Category: Beaver ecological impact

SMART PEOPLE ARE IMPATIENT WITH BEAVER PROGRESS

Let’s say you lived in a family of all female siblings and your eldest sister was a highly successful model for vogue and came in second at the Olympic ski trials. And then one day you saw her sitting in front of the mirror sobbing because she was so “unattractive no one would ever love her”.

I suppose in those circumstances you might be forgiven for a response that is less than sympathetic.

Which I offer by way of a response to this article which complains:

“But environmental groups say policy makers in Oregon and Washington — where beavers continue to be managed as furbearers, nuisance animals and even predators — have been slow to respond.”

I guess it makes sense that the state who is the best about beaver management in the entire country would also be the state with the least patience for poor or slightly unideal beaver management, but still this article in The Columbian made me snicker ruefully, and mutter over and over again: “tell me about it…”

Why are we still mismanaging beavers in the Northwest?

Recognition that American beavers are a vital and often missing component of riverine habitats is growing nationwide, especially in the Pacific Northwest.

Nearly wiped out across the West a century ago, beavers have spent recent decades regarded as a nuisance animal.

Now, their reputation as a keystone species is slowly taking hold.

The dams they create, for free, offer many of the same benefits as costly rehabilitation projects. Their work has been shown to expand floodplains and wetlands, recharge groundwater, provide higher summer flows, improve water quality, create healthy habitat for salmon and encourage a greater diversity of plants and animals.

The natural water storage they create slows the runoff process, keeps freshwater habitat cooler later into the summer and helps counter the impacts of drought.

And as wildfires become larger and more intense with climate change, beaver ponds have been shown to provide firebreaks and offer refuge for aquatic and land animals.

But environmental groups say policy makers in Oregon and Washington — where beavers continue to be managed as furbearers, nuisance animals and even predators — have been slow to respond.

Oregon—the Beaver State—allows unlimited killing of beavers, and has no mechanisms in place to track how many are taken each year. State agencies have no authority to manage them on private land, and do not know how many beavers there are or where they’re causing problems.

Unlimited killing of beavers? You mean like all those depredation permits that California issues every year that are literally for an UNLIMITED number of beavers? Maybe I’ve been out in the elements for too long to be shocked by these claims, but honestly, show me the state that has a cap on the number of beavers that need to be preserved for a healthy watershed or literally even knows a ball park population number about the amount of beavers they actually have?

In Oregon and Washington, proposals to provide beavers with greater protections are gaining ground.

Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife managers say that making the state’s relocation program permanent could begin as soon as this year. They also point to an opportunity to add beavers as a “species of greater conservation need” in the agency’s statewide wildlife action plan.

In the Oregon Legislature this session, a bill to remove the “predator” status of beavers passed. Beaver supporters say provisions in the bill are small but important measures that can help prevent the indiscriminate killing of beavers and help landowners learn to live with North America’s largest rodent.

Oregon Rep. Pam Marsh, D-Ashland, — the bill’s primary sponsor and chair of the House Committee on Climate, Energy and Environment — says it’s going to take time for beavers in Oregon to be seen as friends instead of foes.

Her bill, she says, is the first step.

Removing its “predator” status will move management of beavers from the Oregon Department of Agriculture to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, where they can be overseen as wildlife instead of agricultural pests.

Landowners could still kill them on their own property, but most people would need a permit to do so.

After introducing the bill — and before the walkout — Marsh worked with Republicans in her committee and agreed to amended language to gain more support. Under the amended bill, landowners with beavers causing damage that imminently threatens infrastructure or agricultural crops could bypass the permit, and owners of small forestland are exempt.

But everyone would have to report the beavers they kill to the state, giving ODFW an opportunity to estimate out how many beavers are in the state, understand where and how they’re causing problems and provide landowners with options other than killing them.

Honestly, I don’t think we need “protections for beavers”. We need “INCENTIVES FOR LANDOWNERS”. Environmental tax credits for keeping beavers on your property. Funding for installing a flow device. Groups that can help you wrap trees. A live beaver is more valuable than a dead one.

Marsh believes public support for beavers in Oregon is growing.

“We just heard increasing voices across the state for stepping up for beavers,” says Marsh. “We’re seeing beaver-affinity groups, and increasingly seeing landowners who are raving about the results” of allowing beavers to reclaim portions of their property.

Marsh admits beavers can quickly damage property if they’re not properly directed.

“When you know how to work with them, there’s a tremendous capacity to store water and to keep people safe during wildfires,” she says.

And when she evacuated her land in 2020 when the Riverside Fire ranged five miles away, she went to her beaver pond to take a picture of her farm that was threatened by wildfire. She said trees were breaking on her property from the 70 mph winds, and the sky was orange from the nearby blaze.

“In the beaver ponds, it was as if somebody put a glass dome over the ponds,” she said. “It was 10 degrees colder, and it was still. There was no wind. The trees were barely registering, and in that moment, I realized that there’s a lot more happening in these beaver ponds, especially during wildfires, than we’ve even begun to investigate.”

Lovell says the livestock they left behind in the haste of evacuation found refuge there. And the wildland firefighters who used the farm as the entryway to fight the fire identified the ponds as a backup water supply.

“That’s the climate resilience that we really didn’t see and anticipate,” she said.

That is the very best paragraph I’ve ever read about beaver benefits. And I’ve read a lot of them. That should be repeated over and over again until it becomes our national anthem.

The smart article goes on to talk about how farmers are afraid of the restrictions to their land and how beavers can cause problems. Then there’s a a great segment with Jakob Shockey about how beaver problems can be solved.

Jakob Shockey has spent years educating landowners across Oregon about how to coexist with beavers.

Shockey is executive director of the Jacksonville, Ore.-based nonprofit Project Beaver (formerly The Beaver Coalition) and owner of the wildlife control business Beaver State Wildlife Solutions.

“I’ve managed to make a full-time job out of helping the monkeys outsmart the rodents,” Shockey told the House Committee on Climate, Energy and Environment in March.

Shockey told the committee about tools he uses to help growers and other landowners benefit from beavers without the damage that comes with them.

He says pond levelers work like the drain in a bathtub that can be set at any level to prevent the flooding of crops; electric fences have been highly successful at keeping beavers away from orchards; and methods to cage off irrigation culverts prevent them from getting blocked.

“We can come up with some pretty crafty things. Most beaver conflicts you can find a solution for,” says Shockey.

Changing the “predatory” status of beavers would also remove language that labels them as agricultural pests, says Shockey.

“A lot of folks feel like, if they have a pest species on their land, in order to be good stewards of that land they have to get rid of that pest species,” he says, adding that the label sends a signal to landowners that isn’t helpful. “Most folks I end up working with didn’t have any idea that another solution was available.”

Shockey says that landowners who get caught in the endless treadmill of trapping beavers to get rid of them instead of finding a permanent solution to live with them end up impacting neighbors who would benefit from them, too.

“Beavers are territorial, and they mate for life. If you remove one, another family will move in, so you’re going to be depopulating the surrounding region of beavers,” he explains.

Shockey believes the top priority in beaver management should be helping people learn to live with them in the places they choose to repopulate.

“The fact that in the House they were able to work together and get bipartisan support [for HB 3464A], I was just tickled. It feels like the bill we’ve all been hoping for for the last decade.”

Shockey hopes the Oregon Senate can meet and vote on the bill before this year’s legislative session ends.

How much do you love this article? With all your heart or with your intestines too? I guess that’s what happens when the tide starts turning. The places that are already saturated with beaver wisdom start getting more and more soaked and even the dry places like California start to get a little bit smarter.

To Shockey, the public’s perception of beavers changes one landowner at a time. He says even though Oregon is still working to legally change the status of beavers, he thinks the Beaver State is well positioned to lead the Northern Hemisphere in developing a healthier relationship with nature’s greatest engineers.

With help from agencies and Washington organizations, Project Beaver developed a manual for best management practices to help people coexist with them, which people in Europe are looking to adopt, he says.

Once people stop fighting with beavers and start working with them, says Shockey, they’re sold.

Go read the whole beautiful article and send it to all the fence sitters in your life. Great writing K.C. Mehaffey. A few more like this and I could be out of work any day.

FLOOD THE ZONE WITH BEAVERS

May 4, 2023

I’ll Be Dammed: Beavers Fighting Climate Change

by Science Vs

In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Intro: How beavers “beaver away”

(02:22) Chapter One: How beavers can help

(06:18) Chapter Two: Can we move beavers for the better?

This episode was produced by Disha Bhagat, with help from Michelle Dang, Meryl Horn, Rose Rimler and R.E. Natowicz. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Wendy Zukerman is our Executive Producer. Gimlet’s managing director is Nicole Beemsterboer. Fact checking by Eva Dasher. Mix and sound design by Catherine Anderson. Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Emma Munger, and Bobby Lord.

Science Vs is a Spotify Original Podcast and a Gimlet production. Follow Science Vs on Spotify, and if you want to get notifications every time we put out a new episode, tap the bell icon in your app.

BEAVER STARS FELL ON ALABAMA LAST NIGHT

heidi08 Beaver ecological impact, Beavers May 8, 2023

Well there are a few states I’m not holding my breath waiting for them to say nice things about beavers but as of today Alabama officially isn’t one of them. This was a nice surprise. I believe we had seven participants for the beaver summit from Alabama, so I am not completely shocked.

Beavers have earned a reputation as nature’s engineers | ECOVIEWS

Q. Whenever the subject of beavers comes up when I’m talking with my neighbors near Aiken, South Carolina, they insist that beavers are pests. I claim they do more environmental good than harm. What is your opinion about beavers?

A. I am on your side — and the beavers’. Years ago I wrote a column about beavers after a walk in the woods gave me the opportunity to witness one of nature’s marvels — the construction of a beaver dam. My first evidence of something unusual happening came in autumn after a monthlong drought. When I measured the water level of the stream, I was surprised to find that instead of having dropped, it had actually risen 2 inches in a week’s time. I attributed the anomaly to mismeasurement, until I took my walk.

A beaver dam creates upstream pools used by other wildlife, such as wood ducks. [Photo provided by Whit Gibbons]

Beavers are unquestionably keystone species in regions with small to moderate-size streams. They can not only modify the appearance of an environment but also alter it in ways that dramatically affect nearby plants.

Beaver activity can result in small trees being debarked for food or cut down for dam construction and big trees dying because of flooding. Upstream from where I stood, an abandoned beaver dam had covered several acres in water, leaving tall, barren sweetgum and pine trees that had begun life in a terrestrial habitat and could not survive in an aquatic one.

Ya see that beaver grooming alongside that wood duck? If those Alabama duckhunters want the duck they should try their luck with BEAVERS. Remember the Oklahoma article that said “Beavers are the cure we don’t want to take”. Yep. That was the truth.

Beaver behavior also affects animals. Large aquatic salamanders called sirens thrive in pools created by beaver dams. Frogs and wading birds frequent the margins. Cottonmouths, watersnakes and turtles are more apparent around beaver dams, which create areas for basking on sunny days.

Waterfowl, such as wood ducks, visit ponds that form above beaver dams. Clearly, beavers have earned their environmental engineering cred, and their dams set the tone of the neighborhood for many wildlife species.

Okay. we like that paragraph so much that I didn’t even read the next one until it made me spit out my iced tea. Seriously.

Beavers live 35 to 50 years in zoos and more than 20 years in the wild. The longest beaver dams, reported from Montana and from Alberta, Canada, are over 2,000 feet long. No doubt beavers across the continent are working feverishly to break that record. Beavers are usually nocturnal, but I have occasionally seen them during the day.

35 to FIFTY years? Where does that stat come from? I remember years ago the false prophet consultant Martinez hired to tell us beavers were bad told the editor that beaver breed for 50 years. I called the editor in horror and asked politely. is that a typo? Which made him call back the prophet again and question her stats which prompted her to not come to the subcommittee meeting because we were too HOSTILE.

Just so you know: There is a recorded account of a beaver in captivity living 19 years. In the wild 10-12 is about the limit.

One problem that excessive dam-building causes on our stream is to make it more difficult to navigate up and down in a canoe or kayak. As with virtually all native wildlife, my preference is to learn to live with them. Portaging a small boat around the end of a beaver dam to get to the other side of the stream is a minor inconvenience in return for getting to experience a natural phenomenon that can change the character of the habitat and its wildlife. That is, as long as I don’t see part of our cabin being used to build a dam.

Oh okay, It’s Alabama and South Carolina so we’re officially grading on a curve. Your list of what beavers are good for is far far too short. And your list of helpful facts about how long beavers live is far far too long. But you tried. We appreciate the effort.

THE SECOND BEST BEAVER ARTICLE IN POPULAR SCIENCE

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver ecological impact May 2, 2023

Once upon a time, a long, long, time ago, positive beaver articles used to be few and far between. One dropped every other year or so, and I was powerfully happy to see them. Now everybody and his mother seems to have something nice to say about beavers. Even Popular Science wants a seat at the willow table.

Beavers, snails, and elephants are top grads from nature’s college of engineering

Beavers, like humans, shape their ecosystems not just by eating or excreting, but also by building and tearing down. And because of those similarities, the rodents have become North America’s best-known “ecosystem engineers.”

But the scientific idea of ecosystem engineering wasn’t born in a beaver lodge—it came from Israel’s Negev Desert. The pea-size rock-eating snail sticks to the underside of limestone boulders and has a peculiar means of accessing food: It chews through stone to get the lichen living inside. The tiny mollusks then poop out so much of the rock that they literally build the desert soil. Measurements taken by ecologists in the 1980s showed that their gritty feces add as much sediment in the course of a year as windblown dust.

When one of those ecologists, Clive Jones of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in New York, visited the desert in 1987, he saw that snails weren’t the only animals shaping the landscape. Most of its organisms, from animals down to bacteria, changed how water flowed in the arid environment. Porcupine pits and anthills trapped runoff. Bulbed plants broke up hard-packed earth, trapping moisture. Colonies of microbes covered slopes in waterproof sheets.

And beavers! Don’t forget the beavers, Doing their part to keep North America Green and lush. I mean snails and oysters are cool and all, but I don’t see any one rushing to form the nonprofit “Worth A Shell” any time soon.

Jones and his colleagues coined the term ecosystem engineering in 1994 to connect the processes they saw in that desert to similar ones all over the world. Kelp forests create calm nurseries for fish and crabs on coasts. Terrestrial forests collect water. In all these cases, the actions, or even the body of an organism itself is reshaping the world—and not as part of a food chain. An elephant eating leaves isn’t engineering—but as soon as it rips down a tree, it is.

Since the idea entered the scientific mainstream, ecologists have debated what counts as an engineer, given that almost any organism could conceivably qualify for the definition. Does an action have to be intentional, as beavers’ dam-building appears to be? Does it need to shape the lives of other organisms immensely?

Jones says no to both. From the perspective of an ecologist, it doesn’t matter whether an elephant means to rip up a bush or eat a specific plant—the fact is that it does. And the effect doesn’t need to be earth-shattering. An animal’s shadow is the most trivial example of engineering. “No other organism cares about the ephemeral shadow caused by the cat walking outside my window,” Jones says. But the shadow has the same type of effect as a beaver’s dam in that they both change the heat, light, water, and air that other organisms depend on.

Well I believe it was Frances Backhouse who first called beavers “unintentional philanthropists”

“To understand how an ecosystem works, you need to take all those things into account,” Jones says. If you think about beavers’ eating habits—consuming the leaves and soft inner tissue of wetland trees—you’d assume they were an engine of environmental destruction, leaving clear-cuts in their wake. Instead, studies show that these rodents create stunningly biodiverse wetland habitats. Similarly, tens of millions of bison once roamed from what is now Louisiana to the Canadian boreal forest, engineering the plains differently from the cattle that replaced them. Bison, unlike cattle, plow snow on the winter prairie and wallow up huge sand pits in the summer, helping create grasslands that support more birds and native plants.

Understanding how species alter landscapes isn’t just an intellectual exercise—it’s critical for figuring out how to preserve fast-disappearing habitats, or how to restore lost ones. “Humans can imitate the way in which ecosystem engineers do their work,” Jones says. “Of course, why bother to build a wetland when you can conserve beavers, and they’ll do it for you?”

Of course beavers need most for us to get out of their way and stop bothering them. They need for us to appreciate the changes they make and stop complaining all the time. Still, as nice as it is to read this article in popular science it is still only my second favorite.

LEGISLATING BEAVERS TAKES TIME

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver ecological impact, Beaver population April 25, 2023

The Beaver Bill AB 64 came up for review in today’s California Assembly this morning. I was particularly interested in some of the changes and additions they made and thought you might be too. I missed the hearing but believe it may be online tomorrow.

(i) Beaver restoration includes coexistence, habitat enhancement and expansion, process-based mimicry, and relocation.

That right there is a Major addition. Restoration doesn’t just mean moving nuisance beavers. It means MARTINEZ and FAIRFIELD and SONOMA and DODY RESERVE and TAHOE every that flow devices have been installed and trees have been wrapped. Everywhere that BDAs have been installed.

(d) (1) If a wild beaver that is released onto public lands pursuant to this section migrates naturally onto private property, the private landowner of the property where the beaver now resides may request that the department relocate the beaver. The department shall comply with the landowner’s request determine whether relocation is necessary and feasible in a timely manner.

(b) (1) If, for the purpose of preventing damage to private or public lands, structures, or other improvements of value, a landowner needs to remove, breach, or modify a beaver dam that is utilized by the wild beaver relocated pursuant to subdivision (a) and that is located on the landowner’s property, the landowner shall submit a request for alteration to the department at least 48 72 hours prior to altering the dam.

(2) (A) If the department finds that the beaver dam poses no risk to private or public lands, structures, or other improvements of value, or is found to be providing critical habitat for any listed species pursuant to the California Endangered Species Act (Chapter 1.5 (commencing with Section 2050) of Division 3), then the request for alteration may be denied. The department shall provide to the landowner, in writing and in a timely manner, the reasons why the department denied that landowner’s request for alteration. These reasons shall include a justification on behalf of the department as to why the dam does not need or warrant alteration.

You asked for these beavers. Now it’s your job to either deal with the issues that arise or save all the frickin fish in the stream that are threatened if we give you permission to mess with the dam.

(B) If the request for alteration is approved, the landowner shall be responsible for monitoring the parts of the upstream and downstream that reside of the altered beaver dam on their property for stranded fish in isolated pools. The department shall provide guidance to the landowner regarding monitoring requirements. The landowner shall make a good-faith good faith effort to capture and safely move all stranded or isolated fish to the nearest free-flowing water.

So There.

4030. (a) The department shall, through consultation with beaver restoration program partners, develop a program to promote beaver restoration across California by revising policies and guidelines relating to beavers, coordinating restoration efforts, proactively mitigating human-beaver conflict, and relocating beavers into watersheds.

(b) No later than January 1, 2025, the department shall expand the program described in subdivision (a) to do both of the following:

(1) Develop a required training for the capture, handling, transport, and release of beavers on public and private lands.

(2) Develop a licensing scheme that includes the issuance and administration of permits for the capture, handling, transport, and release of beavers on public and private lands. Any costs imposed shall not exceed the reasonable costs to the department for the implementation and administration of the licensing scheme.

(c) Nothing in this article shall be interpreted to imply that federally recognized tribes shall be required to obtain training or a permit to capture, handle, transport, or release beavers on lands held in federal trust for a tribe’s benefit.

(d) As used in this article, “beaver restoration program partners” means federal agencies, nonprofit organizations, federally recognized tribes, nonfederally recognized California Native American tribes included on the contact list maintained by the Native American Heritage Commission, academic programs, and other entities.

Get on it already, It’s practically May.

This remains my VERY FAVORITE PART of this bill because I am proud for my own kittle role in proving it to their satisfaction”

(a) The North American Beaver (Castor canadensis) is a keystone species that is native to California and was once prevalent in watersheds throughout the state.