Category: Beaver ecological impact

MAYBE MOVING BEAVERS DOESN’T RESOLVE THINGS?

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver ecological impact, Beaver relocation January 15, 2023

Take a picture of this day and mark it on your calendar: Utah has just realized that even when beavers are relocated at incredible cost and effort NEW beavers can still move in! This must come as a huge shock for some.

Gnaw on wood, the beavers are back at Grandpa’s Pond in Hurricane

ST. GEORGE — Last year, the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources relocated several beavers from the popular recreation area known as Grandpa’s Pond to remote places of Utah for wetlands restoration projects.

St. George News made a recent trip to the public park, known for a level half-mile trail that loops a pond filled with birds of multiple species, located five miles southwest of Hurricane. At least two new trees are gone, the stumps showing large teeth marks and several more trees are wrapped in chicken wire fencing after being damaged. It seems the beavers didn’t want to leave.

Utah Division of Wildlife Resources Wildlife Program Manager Teresa Griffin confirmed state officials are working with Hurricane City Parks and Recreation staff on a solution for the current problem of beavers at Grandpa’s Pond. Beavers are often trapped and relocated by wildlife officials in Utah. When this happens, the animals receive a small antenna implant for tracking purposes, if they are large enough, Griffin said.

Did I know this? I didn’t know they got transmitter but I suppose it makes sense. I’ve never been wildly comfortable with anything about the beaver relocation program in Utah.

“None of these beavers are ones we have trapped in the past,” she said said of the beavers at Grandpa’s Pond. “We moved most of the beavers up near Bryce Canyon to a remote area near the Sevier River, or another site where they were horse-packed into the Pine Valley wilderness to help repair the damaged watershed after a fire that occurred about four years ago.”

Ohh you mean you got NEW ones even after all that work? It’s almost like all that trouble wasn’t worth it. I mean compared to wrapping trees and installing a flow device which would have allowed the old beavers to stay and keep away those NEW ones.

“Grandpa’s Pond has some complicated issues since it frequently has people and dogs nearby,” she said. “So if we did set a live trap in the area, it would be somewhat dangerous because of the spring-loaded nature of the live traps.”

Yeah we wouldn’t to catch a child or a dog. That might interfere with our whole funding stream.

Thomas Biebighauser, a wildlife biologist and wetland ecologist for Wetland Restoration and Training, completed more than 6,000 wetland restoration projects in many states, including Utah, during his career spanning four decades. From his home in Kentucky, he said that while beavers present problems for many landowners, they are also great for the surrounding habitat.

Many times he was watched as owners buy a secluded property with a stream, then spend both time and money lining the stream with expensive trees. The beavers love this, the property owners are usually “not so happy with the end result.”

“But if you love to fish, beaver ponds are great places for trout to reproduce,” Biebighauser said. “If you love to watch birds, you will see ducks, geese, herons, and many new species you have probably never seen. These ponds also reduce the chances of severe flooding and they restore groundwater by recharging the aquifer. I know many ranchers who have grown to love them once they realize the benefits.”

Thomas! I’m liking you! Let’s have less ‘musical beavers‘ and more letting people like you talk to the crowds. I think it’s a better investment.

Griffin said property owners can wrap a tree’s base in chicken wire to stop beavers from chomping on them, but if problems persist they can apply for a removal permit. In rare cases, a lethal permit may be issued.

“With the proximity of the Virgin River, it may be an on-going problem,” she said. “It seems wildlife really enjoy the nice parks we intend for humans.”

Both Griffin and Biebighauser said those hoping to see a beaver at Grandpa’s Pond would have the best opportunity at sundown, and walk quietly. Those who get spooked by a loud sound may have lost their chance.

“It will sound like a gunshot — it will be loud,” Biebighauser said. “That is the sound of a beaver’s tail slapping the water to warn others of danger.”

Yes. Exactly like a gun shot. Except nothing dies. Instead things spring to life and reproduce on an unbelievable scale. It’s funny how that happens.

BEAVERS AND THE SERENITY PRAYER

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver ecological impact January 9, 2023

I guess things are wrapping up all over, because this recent article on the beavers in Yellowstone is the final from the glorious beaver serious in the National Park Traveler. I’m going to miss them.

Yellowstone’s Resilient Beavers

While Yellowstone continues to be good beaver habitat, it’s not as robust as the Adirondacks. Through the decades the population has varied greatly. In recent years, the park’s beaver population probably has hovered around 1,000 spread out across roughly 140 colonies. But that number took a blow last summer, as the historic flooding that swept through the northern reaches of Yellowstone likely took out many of those colonies.

Doug Smith, until recently the park’s wildlife biologist, flew over the park in October to see how many colonies he could spot and came away with a tally of 65 park-wide, which was down from 108 in 2021. With each colony home to 6-8 individuals, there might be about 500 beavers left in Yellowstone.

Whether those colonies impacted by the flooding return remains to be seen.

“It seems like what they do — and we don’t have any radioed to know — but I think these big water events, they just find a place to hide out, whether it’s in a burrow they’ve dug on the side of the river or they just find above-ground places,” said Smith prior to his aerial surveillance. “Or they just get blown down river and they hang out. They seem to casually just infiltrate back. They’re pretty resilient to these natural disasters. That’s why I think they’re good for what you’re writing about. I think they’re a good form of ecological restoration because they’re so damn resilient.”

And they benefit so many other species.

“A beaver pond is going to be an oasis. And it’s going to be a biodiversity hub,” said Smith. “They always are biodiversity hubs. I mean, it’s just amazing. When you add water to any mix, what they do, it’s truly amazing.”

That’s right. The Beavers are the inherent masters of the serenity prayer. They wisely accept thing things they cannot change and get the hell out of the way when the water is raging. And change the things they cannot accept building dams and making channels so that streams flourish even in a drought. And despite those studies arguing that they are not very bright seem to have the wisdom to know the difference,

Way better than us.

Though Yellowstone is roughly 10 times the size of both Voyageurs and Isle Royale national, it can’t boast as many beavers as those two do, said Smith, who retired in December. Apparently holding back the park’s beaver population, the biologist explained, is that they don’t like swift currents or coniferous trees for food, and Yellowstone has lots of both.

Through the decades Yellowstone’s beaver populations have varied greatly. A 1921 survey turned up only 25 colonies, although that was a limited survey. Thirty-two years later, 21 colonies were identified, but none in the areas surveyed in 1921. In a bid to help the rodents, 129 beavers from the Gallatin National Forest north of Yellowstone were set free in the park between 1986 and 1999. While that helped boost the numbers, the beaver population continued to fluctuate, ranging between 112 and 127, according to the park staff.

Steadily driving beaver numbers upward in Yellowstone has been willow recovery, said Smith, as it gave the rodents a reliable food source. In the 1990s, the effort to return wolves to the park led to a drop in elk numbers, and that allowed willow stands to rebound, and beaver numbers began to climb, he explained. Also impacting the elk population was the presence of other predators — cougars and bears — and even elk management by the state of Montana outside the park, explained Smith.

Along with overall lower elk numbers, the predators caused the remaining ungulates to alter their movements and that, too, played a part in allowing willow recovery, said Smith.

“The key was a reduction in the elk population allowed willow to come back, which gave beavers a food source,” the biologist said.

From Aspen To Willow

An interesting aspect of Yellowstone’s beaver history is that the animals shifted their diet over the decades, from aspen to willow. When Edward Warren conducted his survey in the 1920s, he saw that the rodents’ preferred forage was aspen. Today, “virtually all the beavers in northern Yellowstone are eating willow,” said Smith.

“So, the story is kind of an abundant population, using willow, a population crash, a long period of time with very few beavers, and then a recovery based on an interaction with elk and predators, but the recovery is entirely dependent upon willow,” he explained.

Willow Willow Willow. I’m curious what the difference is between the range of Aspen and Willow now. If beavers have equal access to flourishing populations of both or if one grows father from the waterline or is less affected by Caribou browse.

Those years when the species’ population crashed also created hurdles for beaver recovery.

“Decades with very few beavers changed stream geomorphology. So watching a few of the sites that beavers are reoccupying, they’re having a hard time because of stream rescission,” said Smith. “The streams have straightened and deepened,” making it tough for beaver colonies to get established.

“I’ve watched one colony bounce around in different locations. They’ve got good forage, but they can’t seem to find a good pond site,” he said. In their search for a suitable site the beavers in 2021 moved further upstream on Crystal Creek and were able to dam the stream and create a pond, added Smith.

Whether they survived the flooding remains to be seen.

While some other national parks are looking to beavers to help with restoration or areas impacted by wildfires or overgrazing, at Yellowstone the beavers are just being beavers.

“We probably have beavers at capacity,” said Smith. “They’re doing the job on their own.”

Yes well when you trap out all the beavers and the streams run wild and incise into crazy chutes and them bring a couple of beavers back and notice that all the dams keep washing out its NOT because these new beavers are lazy. Any more than if your entire engine was allow to rust and you finally got around to replacing the carburator and you’re surprised the car doesn’t run as well as it used to.

It all works together. Beavers. Wolves, Rivers. It doesn’t work as well when you start taking things away. And beavers need beavers making dams upstreams of their their dams so that the water has a chance keeping manageable.

It’s a fascinating job, as Warren pointed out in 1922 in a booket he wrote on Yellowstone’s beavers.

“The value of the beaver to the Park visitor is something rather difficult to put into words, but the creature has a real fascination for the intelligent tourist. Here is an animal of most interesting habits which was once to be found over the greater part of the United States but has since been exterminated from large areas, yet has left traces of its former presence in such place names as Beaver Brook, Creek, Kill, River, Lake, Falls, Hil], Dam and Meadow,” wrote Warren. “It can still be found in abundance in many parts of Yellowstone Park and the surrounding National Forests, affording opportunity for observing its habits and studying: its works. Surely this is a valuable privilege for all who can visit the great Park.”

Well yes. The public does like seeing beavers. But that’s just the icing. Biodiversity. Stream restoration. Climate change and pollution mitigation. The wisdom to know what to accept and what to fix?

That’s the cake.

“WELL, WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME?”

heidi08 Beaver ecological impact January 7, 2023

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife updated their science page yesterday with a brand new discovery. Brace yourselves. This is going to blow your socks right out the door. I don’t mean to be so shocking so early in the day or so early in the year.

But apparently beavers are good for things.

CDFW beaver management policies get a refresh

Thanks to funding approved in the state budget, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) is now in the process of building upon its existing beaver management policies and laying the groundwork for projects that harness beavers’ natural ability to improve California’s ecosystems.

The state budget approved $1.67 million in fiscal year 2022-23 and $1.44 million in fiscal year 2023-24 and ongoing for CDFW’s beaver restoration program.

CDFW is currently hiring five dedicated scientists to work on a comprehensive approach to beaver management. Once hired, staff will work on numerous projects and collaborations including developing a toolkit to help prevent property damage due to beaver activity and to foster co-existence with the keystone species. Staff will also collaborate with partners on ongoing and future restoration projects to relocate beavers into watersheds where their dams can help restore hydrologic connectivity and promote resiliency to climate change and wildfire.

Ooh a tool kit! What do you think it will have in it? The fact that it has taken them 6 months to hire these 5 scientists doesn’t fill me with hope. I guess they were all in shock the first three. You mean these rodents you told us were’t native are USEFUL?

“We’re incredibly excited about the direction the department is going with its beaver restoration program,” said CDFW Deputy Director Chad Dibble.

Anyone paying attention to wildlife in the media recently may be seeing that beavers are having a moment. A recent article in Mother Jones posed the question: “Is it possible that beavers got a publicist?” The article concludes that beavers are finally getting the “rebrand” they deserve. While beavers have always been known for building dams and altering waterways, perhaps less publicly known is the positive impact they have on larger ecosystems surrounding their dams.

“Beaver dams raise groundwater levels and slow down water flow which allows water to seep into the soil and helps create riparian wetlands that support plant, wildlife and habitat growth,” said CDFW Director Chuck Bonham in an Op-ed written for CDFW and published in Outdoor California magazine.

By aiding healthy riparian growth, beaver dams can mitigate drought impacts and support climate change resiliency. The process of increasing fuel moisture and helping larger areas of land retain water can potentially stop or slow the spread of wildfire moving through an area. Beaver dams also improve water quality and help rejuvenate habitat for salmon and aquatic insects.

I’m sure this came as quite a surprise to the average man on the street, but was it really a surprise for YOU??? I mean this is what you do for a living. It is your Raison d’être so to speak. Someone how I expected you to know better.

I remember attending and art commission meeting and one of the commissioners commented that before he had known what a high quality mural was in his office he had asked that it be painted over. He bemoaned that he would NEVER have done such a thing if anyone had simply told him it was valuable before.

It’s not like the man had eyes and could see the art for himself. And its not like fish and game ever had cause to notice that there were way more birds and frogs and otters at beaver ponds before someone instructed them to pay attention.

What do you expect from them anyway?

Over the past several years, CDFW has spent millions of dollars partnering with tribes, NGOs, landowners, and state and federal agencies implementing beaver restoration projects. With its new beaver restoration program, the department is embracing the paradigm shift surrounding beavers and continuing its work to bring together collective knowledge and implement a comprehensive approach to beaver management.

“We’re continuing collaboration with partners and stakeholders, continuing work on restoration sites where we’ve funded beaver dam analogues and continuing to lay the groundwork for re-introduction of beavers in areas where it may have ecosystem benefits. Scientists are confident that beaver restoration has the potential to be a nature-based strategy that can aid in reducing wildfire risk, mitigating drought and combating climate change. It’s another piece of the puzzle as CDFW works to implement solutions to some of our greatest environmental concerns,” said Bonham.

Okay, I’ll grant you the fire research is NEW. And the salmon research is 30 years old so practically new to you. But the DROUGHT effect had to have been obvious all along. And the biodiversity was visible to the cave men so what on God’s green earth has taken you so long???

I guess it’s like the parable of the prodigal son. They should have known better and come around sooner but that’s not the point. Just be glad they got here eventually.

‘”It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.”

COMPUTERS LOOKING FOR BEAVERS

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver ecological impact, Beavers and Fire Prevention January 5, 2023

Alright. We’ve sufficiently mocked the beaver wildfire article and now we can get down to the good stuff. Just so you know in the background our tech-wizard Bruce Mushrush is busily migrating the beaver summit site to ours so that we won’t have to pay for both. If things are busy or weird for a moment just come back in a few minutes and all will be well. Because there are GOOD THINGS TO DISCUSS!!!

Scientists EEAGER-ly Track Beavers Across Western United States

Beavers are among the world’s most effective engineers. Members of this keystone species build dams and canals and, in so doing, create entire, multilayered wetland ecosystems. Beginning in the 1600s, however, the fur trade decimated North American beaver populations.

The species began rebounding in the early 20th century but sometimes came into conflict with the agricultural landscape, as by the 1940s and 1950s, people were aggressively modifying streams to maximize yield. Returning to their former haunts meant persecution as beavers flooded crops and felled orchards, explained Alexa Whipple, program director for the Methow Beaver Project (part of a nonprofit called the Methow Salmon Recovery Foundation).

Now, humans are starting to recognize that beavers, though still considered pests by some, benefit landscapes in myriad ways. For instance, beaver activity can reduce erosion, create habitat for other species, and maintain wetlands.

I’m liking where this is going. Surely we are going to enjoy todays read more than hitting the ecosystem over the head with a hammer.

In fact, we often want beavers to move back into landscapes to do the engineering for us, said Emily Fairfax, an assistant professor at California State University, Channel Islands. “But how are we going to know if they are doing that,” she asked, “if we don’t even know where they are?” The answer lies in remote sensing imagery, which can help scientists identify the landscape-scale features created by beaver families.

Through a combination of fieldwork and remote sensing, Fairfax tracks where beavers reside across the western United States. To make the process more efficient, she’s working with Google Earth Engine to develop the Earth Engine Automated Geospatial Element Recognition model—aptly called EEAGER—which uses machine learning to rapidly identify beaver dams in satellite and aerial imagery.

In work presented at AGU’s Fall Meeting 2022, Fairfax found that EEAGER decreased the time needed to map beaver dams by about 80%. By rapidly finding beaver ponds and comparing their changing distribution over time, scientists like Fairfax can track beaver populations to quantify the effects of their environmental engineering.

This years ago I got a call from an environmentalist working on the google sustainability team and he mentioned the tech giant was interested in adapting their “space laser technology” to id beaver habitat from space. And I was very impressed but daunted as to how it would work or where to offer such a skill. It is wonderful to see it find a home with Dr. Fairfax and the AGU.

The amount of existing and incoming imagery isn’t an impediment for sky-based beaver surveillance. Beaver dams remain in place for 5 to 7 years on average, said Fairfax; very high resolution data that are publicly available come out at least every couple of years and sometimes more often when fires and droughts strike (which is becoming more common). Lower-resolution data sets can provide helpful imagery about once per week, filling in any gaps.

However, tracing beaver dams in such imagery is incredibly time-consuming, often taking weeks to months. With large quantities of imagery, which Fairfax noted is a pleasant problem to have, the process can become a nightmarish sea of external hard drives holding terabytes of data.

Fairfax and her colleagues at Google who specialize in neural networks, machine learning, and artificial intelligence trained the EEAGER model with 8,000 of Fairfax’s manually identified beaver dams and another 5,000 from other coauthors. Because the model was convinced that cul-de-sacs were also beaver dams, they had to train the model on “not dams” as well.

All those little engineers being watched over by all those other little engineers! It’s fun to imagine, isn’t it? My nephew works for google. Do you think he’s part of the team?

EEAGER can now sort through massive amounts of satellite and aerial imagery and identify pixels that contain evidence of beaver activity. With Google Earth Engine, the data querying and processing happen in the cloud, Fairfax explained, so she doesn’t need to add more hard drives to her already impressive stash.

Fairfax noted that the model wouldn’t work as well as it does without extensive field mapping of beaver dams (and not beaver dams), which involves wading through muck and dense vegetation. But although pond-specific beaver studies are important, looking at how beavers affect entire watersheds can now be efficiently accomplished in beaver-based research.

For regions still needing ground truthing, drones now expedite this process. However, because Fairfax’s research has been focused on the western United States, EEAGER may be biased. “We actually don’t know how good it would do in places like Canada or Minnesota,” she said, “because it hasn’t been trained there.”

Computers trained to be on the lookout for beavers! Now if only we could train HUMANS to be on the lookout for beavers in the sense of welcoming them when they arrive.

After the results from EEAGER go through quality control, calculations can address whatever the science question at hand may be. For instance, in research currently under review, Fairfax looked at whether beaver dams became fire refuges during three Rocky Mountain megafires in 2020. In some watersheds, beavers had dammed every single stream from start to end, she said. These sinuous stretches of hydrologic connectivity resulted in fire-resistant habitats. “In these beaver complexes, everything stays wet,” said Fairfax, which means fires cannot easily burn these ponds.

“I’ve gone to [wildfire] sites where I fully expected the beavers to be dead,” she recalled, but “the evening rolls around and the beavers come swimming out.”

Channel modifications, such as straightening bends to transport logs and barges, result in water being whisked rapidly downstream, said Chris Jordan, a research fisheries biologist with NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service who was not involved with the study. Beavers’ networks of dams, canals, and felled trees do the opposite, slowing water down, which—like magic (except that it’s physics)—restores river systems, he said.

Given time and opportunity, beavers will engineer an entire valley floor, which could be more than a kilometer wide, said Fairfax. That seemingly magical engineering lets water seep into the soil, allowing streams to reconnect to their floodplains. Simple or degraded ecosystems can transform into riverscapes with healthy food chains.

You know how they do, hitting the ecosystem over the head with a hammer and all. Looks like Emily can tell the difference between a beaver effect and a wildfire.Maybe she should sit down with Ken Tape.

For example, because endangered salmon and similar fish species are born and die in fresh water, they depend on healthy river conditions to complete their life cycle, Jordan said. Growing more fish requires ants, earthworms, and other floodplain-dwelling invertebrates to become fish fodder. But for that part of the food chain to exist, landscapes around rivers need to be wet at least some of the time. Beavers create the necessary wetland environments that then become biodiversity hot spots.

Regular snapshots of beaver ponds from space, combined with algorithms doing the tedious work of examining millions of kilometers of streams, means new ways to quantify the impact beavers are having on the landscape, Jordan said.

Yes. You just keep algorithm-ing away and beavers will keep beavering away and maybe some day humans will finally understand why they should appreciate them.

I for one can hardly wait.

BEAVERS CHEERFULLY WELCOMED IN BAY AREA

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver ecological impact December 30, 2022

We are winding out the new year with good news. Yesterday Randi wrote back very enthusiastic about how she might be involved with the festival. Elizabeth Winstead agreed to help us out with Worth A Dam and this article was released this morning. 2022 has been a beavery year. And it’s going out with a bang.

Beavers are making a comeback in the San Francisco Bay Area

The recent discovery of two beavers sighted along Matadero Creek in Palo Alto could be a sign of a major comeback for the species in the Bay Area.

Naturalist Bill Leikam, who is the co-founder and president of the Urban Wildlife Research Project, captured trail camera footage of the semiaquatic rodents wandering along the waterway late last month, as the Mercury News first reported. He set up the cameras after he had been tipped off by a resident who claimed to have seen one while they were meditating on the side of the creek, and sure enough, there they were — a male and a female. Now, Leikam treks along the waterway twice a day to check the cameras and scour the beavers’ new home for signs of their whereabouts, finding clues in the form of paw prints in the mud and tooth marks on ash trees. He’s hopeful the pair could help reestablish the species’ population in the area.

I hope so too. Although its hard to wish beavers a nice time in San Jose. It’s such a hard place to find a future. Promise me you’ll stay in the water guys. Never try to cross the streets okay?

Beavers are native to Northern California but were nearly hunted to extinction during the California fur rush in the 1800s, when maritime traders converged in the Bay Area and California’s Central Coast to harvest the valuable, chestnut-colored fur from the species, as well as otters, seals, mink and other mammals. Fewer than a thousand beavers were still living in the state by 1912, according to Brock Dolman and Kate Lundquist, who are co-directors of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center’s WATER Institute and have been researching beaver restoration for the past decade.

“When you remove a keystone species like beaver, which were managing the retention of water, slowing of floods, and the preservation of wetland … that was the first step of the dehydration of the state,” Dolman told SFGATE. He thinks it’s “very likely” that beavers showing up in the South Bay are the descendants of other beavers that were relocated to the Lexington Reservoir by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife more than four decades ago. Since then, beavers have also established near Los Gatos Creek, Guadalupe River, Coyote Creek, Palo Alto, Martinez and Walnut Creek, according to observations recorded on the social media app iNaturalist, Lundquist said.

That’s not the half of it of course. We have beavers in Fairfield and beavers in Pleasant hill and beavers in Mountain house. The question is how long are they allowed to stay?

Every beaver sighted is a promising sign for the experts. Dolman and Lundquist said the animals can help recover near-extinct species like coho salmon by creating new wetland habitats and encouraging the growth of the plankton and insects they feed on. Beaver dams can also more broadly restore natural ecosystems, slowing down water flow and improving water quality by preserving sediment and nutrients in streams. Ken Paglia, a spokesperson for the California of Fish and Wildlife, said that beavers’ efforts to retain water can mitigate drought impacts, support climate change resiliency, and also potentially stop or slow the spread of wildfire moving through an area.

“Having beaver show up in a creek where they haven’t been for a long time can be a really positive thing,” Lundquist said, adding that juvenile beavers typically have a 45% survival rate and can face a number of challenges when re-establishing in a new territory. “In these systems, we’ve seen water pooled and bank burrows for animals to hide in during high flows. That can create biodiversity oases where creatures drawn to water show up more often. More birds, mink and other species that might not otherwise be there are emerging because there’s this area being managed by beaver that attracts and supports all kinds of wildlife.”

Hooray! It’s wonderful to read such nice things about Bay Area beavers. But honestly I can’t help but feel…I’m sure after the first suffragettes were jailed and forced fed and imprisoned and starved over and over so that decades later women ACTUALLY got the vote and could talk to the press cheerfully about how great it was to vote with their husbands and brothers, Susan B. Anthony rolled one eye at the news paper and said, yeah yeah yeah. It’s great now. But bloody hard hard lonely grueling work got us here. And don’t you forget it.

Damion Ciotti, a coastal program manager for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said that beavers can also help reconnect streams to floodplains and provide a natural, alternative to habitat restoration work that would typically require heavy equipment and costly engineering. In 2018, he teamed up with the Placer Land Trust to work on a project with beavers at Doty Ravine, and said he was amazed to find that the animals swiftly expanded the habitat from a narrow stream corridor to 50 acres of floodplain.

All we did was simply allow the beaver to start building their dams on the site,” he said. “It’s a 40 to 50 pound rodent, yet it can have a major influence on a stream system. Arguably, we end up with better projects as a result of beavers because we’re working directly with nature to design and build a habitat instead of going out and building it ourselves.”

Very nice Damion. We are grateful every DAY for what you managed to achieve in Placer. It’s a hard place to sell beaver benefits, truly.

Not everyone is excited about beavers moving into their backyards as their populations increase. While the animals do help to manage the landscape, their presence can result in minor flooding. “Or they can chew down your favorite tree,” Lundquist said.

However, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife approved a new program earlier this year that will fund a team of five environmental scientists whose work will be focused on educating the public about beaver restoration and coming up with nonlethal strategies for people and beavers to peacefully coexist.

“We can show people how to put in a flexible pond leveler, for instance, or wrap a wire around a tree,” Lundquist said. “This helps make sure we can keep the beaver in place but minimize the damages they may cause.”

It’s a significant step forward after years of advocacy, meetings, and “sometimes heated discussions,” Lunquist said. “This is a huge moment in California history.”

Again, I’m seeing the jailed suffragette with the feeding tube raising her eyebrow and saying HEATED DISCUSSIONS? Tell me about it.

There was a sniper behind the screen at our beaver meeting and 11 police officers lined up in front of it. I guess that was kinda heated.