Because the beaver isn't just an animal; it's an ecosystem!

Category: Beaver ecological impact


I’m sure you know that there is nothing I like better than an animated ticked off neighbor meeting about beavers.  But beaver defenders pitted against snow mobilers? Well bring on the popcorn because I could listen to this all year. You’ll remember we covered the BOW story at the beginning of the month. Well this is a helluva epilogue.

Dam controversy: After Bow pond drained, some residents hope to leave the future up to beavers

On a Saturday afternoon walk, Kelly Schofield and her husband turned a corner onto a road near their house in Bow. They sensed something was wrong with the beaver pond before they saw it.

“You could smell it. It was pretty strong. And then when we got down to the pond where you could really see the pond, you could see it was gone,” she said.

The pond was drained. Left behind was a huge tract of mud, and creatures trying to survive. Neighbors took videos of fish floundering as the water receded.

Beavers are beloved by some and considered a nuisance by many. But Schofield and others who lived on the pond agreed: nature’s engineers made their property more valuable, and made their lives better. They took their kids down to the water to learn about frogs and turtles; watched ducks stop by as they migrated south.

In the winter, this beaver pond, technically known as an impoundment, was an ice skating spot for many, including Lisa Franklin’s family.

Are you reading this? You should stop reading and be listening to the clip. It’s SOOO GOOD.


Finally, I would like to point out that the pond lever lasted for five years with the beavers living there. How long do you think the excavator and trapping will last?


Well the fine article I was expecting from my chat with Lisa Kreiger finally dropped yesterday at 8 am so I couldn’t review it that morning which is fine. It gave me an entire day to wrap my head around why she ever felt she needed to soften her good news with words like “smelly” and “eat their own poop”. School yard taunts I guess to keep her from being called a beaver sissy?

The re-beavering of the Bay Area

Plump, smelly and paddle-tailed, this important rodent is making a comeback in San Francisco Bay creeks

PALO ALTO – In a deep muddy creek near Silicon Valley’s busiest freeway, a large furry head pokes up. And then quickly submerges.

The brief sighting, along with a growing collection of video footage, confirms something remarkable: After being hunted to extinction in the 1800s, the North American beaver is returning to the creeks of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Ecosystem explorers, beavers were re-introduced to Lexington Reservoir in Los Gatos about four decades ago, and made homes in upper Los Gatos Creek. Since then, they’ve expanded their range north along the edge of the Bay to the Guadalupe River, Coyote Creek, San Tomas Aquino Creek in the wetlands by Sunnyvale’s Water Pollution Control Plant – and, now, Palo Alto’s Matadero Creek.

”There’s a resilience that’s built into their DNA to find a location, set up shop, find a mate and go to work on increasing the population,” said naturalist Bill Leikam. This week, his trail cameras captured proof that a pair of beavers – male and female – enjoy evening strolls together along the creek, just two miles from the global headquarters of Intuit and Google.

Bill is the good friend from the beaver festival who hasn’t been able to come to the festival since we moved to Susana park because the timing conflicts with his annual backpacking trip in Wyoming. He runs the urban wildlife project and is also known as “The fox guy” for obvious reasons. He told me months ago about these beavers and has been watching them excitedly ever since.

Plump, smelly and paddle-tailed, beavers shaped the California landscape for thousands of years. Their dams built ponds, slowed runoff, cooled stream flow and re-charged aquifers, creating pockets of biodiversity in a hot and dry landscape.

They were eradicated by the 1840s, when fur trappers swept through the west in search of pelts for men’s beaver top hats, which were warm, waterproof and an essential part of a sophisticated wardrobe.

“They were little $20 bills swimming around,” said Heidi Perryman of Martinez, who founded the beaver advocacy group, Worth a Dam.

But conventional wisdom held that the rodents had never lived here in the Bay Area. In historic range maps published in 1937 by preeminent zoologist Joseph Grinnell, the first director of the Berkeley’s Museum of Zoology, they were nowhere to be found.

More recent research suggests that Grinnell got it wrong – and the Bay Area has always been a soggy beaver paradise.

While visiting the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C., Palo Alto-based physician and amateur ecologist Dr. Rick Lanman discovered a beaver skull from Saratoga Creek collected in 1855. A beaver tooth and some bones, dated back to A.D. 300-500, were found at Emeryville Shellmound, a sacred burial site of the Ohlone people located on historic Temescal Creek.

And of course you know Rick, and recognize our historic beaver paper. Well it’s nice to see things come to fruition. Only a decade after we published it. Nothing with beavers happens fast.

Now beavers are back, in a long-overdue homecoming.

They’re unlikely celebrities: they’re nearly blind, eat their poop, and have anal glands that emit musky yellow-tinged oil to mark their territory. Reclusive, they’re rarely seen in the wild because they tend to work in the dark, avoiding people.

But they’re increasingly cherished for their role as civil engineers, creating complexity in a landscape by building ponds that serve as safe habitats for fish, otters, herons and other wildlife. In celebration last April, supporters gathered for the first-ever California Beaver Summit. Every June, the town of Martinez hosts an annual Beaver Festival.

The Palo Alto beaver was first spotted one morning by a nature-lover who was meditating on the creek bank. Startled out of his reverie by the three-foot swimmer, he told Leikam about the sighting. Leikam set up a network of camouflaged trail cameras to confirm the animal’s presence.

Now, twice a day – at dawn and dusk — Leikam, 82, weaves through dense thickets of willow and fennel along the banks of Matadero Creek on a two-mile-long route to inspect his 14 cameras, memory cards and batteries.

Discarded plastic bottles, aerosol cans and other trash litter the ground. The nearby freeway creates a constant din. But the creek’s water, as dark and rich as chocolate cake, is clean.

Beaver signs are abundant: Gnaw marks are inscribed into small ash trees, and long-toed claw prints are jumbled through the mud. Bent grasses reveal the beavers’ routes.

What can I say? People love to be shocked by the poop-eating. I swear we didn’t discuss it and I truly doubt Rick or Bill did. It’s just something she saw that stuck.

They’re pretty hefty animals,” weighing up to 50 or 60 pounds, Leikam said. This is a second career for him: After teaching English for nearly four decades in Cupertino, he vowed to document the behaviors of the region’s wildlife. His Urban Wildlife Research Project, comprised of thousands of video files, is based at his Mountain View home.

“It’s exciting,” he said, pushing through the brambles with ease. “It’s been 160 years since there been any beavers along any of these creeks. It speaks of the health of the creeks.”

There’s not yet evidence of a beaver dam or a lodge, the “wooden igloo” that the animals sometimes build as homes. Instead, he said, the Palo Alto beavers likely live in burrows submerged along the creek bank.

Leikam gazes at the water, noting a sudden swirl of spherical ripples. A big brown head emerges, then vanishes.

Its forebears were “problem beavers,” who clogged up canals in the Central Valley, according to Lanman’s research. A California Department of Fish and Wildlife staffer told him that long-ago crews had surreptitiously released the animals in Los Gatos, rather than killing them, Lanman said.

Meanwhile, a different population was making its way west from Sacramento, eventually building homes in Alhambra Creek in Martinez.

Oh good. It’s about us now.

While freshwater dwellers, beavers can tolerate brackish or salty water during travel, Perryman said. Our Bay and Delta “is basically a big water highway.”

The Martinez colony has perished, but over the years they raised 27 kits, who have since dispersed. Now there’s a colony in Fairfield and Oakley. On the Napa River, there’s a colony next to the busy Hawthorne Suites Hotel. In Sonoma County, colonies in Sonoma Creek have expanded into the Santa Rosa Creek watershed.

“They’re pioneers,” said Perryman, capable of traveling 10 to 20 miles over land and 100 miles by water. Beavers have moved into the radioactive Chernobyl Exclusion Zone spanning the border of Belarus and Ukraine, reclaiming an area that’s empty of humans. They were killed by the 1980 explosion of Mount St. Helens in Washington, but have since returned.

Okay I said they were the FIRST ones back after Mt st Helen’s erupted, as in they came back and made it habitable for the rest of us eventually. But the best laid plans of mice and men…

They can’t live in creeks that have been turned into concrete flood control channels — but in natural settings, they find ways to survive. During the worst of our recent drought, a beaver was spotted inside a small pipe in Los Gatos Creek. It had built a little dam around a steady drip, and sat in the puddle.

As the nation’s beaver population makes a comeback, the animals are incurring the wrath of some farmers and city planners. That hasn’t happened here. And there are techniques to offset any harm from newly green, lush and flooded spaces, Perryman said.

We should enlist them as our ally in environmental restoration, she said.

Instead of just a few new locations, “let’s multiply that by 10 different cities, or 100 different cities,” she said. “Our urban spaces would look really different if we allowed beavers at the edges, where we could tolerate them.”

Well now that is good anyway. You finished strong Lisa! Smelly little fat poop-eating engineers that could save our planet. This article also has a link to the beaver festival. a link to Worth A Dam AND a link to the California Beaver Summit. I am incapable of complaining about that.


This was a fine way to end the holiday weekend. The beavers won the civil war and a fantastic article appeared in  Jefferson radio about restoring Vesper meadow near Ashland in the hopes of beavers returning to it.

Bringing back the beavers

For four years, Jeanine Moy has led programming to restore, monitor and explore Vesper Meadow, near Ashland. One of her prime objectives has been to restore Latgawa Creek and set the table for the beaver’s return.

In 2018, Moy was serving as outreach director for the nonprofit Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center, but she wanted to create a program or organization of her own that reflected her holistic vision of conservation—one that elevated art along with science, educated people while building community, and restored cultures as well as ecosystems.

She met Ross while teaching a class for older adults at Southern Oregon University. Ross recalls how Moy described that healthy landscapes can act like sponges, slowing and soaking up water.

“That really spoke to me,” says Ross. “Water is so scarce now.”

Ross and Conaway were comfortably retired, and with money in the bank from a house sale in California, they wanted to give back. “We were looking at what we could do with climate change and community building that would be gratifying and open up opportunities for a lot of people,” says Ross, who is nearly 70. She and Moy decided to partner on a project: Ross would acquire a parcel of land ripe for restoration; Moy would live onsite, develop programming and raise funds.

That year, Ross and Conaway purchased 323 acres and worked with the Southern Oregon Land Conservancy to place all but seven in a conservation easement. They named it Vesper Meadow, after the vesper sparrow, a grassland bird discovered there during surveys.

Now that’s the way to do it. Retire and sell your home in California and move to Oregon to bring back beavers. Way to go team!

If you glimpse Vesper Meadow from the highway, you’ll likely see a lovely expanse of open space that’s dotted with wildflowers in early summer and blanketed in snow in winter. It’s hard to spot the degradation unless you know what you’re looking for.

Thanks in large part to beavers, Vesper Meadow was once a complex, wet meadow, says Sarah Koenigsberg, communications director for The Beaver Coalition, a nonprofit focused on promoting beavers as agents of conservation. “The water table was right near the surface, and there were lots of teeny tiny channels and rivulets and wet swampy areas,” she explains. Conifers, which don’t like “wet feet,” grew further upslope, but aspen, willows, and camas thrived in the meadow. Several groups of indigenous people, including Shasta, Latgawa, and Takelma, likely harvested camas and other foods, gathered seeds, and managed the land with fire.

To slow the erosion along Latgawa Creek, Moy and an army of volunteers immediately started planting willows. Willow planting is a time-honored restoration strategy, and you don’t need a permit to plant them.

But Moy wanted to do more.

“The waterway being so degraded and showcased with the highway running through it lends itself to being a restoration demonstration site,” she explains.

Moy quickly honed in on bringing beavers back to Vesper Meadow. Not only do beaver-managed landscapes support a variety of plants, animals, and pollinators, they also help buffer the land during droughts and can even slow down or stop a wildfire.

But you can’t just drop a bunch of beavers off in a dry meadow, says Koenigsberg. “There’s no food. They’d starve, or get eaten by predators.” First, you have to set the table.

As long as the highway is bringing people closer, you might as well educate them. Right?

After talking with experts from The Beaver Coalition and NOAA, Moy decided to use a low-tech strategy called process-based restoration. It doesn’t require heavy equipment or engineering degrees, just lots of human hands. She started planning the log structures in the summer of 2020.

Sheri Hagwood, Partners for Fish and Wildlife botanist with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, suggested Moy apply for funding and technical assistance through the Partners for Fish and Wildlife program, which helps private landowners enhance their properties for wildlife.

Vesper Meadow received $36,000 through the Partners program (and matched it with over $37,000). Hagwood helped Moy with planning and permitting. To build the structures, she needed to obtain a host of permits from federal, state, and county agencies, which evaluate everything from water quality to the project’s impact on cultural resources.

Moy bumped into the FEMA requirement when applying to Jackson County for a floodplain development permit. Part of the meadow was a FEMA mapped flood zone. An engineering analysis showed that during a hypothetical “100-year” flood, her project would raise the water level in one part of this zone by 8 inches, which the county didn’t allow.

According to Moy, the flood map didn’t match what was actually on the ground. Her only course of action was to apply to FEMA to revise the map and show that no homes or other buildings would be threatened by her project.

“The whole FEMA process is in place to protect homeowners from flooding, but there are no other homes anywhere near this floodplain,” says Moy. “It just seemed excessive for us to be able to put some sticks in the creek.”

She used part of her budget to hire an engineer to map and analyze the creek. Finally, last November, they mailed the application to FEMA.

After a few months, she followed up. FEMA had never received her materials. She sent them again. For the next several months, the FEMA representative and her engineer went back and forth with requests and revisions. With the weather window for building the log structures closing, Moy planned Beaver Days.

First you build it and then get out of the way and then they will come. Let them be in charge of the process from there.

It’s humbling to admit that a rodent can do this work better than we can, says Koenigsburg. “This kind of restoration challenges human nature,” she adds. “We like control and we don’t like messy. But we’re at this turning point: Do we want control, or do we want water, biodiversity, and firebreaks?”

Moy’s plan is not to hand the meadow off to beavers and leave. A key part of her programming is to restore human presence to Vesper Meadow, using art, education, science, and hands-on work to draw people in. Vesper Meadow helped cofound the Indigenous Gardens Network and has invited Siletz and Grande Ronde tribal members to re-connect with a landscape their ancestors knew intimately.

“More and more I use the term bio-cultural restoration,” says Moy. “It’s not just humans visiting and restoring and measuring [Vesper Meadow] but rather building personal relationships with the land and tending it over time.”

And scene. Vesper meadows is in good hands because of the beavers work and your vision. Well done. Thanks to the beaver coalition for helping out.


So I have been using the holiday weekend to buckle down on my upcoming presentation to the Alameda Fisheries Work group in December. They are eager to think about the new beaver rules about beaver introduction and whether they can be welcomed in the upper watershed there for their positive impact on fish. Of course Michael Pollock is the speaker they really want but they allowed me to tag along because they thought maybe I would have some insights on navigating alliances and persuading stakeholders about beaver benefits. This made me think about what worked and what didn’t work in Martinez.

And I have to say honestly that like any new student I went naively to the   beaver library and came back with an armful of facts about why beavers are good for streams and fish and fires and watertables and birds and otters. And I was sure that with this great knowledge, a patient spirit, a dispassionate presentation, my formidable professional psychologist skills and some excellent graphics the whole thing would be a slam dunk. An easy win. After the fair hearing the court would be adjourned in my favor.

I really thought introducing people to the well researched facts would change their behavior.

Um.


What I found looked a lot more like this. A firm quarter of the committee members were persuaded by science. The watershed people and the flood control people were interested in what I was talking about. To persuade them I had to present it to them really cleanly and compellingly, connect them to alternate sources of information, and be willing to answer questions or present information at the drop of a hat. I couldn’t appear to care too much about the outcome. One night I filled in for an Audubon speaker and suddenly the next evening Alhambra watershed asked me to present. Another night the wildlife chair of the sierra club invited me at the last minute to their meeting in Alameda and I actually had to cancel patients to be there because I knew it was a deal-breaker, The science part was hard work. I had to talk about things outside my comfort zone to intimidating professionals that had lived their adult lives steeped in words like riparian and hydrology. But it was familiar dissertation-like doable work.

The rest required more subtle forms of persuasion and I had to figure that out on the fly. It took the form of massive public interest (in which media and children played a huge part) and correspondingly significant self-interest. To my great surprise, when people decided they cared about the beavers and couldn’t be talked out of it the city leaders decided they cared very much about their own careers and political futures and were willing to listen to information that might help. It reminded me of that horrible old joke about the donkey and bricks.  First you really did have to get their attention.

I’ve since learned that the self-interest piece can take many forms, not just re-election: Salmon population. Amphibian population. Cattle forage. Climate Change. Fire risk, Waterfowl numbers. I consider it my job to find what my audience cares about and drive beaver lessons in that direction. Fortunately beavers are good for pretty much everything. Only rarely is their interest about the beavers themselves. Sometimes that bothers me. But mostly it’s okay.

If beavers are allowed to stick around, I find they will make their own impression.


I have been loving this National Parks Series on beavers. Today we get a new chapter from Bandalier National Park in New Mexico. I remember being amazed at the NM Beaver Summit when presenters talked about hiking down to reintroduce beavers with beavers strapped to their backs.

Under the Willows | Beavers Return To Bandelier National Monument

BANDELIER NATIONAL MONUMENT — Bandelier National Monument has had its share of natural disasters. In 2011 the Las Conchas fire burned 156,000 acres in northern New Mexico, much of it at Bandelier. And then, two years later, a devastating flood, the largest in recorded history, coursed down its narrow canyons. The landscape was drastically changed, from Ponderosa pine forests to rocky mesas and log-jam choked canyons. Nearly three quarters of the Frijoles Canyon’s upper watershed’s forest was destroyed.

But when there is destruction, there is also rebirth and an opportunity for restoring the landscape, by recovering native fish species and the industrious beavers, known as a keystone species. They’re nature’s preeminent dam builders. Their keenly assembled piles of wood create ponds that support wildlife, aquatic species, and even act as natural firebreaks. They also slow stream flows, holding back precious water in this rugged desert landscape.

After decades of them being hunted and killed because they were flooding landscapes, cutting down trees and making travel in the narrow canyons difficult, beavers have made a comeback. In 2019 four beavers were introduced above the Upper Falls by the National Park Service. Since then, 27 beavers have been brought into the park and released. But the idea wasn’t a new one.

Isn’t that an excellent way to introduce the hero of the story? I sure wonder what California’s National Parks are doing about beavers. I really enjoyed this film and her bright explanations.

Ya gotta love an ranger that doesn’t want to drill a hole in a beavers tail and tells people not to walk on the dams! I have gotten such grief from all kinds of biologists and visitors for protecting ours in the day. “Oh don’t worry I do it all the time,” They’d explain. As if I were worried about THEM.
I’m sure if you’re Glynis Hood hiking in back country and never see a sole surrounded by beaver dams you might be able to get away with it. But in heavily trafficked areas, no. Just don’t. Resist the temptation to see if its strong enough to support you. It is. And it wasn’t build for you or because of you,

New Mexico Department of Game and Fish in 2018 to relocate problem beavers to prevent them from being euthanized,” she says. And, in a build-it-and-they-will-come scenario, the rangers constructed artificial habitats, called beaver dam analogs (BDAs), for them. They also planted native willows, an essential food source, which have thrived. And beavers are masters at managing willow stands, ensuring a stable supply.

And Milligan recognizes that the beaver can create a place for other species to thrive.

“We are hoping they can establish themselves to provide habitat for our native but endangered New Mexico Meadow Jumping Mouse and native leopard frogs,” she said. “We also reintroduced native Rio Grande Cutthroat Trout in 2018 (and every year since) and they love using beaver ponds.”  

Beavers are a heavy lift. Tell me about it! I feel like I’ve been carrying beavers on my back for fifteen years!

Their ponds have also been an ideal place to reintroduce native fish.

“The fires and floods that came through in 2011 and 2013 wiped out all of the fish, and we used that as a place to start from,” says Hare.  “We only introduce native fish to the area. The first fish were introduced in 2018; the Rio Grande cutthroat trout. This year (2022) we brought Rio Grande chub and Rio Grande sucker, and used the beaver ponds to introduce them into.”

And as the beavers multiply, they’re starting to repopulate these canyons, supporting not just themselves, but every bird, fish, bear, deer, invertebrates and vegetation that rely upon them. In Bandelier (and many other parks) they’ve been transformed from a nuisance, to a solution.  

Excellent closing solution. Of in city storm drains or urban ponds they were already a solution too, just not one for a problem people felt like fixing. I have a dream that one day there will be plenty of beavers in our wild spaces AND plenty of beavers in our urban in between spaces and everyone will realize what a fantastic solution they are and let the stay put.

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