s rivers and streams are unoccupied by beavers and thousands of rivers and streams are listed as “impaired” under the federal Clean Water Act.

Commission meeting

The commission will discusss the state’s furbearer regulations on June 14. To comment virtually or in-person, email ODFW.Commission@odfw.oregon.gov, noting you want to talk about furbearer regulations and include your name, email and phone number. Submit written comments to the same email, with “Furbearer regulations” in the subject line. For more information, check the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife webpage.

Beavers should not be considered as just another species to be managed for recreational purposes by the department. They are the keystone of keystone species and should be protected to assist in species recovery and expansion, and also as a matter of state and national security.

A forthcoming literature review authored by the Oregon Natural Desert Association – set for public release to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife Commission on June 14 – demonstrates how critical beaver-created and modified habitats are to fish and wildlife. In the Oregon Conservation Strategy, 43 species of greatest conservation need – those that need action now to prevent their further decline – are listed as federally threatened or endangered. Forty-four percent of these species could benefit from expanding beaver populations. Additionally, out of 159 species of greatest conservation need identified by the department, up to 111 species, or 70%, could benefit from more beavers on the landscape.

Think of “Beaver Management” Like “Water Management”. An extremely valuable resource that we need to plan for and take into account. You are lucky to have them.

Since 2020, conservation groups and scientists have been submitting information and formal requests to close federally managed public lands to hunting and trapping. Despite our previous unsuccessful attempts, we beaver believers are not going anywhere.

In late May, over 40 conservation groups submitted this letter requesting that commissioners vote to “enact a closure to beaver trapping and hunting on federally managed public lands amending OAR 635-050-0070 with a report to the commission documenting the ecosystem effects, including to water resources and to fish and wildlife populations after 10 years.” A similar request to the commission to close beaver hunting and trapping on federally managed public lands was submitted to the commission by a coalition of Oregon scientists on the grounds of accelerating climate-driven droughts and wildfires and biodiversity losses.

Fish and wildlife staff recommend that the commission approve maintaining the status quo – allow beaver trapping and hunting to continue on federal managed public lands as a recreational activity. And yet staff also state in the information it has prepared for the commission that the “the Furbearer Program is also committed to implementing the department’s Action Plan for Beaver Modified Landscapes which outlines specific goals and actions the department is implementing over 36 months (August 2022 – 2025) to protect and restore beaver habitat and beaver-modified habitat.”

However, you cannot protect and restore beaver habitat and beaver-modified habitat if you continue to allow beavers to be killed as a recreational activity.

We need all hands on deck. As they say, democracy is not a spectator sport.

You can’t save water without the watersavers. You can’t save biodiversity without beavers.

Period.

WHEN BEAVERS COUNT YOU COUNT BEAVERS

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver ecological impact, Beaver Rehabilitation, Beavers December 29, 2023

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.

VERMONT MOVES TO THE HEAD OF THE CLASS

heidi08 Beaver ecological impact, Beavers December 21, 2023

If people get to the right answers anywhere first about beavers its going to be in Vermont. It looked like Utah and Washington might beat them for a while but the are speeding along at a great rate. It has a few head starts including being the home of on Skip Lisle inventor of the beaver deceiver and the man who has installed flow devices across the Northern Hemisphere.. And it’s own VDFW now installs flow devices itself. It has writers like Patti Smith of the beavers of Popples pond fame and years of education and rehab provided at the BEC Ecology center. Vermont might just be the place to be if you’re a beaver.

Restoring Vermont’s Beavers: The Cheapest Insurance to Reduce Damage from Climate Chaos

Increasing the state’s beaver population can reduce some of the costs — social, environmental, and monetary — of lessening Vermont’s climate risks and can improve our state’s ecological health.

Encouraging beavers in woodlands is inexpensive and can be implemented in a few years, versus decades. If we restore beaver populations, particularly at high elevations, beaver dams and canals will significantly reduce the risk of flooding and the cost of flooding that does happen, clean natural waterways, and enhance the abundance of animal and plant life that are part of the reason many of us live here.

Hows that for an opening paragraph. You may remember that Vermont suffered terrible flooding this year and suffered damages to the tune of 2,13 billion. That’s billion with a B and fixing things for the future to get ready for more ,climate changes will cost twice that much.

And beaver? What do they cost?

Recent articles in Scientific American and Science News reinforce older studies reported in books on the benefits of beavers. Beavers can be inexpensively reintroduced to public lands and — with owner approval — private property at little cost other than moving them there. Wildlife managers can investigate potential sites with a day visit and locate the pairs of beavers to sites that meet all their requirements This greatly reduces the chance that they will wander and build dams elsewhere.

Efficient Water Management

Beaver are efficient managers of flowing water, incidentally mitigating the effects of both floods and droughts, creating conditions that favor trout and other aquatic animals, providing dry-season water for all manner of creatures, and cleaning water before it is released from their dams. As beaver ponds age, trapped silt creates woodland meadows with rich, well-drained soil that provides habitat for all sorts of animals, some of which thrive nowhere else.

To the ecologist, beaver dams provide a stockpile of pioneer forest species that could not survive in the shade of a mature forest. For the fisherperson, they improve habitat by allowing cool, well-oxygenated flowing water with flow from dams that somehow do not block migrating fish such as trout and salmon. Beaver ponds purify water by allowing soil and pollutants to settle out and by stabilizing them, and store surface water and recharge ground water. For these and other reasons, beavers are considered a keystone species, one that increases the health and productivity of the whole ecosystem.

I hope you are all taking notes because the author of this article certainly did. Honestly this should be assigned reading in every flood control, fire department and civil planning division around the country.

Storing Water in the Ground

According to author Ben Goldfarb, researchers of beaver dams in eastern Washington found that a typical beaver dam stored “an average of 3 1⁄2 acre-feet free water and at least five times that figure below ground.” Some of that is water that might otherwise exacerbate a flood. It is not unusual for folks to notice that formerly reliable springs dry up when beavers have been trapped-out. Water conserved in hundreds of beaver dams adds up to huge volumes removed from flood potential without huge risks.

A Keystone Species

Because of their ecological importance, beavers are regarded as a “Keystone Species.” Their work in creating small clearings and managing water multiplies the diversity of plant and animal species as well as their general abundance. Unlike big dams on the rivers below, beaver dams do not require expensive public bonds. Storing smaller amounts of water in many beaver dams means that damage, if any, is minimal, if one dam fails. I have personally only seen beaver dams fail when abandoned (gradually) or dynamited by an impatient landowner (suddenly). Even the dynamited dam did not overflow the stream banks where I watched water race by.

Dan Hemenway is the author of this article and I just might have to buy him a beer. Or a car. This is the kind of massive serious reporting that you expect from Slate or the Smithsonian but they are too busy scratching their heads about rodents to put together.

Where Dams are Unwanted

Sometimes beavers dam water where flooding is inconvenient to people. The Vermont “Department of Fish and Wildlife has installed … (hundreds of) flow (management) devices since 2000 at a success rate approaching 90%” at inconvenient beaver dams, according to author Goldfarb. The other 10% require removal, of course, as will be necessary in a small percentage of cases. Overall, beavers decrease maintenance costs.

Where a dam that floods farm fields is judged useful by experts in river hydrology, the landowner might be recompensed with something like a conservation easement, received in years when the land is flooded. The practice could be extended to other situations on a case-by-case basis. The population of the state as a whole benefits from flood mitigation and water conservation. The small cost of such easements is negligible compared to the reduced costs of flooding.

He even hits the paragraph I almost never read. Flow devices solve problems. Stop being a baby and suck it up and wrap trees. Or would you rather flood?

Low-Cost Alternative to Geo-Engineering

Recently a proposal to create a floodplain to protect Waterbury has been revived. The plan calls for excavating as much of seven feet of soil to trap water that would otherwise contribute to flooding. When first proposed, following Tropical Storm Irene, the estimated cost was $3 million. Today it would cost more. The owner does not want to sell. Aside from objections to most uses of eminent domain, and I have some, such projects always risk unintended effects.

For a tiny fraction of the projected cost, reintroduction of beavers could protect the entire watershed, resulting in a system of dams and other water works that would slow water flows downhill; clean water; improve habitat for fish, game, other birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians and insects; moderate all stream flow, low water as well as high; and reduce erosion. I suspect that 10% of the projected cost to mitigate flooding in Waterbury would be far more than what is needed to establish beaver-built flood mitigation for the entire Winooski watershed.

Go beaver!

Good lord I feel like I need a cigarette after that articles and I never smoked. Dan hit all the good places and knocked it outta the park with that article. Remind me to send him a thank you note.

HIGH DESERT MUSEUM WINS ORPHAN LOTTERY

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver Behavior, Beaver ecological impact November 18, 2023

The High Desert Museum in Oregon is one of the most respected museums in the world. It was my father’s favorite and has featured some truly breathtaking beaver exhibits including the interactive grapahic featured in the margin of this page. Once they even asked to use our ecosystem poster in a beaver exhibit.

And now they have this:

Baby beaver from John Day finds home at High Desert Museum

The High Desert Museum recently welcomed a new animal who happens to be an expert engineer, a keystone ecosystem species and the largest rodent in North America.

A baby beaver, called a kit, arrived at the Museum in May. Found in John Day alone in a parking lot, people had searched the area for her family but failed. The kit was then placed into the care of Museum wildlife staff by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Veterinarians estimated at the time that the animal was only a few weeks old. The beaver was very weak and dehydrated, weighing just 1.4 pounds. Wildlife staff spent the next several months working to formulate an appropriate diet and nurse the kit back to health.

“The Museum’s wildlife team was tireless in researching appropriate diet options and providing around-the-clock care,” says Museum Executive Director Dana Whitelaw, Ph.D. “Their dedication to providing the best care is exceptional.”

It took most of the summer for the beaver’s condition to improve, but the baby slowly began to gain weight and strength.

Six months later, the beaver is healthy and growing, now at almost 17 pounds. Staff have built a behind-the-scenes space to meet a beaver’s needs, complete with a pool for swimming. The kit eats a species-appropriate diet of native riparian browse such as willow, aspen and cottonwood, supplemented with vegetables and formulated zoological diets to ensure proper nutrition.

The plan is that when ready, the beaver will become an ambassador for her species by appearing in talks at the Museum that educate visitors about the High Desert landscape.

Just to be clear I HATE when orphans are raised in captivity to be ambassadors but of all the places to be kept on display this is probably the creme of the crop. And who knows, maybe he’ll get a companion one day.

“The beaver is doing well and learning behaviors that assist with her care,” says Curator of Wildlife Jon Nelson. “She is learning target training, how to sit on a scale to be weighed and to present her feet for voluntary inspections and nail trims. She also enjoys time playing in the Museum’s stream after hours.”

The beaver is believed to be female. It’s challenging to conclusively identify male or female beavers.

The opportunity to name the beaver was auctioned at the 2023 High Desert Rendezvous. The winning bidder has yet to select a name, which must be appropriate for the Museum and connected to the High Desert.

An estimated 60 million to 400 million beavers once lived in North America, creating wetlands and ponds. The dams built by these “ecosystem engineers” slow streamflow, raise the water table and reduce downstream flooding and erosion. Beavers also help birds, fish and other wildlife and native plants to thrive by creating habitat.

Beaver populations dropped dramatically in the last two centuries with demand for beaver pelts for clothing, most notably hats, in the mid-19th century. Their dam-building activities also at times prompt people to consider them a pest on their properties.

Today in the West, restoration of the beaver is underway and humans in some areas are mimicking its dam-building behavior in order to restore healthy High Desert riparian areas.

“The history of beavers in the High Desert is a profound one,” Whitelaw says. “We hope to be able to share the new beaver at the Museum with visitors soon to help tell the meaningful stories about the role these animals have to play in healthy ecosystems.”

The Museum cares for more than 120 animals, from otters to raptors. Many of the animals are nonreleasable, either due to injuries or because they became too familiar with humans. At the Museum, they serve as ambassadors that educate visitors about the conservation of High Desert species and landscapes.

I’m sure she’ll be called rattle snake or Justin soon. But remember, two years ago the museum dd the best exhibit ever for beavers and the difference they make so take heart little one, at least your among friends.