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

Category: Beaver ecological impact


This is unbelievable. It’s been days since there was a significant beaver news story and this morning there are two stories of exact opposite dramatic weight. Neither one can wait until tomorrow. There’s no alternative, you must hear about BOTH of them. The best of times and the worst of times. The zenith and the nadir. The story we’ve all been waiting for and the story that we’ve never expected to read.

My only love sprung from my only hate, said Juliet. I can’t do a split screen but let’s just look at the headlines side by side, shall we?

 


Lest you think I exaggerate YES that headline says President Biden and YES that other headline is from The FRIGGIN’ WILDLIFE SOCIETY. So you can see my dilemma. Let’s start with the good news. It will give us strength for the other part.

Yesterday, this letter was delivered to President Biden requesting an executive order protecting beaver on federally managed public lands. “In order to fully realize the wide array of social, ecological, and economic benefits that beavers provide to human and wild communities, the federal government must take bold and decisive action,” said Adam Bronstein of Western Watersheds Project. “This executive order would provide clear direction and is needed because state wildlife agencies are too narrowly focused on the interest of hunters and trappers, leading to their continued failure to protect this critical keystone species. Anxieties are high and cut across state boundaries and addressing them requires a national strategy rather than a piecemeal approach.”

Why are beavers so important? Beavers and — the habitats they create — sequester vast amounts of carbon, provide vital habitat for fish and wildlife, create natural firebreaks, filter drinking water, store water during drought and temper flooding events. When beavers are removed from the landscape, these important benefits are lost. Beavers nearly went extinct in North America after centuries of fur trapping and extermination efforts and their populations have yet to recover across most areas of the United States. Protecting beavers by closing public lands to beaver trapping and hunting will vastly improve survival rates.

Suzanne Fouty wrote me weeks ago about this being in the works and Worth A Dam is a signatory to the letter but it’s nice to see the headline. The attached letter is a wonderful read and the signatories below are like a who’s who in the beaver world. Of course you know me, I wish it said something about killing beavers for other reasons like blockign culverts, but it’s a start and we all have our own fish to fry.

“Beavers are a keystone species, meaning that they play a crucial role in maintaining the biodiversity and stability of ecosystems,” adds Dr. William Ripple, Distinguished Professor of Ecology at Oregon State University. “Beavers have been referred to as ‘nature’s firefighters’ due to their ability to create wetland habitats that can act as natural firebreaks, slowing or even stopping the spread of wildfires.”

And as weather becomes increasingly unpredictable and severe and the economic, ecological, and emotional costs rise, we need all the help we can get. Long-time environmental advocate and singer/songwriter Carole King summed up the reality of the situation, “No matter how far downstream we live, beavers and their dams are beneficial to all of us because they create wetlands, mitigate drought and flooding, and filter pollutants from our rivers and streams.”

Nicely said. Beavers do a lot of things for the country that you say you want done. So lets not kill them. Except of course for in Michigan and Wisconsin where they degrade habitat and pollute our streams. How’s the whiplash coming along? This is from article II:

Beaver dams are a major cause of habitat degradation in the streams that drain into Lake Superior, Lake Huron and Lake Michigan. While beaver ponds can be beneficial to some species of wildlife, obstructions on these small tributaries can negatively impact critical habitat for migrating fish, including brook trout, particularly during spawning season. A single obstruction has the potential to impact fish passage over miles of the stream and can disrupt gravel stream bottoms necessary for successful spawning, decrease stream flow causing lower oxygen levels and negatively increase water temperature.

We expect malarkey like this from USDA. I mean goodness what else are they likely to do. But to read this report in THE WILDLIFE SOCIETY? Honest TWS has done some of the best and earliest beaver education in the country. In fact way back when the Martinez beavers were in danger I remember one of my most hopeful moments was when fellow committee member Igor Skaredoff attended a TWS beaver conference in Oregon. I expect better from them. Good lord.

Wildlife Services coordinated with the Michigan and Wisconsin departments of natural resources to identify stream locations that represented traditional coaster brook trout habitat. Staff then surveyed designated streams on foot, watercraft and fixed-wing aircraft to identify stream barriers. After locating beaver activity and dams through surveying, barriers were removed using a combination of hand pulling and explosives.

From 2018 to 2021, where the goal was to protect areas of coastal wetland and other habitats in Michigan, Wildlife Services staff monitored targeted areas along 19 streams, surveying approximately 200 acres and removing 120 beaver dams. During the same timeframe, Wildlife Services staff in Wisconsin worked to maintain stream connectivity established for aquatic species. Wisconsin Wildlife Services staff monitored targeted areas along 32 streams, spanning just over 300 miles, and removed a total of 225 beaver dams.

We are living in times of feast and times of famine. The best of times and the worst of times. The beaver renaissance and the beaver dark ages. It ain’t over until it’s over, Your help is still need.

Stay vigilant.


It’s not just Chernobyl where beavers are reclaiming huge wastelands for their own and slowly making it habitable for other wildlife. They’re doing it in Detroit also.

Beavers reclaiming land on abandoned island in Detroit River

Shoreline bushes chewed back. Nearby trees felled and demolished. Hundreds of branches piled near a mound damming up a river and flooding the area. To some people the scene looks like environmental havoc. 

To the beaver, it’s home.

Using trail cameras, FOX 2 photojournalist Coulter Stuart caught one of these rodents building his own den. It was spotted at an inlet on Stony Island in the Detroit River. In one scene, the beaver can be seen packing mud into the side of a mound – fortifications for his hut.

In another clip the beaver is seen walking on his hind legs, carrying sticks from one end ot the other. 

Capturing this ingenuity on display can be tough since the rodents are nocturnal and only build at night. During the day, the only evidence are their footprints in the dirt and the discarded wood that surrounds their homes.

There’s evidence of another kind of activity on Stony Island, too. Scrap metal and sunken barges now shape the shoreline, while beer cans and shotgun shells litter the land. One dilapidated building has a message spray-painted on its side telling visitors the island smells like urine. 

Yup trashy metal and a creek that smells like urine. That’s not so far off from the fine home our beavers once enjoyed. From the beaver perspective large chunks of metal aren’t that different from heavy wood and rock. They’ll do just fine to keep things anchored to the dam.

Once the home base for a massive project that transformed the Detroit River and Great Lakes shipping traffic, the 100-acre plot of land is slowly being reclaimed by wildlife.

“Wildlife is resilient. If you give it half a chance, you’d be surprised,” said Bob Burns who does conservation work with the Friends of the Detroit River group. 

It may be a surprise that beavers have returned at all. They were harvested to near-extinction when fur trappers arrived from Europe during the colonial era. The added pressures of pollution and habitat loss from Southeast Michigan’s rapid growth in the early 20th century would have made any return to the area extremely difficult.

Burns is a longtime resident of Southeast Michigan. From the burning of the Rouge River in 1969 to the emergence of PFAS in the 2000s, he’s witnessed the impacts of human contamination on the environment.

But in the past 10 years, he’s also seen mother nature’s response when it’s offered an opportunity to recover. The reemergence of beavers is a sign of that progress.

“I’m not saying things are perfect, far from it,” he said. “But from the days of dumping oil and grease and having fires on the river to now with improvements in water quality – it’s really starting to pay off over the past decade.”

Mr Burns is my favorite kind of naturalist. One whose eyes and ears are fully opened to the here and now of wildlife. I really enjoyed this short video with clips of Ben and Dan Flores talking about what the landscape was and could be again.

We ruin a waterway so badly that no one wants to live anywhere near it. And then because its neglected and free of human threats beavers move in and start to improve things so it looks nice again. And then people move BACK because it they want their pretty river back and suddenly they want to get rid of the pesky rodents.

Of course you know how the story goes. First it’s WOW BEAVERS ARE BACK! and then its Ugh Beavers are back. Those rats ruining our culverts or eating our cherry trees.

Their population growth has also led to an increase in nuisance complaints related to beavers – though not to the point they’re management requires a larger response.

“It’s still not to the point that it’s a growing problem, but it’s a tight rope to walk,” Cooley said. “People like having beavers around. It’s a good indication you have good habitat. But there does come a point where they start backing things up. That’s in their nature.”

Beavers are now regular sight at the Bayview Yacht Club. They’ve also found suitable habitat at the Conner Creek Power Plant where the Rouge River opens into the Detroit River. The DNR keeps watch of them on Belle Isle while a few have prompted animal trapping calls on Grosse Ile.

Recently, they surprised residents in Trenton at Ellias Cove.

The environment’s conservation will likely spur more interactions between humans and beavers as their numbers continue to grow. But Cooley says the beavers taking up residence on the islands that border Grosse Ile may not be such a bad thing.

“Being in the Detroit River, there’s not as many opportunities to cause problems. So that’s a good place for them to live,” he said. “If you build it, they will come.”

You know how it is, you have to strike a balance. Just like they did when they filled the river with ships bringing toxic supplies and then turned the entire boatway into a rusted dump. I guess that was a balance between pocketbooks. His and Theirs.

This new idea you’re suggesting, a balance between humans and nature, that sounds a little crazy to most people.


First you find out where they are and where they aren’t. And then you do things to make them more likely to stick around, like planting trees and kicking out the trappers. And then you sit back and let beavers do the work.

U.S. Forest Service to find out just how many beavers live in the valley

A beaver census is just downstream, to be administered by the White River National Forest this summer through October.

The Pitkin County Board of County Commissioners on Wednesday unanimously approved an agreement to allocate $50,000 of the Healthy Rivers and Streams Fund to partially finance a study into beaver activity and habitats Roaring Fork Valley headwaters.

“This agreement is to investigate and implement actions to promote beaver utilization of our headwater streams up on federal land in order to promote watershed health and occupation by native aquatic species,” said Lisa Tasker of the Healthy Rivers and Streams Citizen Advisory Board.

The money will go to hire two seasonal employees to visit high-elevation sites across federal land in the valley. Clay Ramey, a fisheries biologist with the White River National Forest, said he compiled 200 randomly generated sites, including Thompson Creek, Castle Creek, Snowmass Creek, eastern Maroon Creek, Hunter Creek, Woody Creek, and the upper Frying Pan area.

Now that and a beaver festival to teach everyone why it matters sounds like a really really good idea. Heck talk to Ellen Wohl and fund a couple graduate students doing the same thing while you’re at it.

“I’m really enthusiastic about this,” Commissioner Greg Poschman said. “And it’s this sort of activity that helps, you know, turn our kids on to preservation in the natural world and protection of important resources.”

“I imagined that we might use it for getting some beavers introduced into some river areas that maybe used to have them in the past but don’t have them now,” he said. “Because I see beavers as a way of backing the water up and helping the high-elevation wetlands become more of a sponge to hold water for later in the summer. To me, it’s really a good thing to do to keep the water back and up in the high country as long as possible.”

Ecologically, beavers dams and the pools they produce allow a healthy, vibrant riparian zone in areas they might not otherwise exist. And they hold runoff water at higher elevations for longer.

Ramey said that once the U.S. Forest Service knows where beavers already live and where they would improve the ecosystem, they can relocate beavers to sites that make ecological sense.

Okay I can tell you right now where they make sense. EVERYWHERE. And including all those nice places you’re relocating them from too.  Every place where you want the water cleaner.

Sure if you have some places where you want to keep the water dirty, good ahead and move those beavers.

“Beavers were native here. And so, before the gringos showed up and killed them all, there were beavers everywhere. And more or less every stream that’s less than something like 5% slope was just chock a block with beaver dams. The animals adapted to that, and the plant communities adapted to that. And the water that came out of these watersheds probably a lot slower than it did once we took all the beavers out,” Ramey said. “It’s using beavers as a management tool in this way; it’s attempting to re-create what was the existing natural, ecological context for the way water came off of the mountains here.”

Beaver dams also help in wildfire mitigation, as their pools encourage greater ground water retention and a refuge for wildlife in the event of a fire.

Once USFS has a complete data set of beavers and potential habitats throughout the forest, Ramey said that he will be able to inform Colorado Parks and Wildlife where to relocate beavers that have set up shop in residential areas.

“It’s not a beaver re-introduction project,” he said. “We’re just looking around.”

Well sure. First look around. And find out what’s currently happening in these places. Maybe streams are so damaged by the beaver shortage that you’ll need to help them along with some beaver dam analogs. Maybe there’s some scrubby places that could use a little more willow or aspen before you get a healthy beaver population.

The entire discussion was pretty congenial, even when one commissioner talked about disscecting a road kill beaver in his daughter’s fourth grade class…children love to learn about nature ya know.


This report is a fine reminder that no matter how well intentioned you are or how much money you have, its a good idea to bring your neighbors along with your project from the very beginning.  Whether that means having a barbecue or hosting fieldtrips or just answering phone calls. It takes a neighborhood to save a stream.

Animals and neighbors warm to Wallowa River restoration project

One of Ian Wilson’s greatest joys is going down to the short stretch of the Wallowa River on his family’s ranch to fly fish.

“For me, it’s the equivalent of … church for someone who is deeply religious,” he said.

But as a fish biologist, he’s also long known there was something off about the river as it cut across his property: The Wallowa was oddly, unnaturally straight. And because of that, it wasn’t very hospitable for fish. Rather than stop and spawn, salmon and steelhead tended to swim through the property.

Salmon like clean, shallow gravel beds to lay eggs. And smolt, or baby salmon, prefer lots of little still-water pools where they can relax and fatten up on insects. Basically, they need the kind of meandering river system that naturally occurs in a floodplain.

Over the years, Oregon’s farmers, road builders and developers cleared many of the state’s floodplains by cutting trees and filling in channels. Doing so maximized their ability to use land.

All those neighbors didn’t take too kindly to that stream stuff undoing all their hard work. But not everyone is privy to the  stream of thought that can see what a river should be. Fortunately he just kept right on working.

But now, because Chinook, steelhead and trout are listed under the Endangered Species Act, the Bonneville Power Administration is trying to rebuild floodplains using revenue from electricity generation.

With help from the nonprofit Trout Unlimited, Wilson won a $1.2 million BPA grant to restore his three-quarter mile stretch of river.

In the summer of 2022, crews placed 475 trees, many complete with massive root wads, in the channel to slow water down and spread it out. They built 54 artificial beaver dams to hold water in the floodplain and create lots of little stillwater pools. And they planted cottonwood, willow and alder trees for shade.

Considering the aim was to restore the river to a more natural state, the restoration was a relatively industrial project, with excavators and dump trucks. They dug channels and filled-in deep river pools.

Wilson said the work vastly increased fish spawning habitat. It  used to take him 45 minutes to look for salmon eggs in the river, “Now it takes me upwards of half a day, because there’s so much water to walk,” he said. “Same flows, but there’s just so much more area to cover.”

The restoration finished in September and lots of new animals have already shown up. Where Wilson used to see 10 ducks, he said there are maybe 100 now. He’s also spotted bald eagles, dragonflies and songbirds.

“Within two months, we had beavers return, which was beyond my wildest expectations,” Wilson said. “We’ve seen a black bear recently. We just saw a bobcat this last Sunday and there’s a lot of coyotes out.”

Beavers? Did you say you got BEAVERS? Wow that’s really lucky! And please tell me you aren’t so crazy as to think they’ll block all the salmon and decided to have them trapped out, right? So far so good.

It’s an environmentalist’s dream. But this is eastern Oregon, where endangered species listings have hurt local economies in the eyes and experiences of some residents. Land used for chinook salmon, the gray wolf, the Oregon spotted frog and other animals cannot easily be used for logging, mining or grazing, limiting economic activity.

And unlike many of his neighbors, Wilson is not reliant on his ranch income because he and his wife have other jobs. So he said when he gets the odd sour look at the grocery store he understands why, ”You know people give me a hard time,” he said. “And you just have to kind of accept that I guess, to some level.”

In hindsight, Wilson thinks he could have contacted more neighbors, even though it’s not required, “That probably would have gone a long way towards maybe a little more understanding, initially.”

To try to calm the waters, after all the work was finished Wilson held a neighborhood barbecue, to show everyone what he was up to.

“My reaction was, it was a huge project,” said Janet Hohman, Ken’s wife. She’s happy to see new riparian areas being created, but she’s withholding her verdict until it’s clear no logs get flushed downriver.

But Ken Hohman said he felt better after seeing all the work.

“I mean, it’s a good project,” he said. ” I wouldn’t spend $1 million of my money on it, but yeah.”

Sunlight is the best disinfectant, Showing your work and letting your neighbors know how it will affect them. Rivers are kind of remarkable symbols for how what I do in my little area might impact other people. You can never sneak restoration in under a cloak. Better to do it with a trumpet.


Beavers have put up with a lot over the years: near extermination, being called all kind of names, lies that they kill salmon or eat salmon or compete with salmon. They’ve been dropped out of airplanes and helicopters even when people thought they mattered. Meanwhile otters have sprung back from the fur trade being called cute and athletic, Even fishermen stop what they’re doing to watch otters frolic, Even when they hate them. It’s not fair in any way, considering who does all the work that makes all those fish ponds that the otters enjoy in the first place,

So you have to forgive beavers (and me) for enjoying the thinnest slice of Schadenfreude in the past 24 hours where headlines like these have been falling like thick snowflakes.

Otter kills young beavers released at Loch Lomond

An otter is suspected to have killed two beaver kits released at Loch Lomond last month. The kits, along with their parents and three siblings, were relocated from Tayside to a nature reserve as part of efforts to boost biodiversity.

The dead beavers and an otter were spotted on remote camera footage last week.Conservationists said a post-mortem examination had confirmed an otter had preyed on one of the kits.

Well of course the post mortem  could show kits in their stomachs but they couldn’t actually prove the otter killed them. I mean anything might have happened and the otter just swam up to investigate and gotten lucky. and nibbled the spoils. I mean be honest, it’s not OTTER CSI we don’t know for sure what took place. But it’s a reasonable assumption. They do attack pelicans and baby ducks, I’ve been seeing headlines like “Otters attack” and “Killer otters” for days now and all I am sure that every fish in the world is reading those headlines thinking, “MMM….And how cute are they now?”

The world is temporarily out of balance. Don’t fret, it will right itself soon enough. Let’s just turn the page and see what challenges beavers are facing now, shall we?

Refuge Notebook: More research needed to determine beavers’ impact on landscape

I was recently pouring through decades of beaver harvest data, trying to map where people had harvested beaver on the refuge and where they had not. This historical data is one piece of a complex puzzle in predicting current and future distribution on the landscape.

As a biologist, I feel that one of our strongest traits is pattern recognition, which was in full force as I input years of harvest data. With every name, I could visualize times I had been to almost every spot.

Even when the harvest report had the wrong name or spelling, I remembered doing a bird or vegetation survey nearby. The patterns continued year after year until I came to a name I had never noticed, Ootka Lake.

What a cool name, and why do I not know where it is? I started old school and scanned my paper maps to no avail. Next, I used my trusty electronic device and found Ootka Lake in the Beaver Creek Drainage near Akula Lake.

I had to know more about it.

As I looked at the map and traced the water back through the drainage, I also realized there was very little geological or topographical reason for a lake in the middle of these vast wetland-stream complexes.

There may or may not be beavers there now, but it seems apparent as I backtracked up “Beaver” Creek that these lakes were at one time formed by some of nature’s most energetic engineers.

There was no geological explanation for a lake there. Some other culprit must be to blame. Beavers are afoot! Call in Mr. Holmes at once, maybe he can get to the bottom of this.

At some point, I will have to find my way to the downstream side of Q’alts’ih Bena and see if there is an active beaver dam. Or is the history of that well-constructed dam buried under the lakeshore sediments and leaf detritus?

The picture in my mind of beavers dragging birch limbs down to the water’s edge may not be present, but somewhere buried in that lakeshore is a history of how a small creek was temporarily blocked, filling the valley with water, and then continued to flow down to the Kenai River and how that slow meandering creek and wetland were transformed into a small lake that continues as a place today.

What a treat to know the Dena’ina had already discovered the history of this place and named it long before the timeline of the beaver harvest records in front of me.

As our climate continues to change, concerns have surfaced about warming waterways and potential impacts on salmon. Some of my colleagues have been looking at where water in nonglacial streams similar to Beaver Creek originates and what influences the water temperature throughout the season.

Because I just THOUGHT it so it must be true. Beavers must warm ponds and kill salmon. Never mind all that research saying that dams actually cause hyporheic exchange that ends up COOLING the waters. Because science is hard to read and makes my head hurt.

Since there are no glaciers affecting water quantity and temperature in this system, we can narrow inputs down to snow melt, rain, artesian upwelling and wetlands. The lakes hold water and slowly release stored water like a sponge.

In some situations, temporary flooding from a well-placed beaver dam could be the catalyst that wets the surrounding spongy wetland. It is actually feasible that throughout a warm, dry climatic period, inputs like artesian upwelling and slow-released water from wetlands might be the temperature-stabilizing influence these creeks need to remain viable for salmon and other habitat components they need.

When I see things like fire, insect outbreaks and drought can change landscapes, I am stumped at why I never put beavers in the same category. Without more study, we can only speculate, but the influences of one family of beaver could be far-reaching. The obvious storage of water in a lake is the low-hanging fruit in this story.

Time and future research will hopefully shed light on the function of beavers on our landscape previously, today and into the future. But, for now, my daydream of visiting Q’alts’ih Bena must be put on hold as there are 10 more years of data to input and five other outstanding reports to be finished before the summer field season arrives.

Yeah it might turn out that beavers are actually helping things by making these spongy wetlands but we don;’t know for sure. It could be a fluke, They could be a cancer, spreading across the tundra and wreaking havoc. Better spend more money on research just to be sure.

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