Category: Beaver ecological impact

AIRDRIE BEAVERS HAVE A CHAMPION

If you traveled north of Montana and kept on snow plowing until you passed Calgary you’d come to the city of Airdrie, And you have dropped into a most unusual presentation to the city council there. Meet champion Barbara Kowalzik who I suspect is going to be our very good friend soon.

Resident lobbies council for better wildlife management practices

With the City of Airdrie putting a pause on trapping and killing beavers of the Waterstone community, an Airdrie resident presented to council asking that the City adopt a policy to co-exist with beaver populations on November 7.

Summerhill resident Barbara Kowalzik, who has lived there for 13 years, made a presentation to council offering some information to consider as the City explores alternative to trapping and killing destructive beaver populations in the community.

While she presented as a concerned resident, Kowalzik holds a bachelor degree of sciences, and has over a decade of experience in wildlife conflict management.

Kowalzik said that the continued destruction of public and private properties has shown that Airdrie’s current management methods have been ineffective.

“The beaver lodge in my community has existed long before I moved here, and over the last 10 years I’ve seen these beavers relocated unsuccessfully and managed a number of times. I feel that I can say with confidence that we have an opportunity here to make a change because what we are doing is not working,” said Kowalzik.

Ohhh hoo hoooo. I am liking Barbara! What a celestial entrance! I wish I had known enough once upon a time to be able to march in and present to the city council that they should do it better.

“Many trees in my community have been wired, but unfortunately most are wired insufficiently or the cages aren’t properly secured which allows beavers access,” she said.

“I think the fact that beavers have taken a number of large poplars over the last few months speaks to the fact that there’s room for improvement.”

She added that she believed aggressive behaviours demonstrated by beavers were an overstated concern.

“Although beavers are social animals, they’re not aggressive and attacks and bites are exceptionally rare. I can say this from first-hand experience working with wild beaver populations,” said Kowalzik.

“I’ve heard the beavers in my community be referred to as aggressive a number of times, and implying this aggression as justification for trapping,” she said.

Beavers aren’t aggressive buddy. But watch out because I AM! Just putting chicken wire on a tree isn’t the same thing as protecting it. We know that.

“I would suggest that defensive behaviours, such as posturing and vocalizing, has been mislabelled as aggression, which can be very misleading as it relates to public safety.”

She suggested preventative measures as a solution. Those included a proposal to paint tree bases in sand mixures, and a practice called ‘diversionary planting,’ which equates to placing specific plants near beaver colonies to attract them so they don’t turn to other publicly or privately-owned trees and shrubs.

Another proposal was to explore pond levellers to manage water levels and mitigate beaver activity in certain areas.

Kowalzik’s presentation cited a study conducted by Stella Thompson published in the January 2021 edition of the Mammal Review, which estimated that environmental services provided by beavers can amount to $179,000 USD per square mile annually.

The big guns. Cities waste money by trapping beavers. Everything else falls on deaf ears. Keep going Barbara,

She said that could be taken into consideration when looking at the 2018 Nose Creek Watershed Water Management Plan, which highlighted the unhealthy ecosystem of the watershed.

“It’s polluted with phosphorus, nitrogen, and fecal coliform. Not only do beavers on the landscape help increase water quality, but they also help enhance biodiversity,” she said.

“It has a ripple effect, and I think the riparian habitat in Waterstone is a great example of this. There’s mink, muskrat, neotropical songbirds, numerous invertebrates, and numerous species of wild plants.”

She said the challenges presented could potentially be leveraged into new opportunities for innovation.

“Mutiple beavers in my community have been trapped and killed over the last month, but beavers still remain in the lodge and trees still remain accessible,” said Kowalzik.

Ohh hoo hoo Barbara. You got ’em on the ropes now! Don’t let up. Keep wielding that sword until they say uncle.

“I’m hoping we can leverage some of the resources available to us in order to make some well-informed decisions moving forward.”

Councillor Ron Chapman said he was somewhat divided on the issue because of the costs and liabilities they were presenting within the City.

“In the wild they are great, but the City of Airdrie is not a wild environment for them. In a municipal setting, I don’t see it different than having a mouse in your kitchen,” said Chapman.

Hmm does the mouse save money on your water bill and fight fires? Asking for a friend.

“If you have a mouse in your kitchen, you have to get rid of it because it’s doing damage. It’s going to continue to do damage while it’s there,” he said.

“I’m not convinced that we’re going to be able to… co-exist with them.”

The City of Airdrie is looking to do some additional research with the insight of other wildlife experts on how to best approach the beaver problem.

Councillor Candice Koleson said she looks forward to seeing what comes from those discussions, but added that she recognized that there’s a very apparent problem for the municipality.

“They are incredibly destructive. Big trees have been taken down overnight, and it’s very difficult for us to be able to justify that destruction,” she said.

The week prior to the meeting saw beavers take down a tree along Main Street, which has only raised safety and liability concerns around the critters remaining in an urban environment.

Well yes it’s easier to Kill a problem than to solve it. I agree. But is it better for the community? Is it better for the green spaces in your community? Better for your water quality? Better for the mental health of your residents? I’m going to guess the answer to that is “NO”.

Barbara we need to talk.

12th Martinez Beaver Festival 2019. Photo by Cheryl Reynolds 6/29/19.

‘BEAVER GATE’ IS AN ACTUAL THING?

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver ecological impact, Who's Killing Beavers Now? November 7, 2022

The Mildred Peterson Preserve is a suburban city park on the east side of Lake Michigan outside Grand Rapids in Suagatuck, It is a nice place to visit the shoreline and see the colors but it is not, apparently, a nice place to be a beaver. So few are really.

‘Beavergate’ reports true, kind of’

Reports of beaver trapping this fall at Saugatuck’s Peterson Preserve are true, said city manager Ryan Heise.

Rumors they were secret, ad hoc and might have even involved larger bear traps, less so. But it was lead-up to elections.

“The City of Saugatuck,” Heise said, “has been placed in the unfortunate position of removing beaver from the Peterson Preserve for the last three years.

“It’s my understanding,” the second-year manager went on, “that in the early 1960s pond work and stream alterations were made to Moore’s Creek, originating from Goshorn Lake.

Placed in the unfortunate position? Seriously? Like “This hurts me more than it’s going to hurt you,but it has be done. You made me do it”. Swear to God they said that out loud with their mouths parts because they truly thought it would make their position better.

Go figure.

There are stories that this creek historically was spawning habitat for native fish, and later salmon/trout introduced to Lake Michigan in the late 1960s.

“We are aware of concerns about the trapping and the dam, which triggers an interesting discussion on the relevance of the dam from an ecological significance perspective.

The trapping is a permitted activity necessitated by need to maintain native habitat, prevent damage to the existing dam, and assists in mitigating damage to surrounding road base and other infrastructure upstream.

“The trapping is complete for this year,” Heise said.

Oh and happy 15th anniversary, by the way.

BEAVERS: FIXING WHAT’S BROKEN

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver ecological impact, Beavers November 6, 2022

I love waking up an hour later and not feeling guilty about it. Don’t you? There are lots of articles celebrating the upcoming beaver moon and the last lunar eclipse for 2 years but it won’t be visible here so I thought we’d focus on this fine article from Vermont instead, which is a state that has some really smart beaver folks too.

Nature Can Still Help Us, Despite the Errors of Humanity

By Dan Hemenway

For some time, I have been thinking that restocking beavers in the hills and mountains of Vermont would solve many problems with minimal cost. A network of little dams that store water at elevation, in small impoundments instead of big Army Corps of Engineers scale structures, has the potential to keep the ‘Ver’ in Vermont. Manifold small beaver dams would restore springs, help forests resist fires likely to result from climate change heat and drought, decrease erosion from aberrant climate-change-induced deluges and tropical storms, increase groundwater, improve forest production far in excess of the trees beavers use, and cool the temperature of brooks and rivers. Healthy trees, with ample water for transpiration in blistering heat, can cool much of the area around them.

Excellent opening argument Dan. I’m completely invested in what you are going to write next.

While dithering about whether to suggest introducing beavers as self-regulating climate-moderating engineers, I encountered an article labeled “Beavers help climate change: Dams boost water storage and lower temperatures” while reading Science News (Sept. 10, 2022, p.8). People (and beavers) are doing it already!

Science News reports that a year after stocking beavers in the upper reaches of the Skykomish River in Washington State, “average water temperatures dropped by about 2° C” (3.6° F), “while nearby streams without beavers warmed by 0.8° C” (1.44° F), more than a 5° F difference. The beavers “raised water tables by as much as 30 centimeters” (almost a foot). The researchers estimated that the dams resulted in double the amount of water stored in the ground as was stored behind beaver dams after just one year.

That seems like a really good service. I mean isn’t there someting IN that water that wants it to stay cool?

People who fish for trout, in particular, will appreciate lower water temperatures, which are vital to trout. Not mentioned in the article is that beaver dams smooth (dampen) stream flow fluctuations. Brooks and rivers are more likely to run year round with no or less severe flooding and little likelihood of drying. Think of the Winooski River if it never dries as it runs through Montpelier as it did this year. Dampening flooding from the anticipated increase of extreme ‘rain events’ by small high ponds would help reduce river flooding, maybe making it a rarity.

The increase in groundwater not only would help the forest resist fire, it would add to the water available to forests, springs, and any wells below the beaver ponds. In my latest commentary in The Bridge (Sept. 6, 2022), I discussed the likelihood that the Montpelier area, and much of northern New England, will be a magnet to climate chaos refugees. Improving the hydrology of the slopes around Montpelier would be an excellent way to prepare for the added human stress on our environment and at least partly counter the damage from a wilder and more dangerous climate.

Well sure, If you’re going to list all those good things beavers do you’re going to make it sound like we need them. But they flooded my cousins basement! They at my aunt’s hawthorn tree! We can’t just let a menace like that run loose!

Eons of erosion ideally shaped the region’s hills and mountains for small pond construction, by beavers or people, to store water in a way that stabilizes and enriches the environment in even more ways that I’ve mentioned. Small dams are minor adjustments to the landscape; they do not pose the wholesale failure risk of large dams. Being modular, with far more potential sites than anyone would propose utilizing, they can be developed carefully and gradually without huge appropriations. Therefore, I suggest some forms of economic incentives, perhaps a rotating fund for low-head hydroelectric where, as the generators pay off, repayment money is made available for new landowner projects. I suspect that the state fish and wildlife folks would enthusiastically stock beavers if that becomes seen as a public good.

All the residents of the area, from songbirds to fish, moose to rabbits, Republicans to Democrats, would benefit from efforts to restore the health of the environment by managing the water as nature arranged before we got here. If we make the right moves, deliberately and incrementally, we can accommodate our forests, our streams and rivers, our wildlife, and an enlarged human population. If we wing it, we will likely make a mess of the change that population numbers and the waste of consumerism bring down on us.

Well said, Dan.

Beavers can help us navigate the armageddon we have brought down on ourselves. I think that’s worth having a moon named after them. Don’t you?

ANOTHER GREAT DAY FOR BEAVERS

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver ecological impact, Beavers and climate change November 5, 2022

This is the kind of morning I dream of. A fantastic new Ben Goldfarb interview about beaver magic AND a great local article about beaver sighting in Palo Alto with a great discussion of our historic papers with Rick Lanman, I just have to try and share both.

Episode 97: On Re-watering The West With Beavers And Decommissioning Forest Service Roads With Ben Goldfarb

Take time to listen to the whole piece. It even praises Martinez!

The beaver is back: Pair of the semiaquatic rodents spotted in Palo Alto

More than 160 years ago, the sight and sound of beavers in local creeks was likely common, splashing their paddle-like tails with their brown bodies gliding through the water with noses just above the water line.

But now, the beaver is back. In April, the first beaver was spotted in a remote stretch of Matadero Creek. Today, there are two of the chubby herbivores. If they successfully reinhabit local creeks, the presence of these large, semiaquatic rodents could herald a return of other long-disappeared species, including salmon, endangered amphibiasemins and birds, according to scientists.

The beavers might also play crucial roles in recharging groundwater, repairing stream-channel erosion and restoring wetlands, said Dr. Rick Lanman, a Los Altos-based physician scientist, historical ecologist and president of the Institute of Historical Ecology.

For Lanman, whose groundbreaking work found that beavers were native to Santa Clara County, the journey to rediscover beavers began in 1987. His Los Altos home is located near Adobe Creek.

Oh goodness, Hi Rick! Great t0 see you back in the papers, I’ll share just one more quote and then you have to go read the whole thing yourself.

Nine years after Lanman and the Institute of Historical Ecology published their findings, in April, Palo Alto resident Bill Leikam, co-founder and board president of the Urban Wildlife Research Project, documented the first modern evidence of beavers in a remote section of Matadero Creek. Leikam, who is known for his research on the celebrated baylands gray foxes, captured images of a beaver on trail cameras after being alerted by a friend. First one, and then two beavers appeared in the ghostly black-and-white images.

The two beavers spotted this year in Palo Alto, if a compatible pair, could potentially mate and start a colony of little beavers with the potential to inhabit San Francisquito Creek and move into adjacent San Mateo County. At a certain point, in favorable habitat and with an open corridor, the population could jump, Lanman said.

“It’s gonna get real interesting. When they reach there, they’ll be able to come upstream, and that’s a big system. And it’s important because beaver provide important ecosystem services. Beaver ponds are insect cafeterias for coho salmon fry. Survival increases like 200 times when there’s a beaver pond for them. It’s a sheltered place filled with bugs,” he said, and provides shelter for steelhead trout and for Chinook salmon.

Beaver footholds across the landscape are making a huge difference. And creating a kind of scaffolding that allows support for the next beaver step across the landscape. We are building as we go.

In the city of Martinez, beavers colonized Alhambra Creek and turned the waterway from a trickle to multiple rich ponds and dams. The creek now hosts steelhead trout, and river otter, mink, green heron, hooded mergansers and tule perch, a species of fish likely not previously seen in Alhambra Creek, according to the website martinezbeavers.org.

Lanman and Leikam hope the Palo Alto beavers will also usher in an enriched ecosystem.

“It’s so exciting for me to see. Ten years later after we published these papers, finally they show up a couple of miles from my house,” Lanman said.

BEAVERS: A PHENOMENAL IMPACT

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver ecological impact November 4, 2022

I think it’s high time for a little good news from Utah. Don’t you think? This from the Salt Lake Tribune by Jordan Miller.

This Utah animal is helping landowners fight wildfires, climate change and drought

Jay Wilde has worked on his Preston, Idaho, ranch just north of the Utah border for most of his life. Growing up, one of its biggest pests were beavers.

The pesky rodents muddied up irrigation ditches and blocked culverts, he said, and he wanted them gone. But after moving back in 1995, he experienced a major “paradigm shift.”

With the help of Utah State University’s Beaver Ecology and Relocation Center, he opened his property as a haven for the species in 2015. Now, the area is home to over 200 beaver dams — which have increased the ranch’s creek flows and helped a vulnerable fish species thrive.

“There’s still those folks out there that haven’t accepted the fact that we need them,” Wilde said. “But by and large, the whole attitude of beavers is beginning to change.”

Yes we do Jay. I couldn’t have said it better myself. Except I would add that iin order for US to be healthy we need healthy watersheds which means HUMANS need beavers.

Utah State’s beaver relocation program re-homes an average of 75 beavers each year, restoring ecosystems where beavers have played a crucial role for thousands of years — all with support from the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources and the U.S. Forest Service.

Nick Bouwes, who serves as the program’s director, has studied the effects of beavers on stream restoration for over 13 years. The USU professor previously used beaver dam analogs — or man-made beaver dams — to restore salmon habitats in Oregon.

These fake dams have been a go-to for stream restoration for about a decade, Nate Norman, the center’s lead field biologist, said. They can be scaled to the size of a water body and help disperse water across floodplains, rehydrating parched areas.

Together, Bouwes and USU professor Joe Wheaton started a company to implement such dams in areas across the West before deciding in 2017 to go a step further — incorporating live beavers to the same sites.

“It started pretty small,” Norman said. “The first year we were able to trap and release five beavers, and the program has grown from there.”

Now, the program has a permanent “beaver bunkhouse” at Utah State with custom-built kennels that “mimic the comforts found in a beaver pond,” according to the center’s website.

Good. Because the university program that reintroduces beavers seems to have the motto of “If she dies, she dies…” I have a modicum of faith that you guys will get this right.

Each kennel has a concrete “pond” that slopes down into a deep-water area for cover, along with a makeshift lodge in the shallow section. The “lodge” can house several beavers, and each kennel includes a camera and a thermometer to monitor the rodents’ health.

These beaver “guests” only check-in after a landowner reports a nuisance beaver to the program. Norman then dispatches to assess the situation.

“This could be anything from a beaver that chewed on one tree one night, or it could be a colony of several beaver dams and lodges on a large ranch,” Norman said.

If Norman determines a beaver is likely settling down in the area, he’ll set out traps to catch the animal.

“They live in families, and so we tried to catch the entire family and relocate them all together,” Norman said. To make sure an entire family has been rounded up, Norman “tests” the area by breaking the beavers’ dam.

“If nobody fixes the dam, that’s usually a good indication that there’s nobody left there, we’ve got them all — because beavers really hate to have their dam broken,” he said.

Back at the bunkhouse, the beavers are quarantined for three days to make sure they don’t transmit any diseases or parasites. Volunteers clean the facility, replace their water each day and feed them one of their favorite meals: wood.

That wood typically comes from branches, which volunteers cut down from willow, cottonwood or aspen trees. Beavers also love root vegetables, Norman said, along with squash or pumpkins.

Once quarantine is over, it’s time for their relocation. First, a few man-made dams are assembled in a designated release area, to help establish a habitat. Then, the beavers are set free “to hopefully survive and thrive and save the ecosystem,” Norman said.

Sure seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to just because some landowners don’t know what’s good for them. But okay. It’s easier to move beavers than change minds. I get it. But I’m still trying.

Emily Fairfax, who serves as an assistant professor with USU’s Department of Watershed Sciences, also works as an assistant professor at California State University Channel Islands, where she leads a research group called BEAVS- which studies beavers, ecohydrology, and visual storytelling.

In Utah, Fairfax has seen evidence of beavers in some of the state’s most barren landscapes, including beaver-chewed sticks floating down the Green River, or canals beavers have dug near Desolation Canyon.

“They’re already engineering incredibly harsh environments,” Fairfax said. “So I’m optimistic that they will continue to be our climate ally, even if things get a little bit worse in the future.”

In dry climates like Utah, beavers play a crucial role in slowing water down, so precipitation has time to seep into the landscape, she said.

They also help slow down water in snowmelt-driven systems, where water can run out by June or July if it just comes “screaming through” degraded water channels.

“They’re like speed bumps for that water,” Fairfax said of beaver ponds. “And when the water is slowed down, and it gets stored, then the vegetation can keep accessing the other roots — even into July, August, September, October.”

“And that lets the vegetation stay green and lush,” she continued, “so it never really reaches that super dry, crispy fuel state that makes wildfires so intense.”

Slowing down snowmelt and giving water time to seep into the ground also helps with aquifer recharge — which Utah’s groundwater sources have been lacking.

This recharge depends on an area’s geology, Fairfax said, but research has shown that once beavers occupy a stream, there is a local rise in the water table. And if the species persists over time in that area, there can be “true aquifer recharge” — which can affect areas far beyond a beaver pond.

Okay, we’re taking these beavers to somewhere they want not to burn up and their wells not to dry. I understand that’s not what YOU personally want. TTFN. We’ll be on our way. Good luck being thirsty and flammable.

These beaver ponds double as carbon sinks, too, because the wetlands they create can help remove carbon dioxide from of the atmosphere and even slow global warming.

“In terms of adaptation, or dealing with the effects of climate change — when a riverscape is unhealthy, when it’s degraded and it’s been overly modified by people, it cannot resist any disturbances,” Fairfax said. “A drought, a flood, a fire — any of those that come through is just going to make that system even more unhealthy.”

But when beavers are in an area, they can nudge a riverscape back toward restoration, she said.

“Then when you have a disturbance… the river just handles it like it’s meant to do,” she said, “because it’s been part of this planet for millions and millions and millions of years, and it should be able to persist through natural disturbances.”

Beavers get over it. They help YOU get over it. It’s what they do.

Wilde has seen the talents of beavers firsthand. The Beaver Relocation Center established a few man-made dams on the Idaho rancher’s property before relocating five beavers there in 2015, and Wilde credits those dams to enticing the animals to stay in the area.

That’s because beavers need deep water, Wilde said — their entire defense mechanism when evading predators relies on hiding in it.

“So we just added some security to them long enough so they could get their own dams and complexes put together,” he said, “and away they went.”

Wilde’s ranch is located along Birch Creek, which is a tributary of the Bear River. The creek dries up each year, and ever since he moved back in the 1990s, he’s noted the exact date that the water has disappeared annually.

That’s why he knows that since the beavers made a home at his ranch, the creek has seen between 40-50 additional days of water flow.

This year, the creek has continued to flow for 75 more days, Wilde said.

“They’re pretty reclusive, and you don’t see a lot of them,” Wilde said. “But usually, along toward dusk in the evenings, they’ll come out and be swimming around, and working on those on those dams.”

The beavers’ work has allowed other wildlife in the area to thrive, he said. In 2001 and 2012, for instance, the Forest Service recorded fewer than five Bonneville cutthroat trout per 100 meters on Birch Creek.

But in 2019, after the beavers were established, the Forest Service recorded about 70 of the threatened fish per 100 meters.

“My whole goal was to try to get the stream to flow,” Wilde said. “But you know, the effect that it’s had on those fish? That’s just been phenomenal.”

Wilde’s ranch has received nine relocated beavers over the years — all for free. Interested landowners can get involved by contacting their local DWR office, or the ecology center directly.

“They are the most calm animal. They are chill,“ Norman said. “They’re an amazing little rodent.”

How true. What a FANTASTIC article Jordan Miller has written. Spoken like a true believer who actually did her homework. There’s a reason why Utah is neck and neck with Washington for being the smartest beaver state. I am always happy to be reminded of why.