Please join with 250 non-profit organizations, scientists and advocates who submitted this letter to President Biden on February 27, 2023 asking for an Executive Order to protect beaver on our federally managed public lands as a proactive emergency climate response!
This petition will close on May 31, 2023 and be prepared for submission to the Biden Administration.
Ending beaver trapping and hunting on our federally managed public lands is a nature-based climate solution that will help restore many of our streams and wetlands, and bring real, tangible benefits to our communities.
Drought, floods, wildfires, and crashing fish and wildlife populations are no longer confined to small areas but spill across state boundaries. State wildlife agencies have failed to act in our best collective interest as they continue to narrowly focus on select recreational user groups even as our human and wild communities are increasingly stressed by the accelerating impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss. It is time for action at the national level.
Benefits include: More dependable water for cities, towns, farms and ranches; natural water filtration systems resulting in improved water quality; natural firebreaks creating refuges for wildlife during wildfires and protecting water quality post fire; temporary surface and groundwater storage that dampens flood peaks and improves stream flows during droughts; abundant quality fish and wildlife habitat; and drawdown of atmospheric carbon as wetland habitat expands.
Beavers can help us meet the challenges before us but only if we protect them. It is time to ask the President to take action as a matter of national security. Time is of the essence.
Matt Kaminski stood on a road scarcely higher than the floodplain, glassy pools on all sides stretched out like something from a dream. In the distance, a storm lumbered over the Coast Ranges.
The marsh all around him, Kaminski said, was a window into the Central Valley’s past. Back then, the waterways that twist down from the Sierra Nevada mountains would flood unrestricted by the current thicket of dams, canals and levees.
The more you know about rivers, the less confidence you have in a mapmaker’s static squiggle. Kaminski, a biologist from Ducks Unlimited who helps oversee the floodplain and, when it dries out, the grasslands, explained that when “the state of California was wild, it had a lot more wetlands.”
During the rainiest years, the whole valley could transform into an enormous, shallow sea. Floodwaters would spread over the landscape and percolate through the soil into the aquifers beneath. Little aquatic creatures would make their home in the tules and migrating birds would stop to gorge on their long journeys in the spring and fall. The Valley oaks and Fremont cottonwoods would rise, improbably, out of the shallows.
That appeared to be happening just east of Gustine in Merced County, as yet another storm from the tropics approached the valley: The San Joaquin River seemed to spread out and create an ephemeral wetland, a natural process.
But Kaminski pointed to the edge of the water, where three concrete slabs jutted into the marsh, and little slats of wood controlled the flow under the dirt road to the other side.
This marsh hadn’t flooded on its own.
Instead, the wetland was an artifice on top of an artifice. Powerful California interests “reclaimed” the Central Valley’s wetlands in the 19th and early 20th centuries, draining them for agricultural use and transforming the landscape.
The vast majority of the state’s marshes are gone.
But in little pockets in the state, people like Kaminski are reworking the land yet again to bring back a version of California’s past, in service of the future. By allowing rivers to spread out, flows are diverted from downstream communities, replenishing groundwater and staving off unwanted floods.
“These wetlands,” Kaminski likes to say, “act as a sponge.”
And the state agreed. In September, the California Wildlife Conservation Board earmarked $40 million for the nonprofit River Partners to spend on similar projects in the San Joaquin Valley.
But in the governor’s proposed budget released in January, that funding was axed. The news came early in the procession of climate-change-fueled winter storms that have led to staggering snowpack in the Sierra, extensive flooding throughout the state and more than 30 deaths. Facing a budget shortfall, Gov. Gavin Newsom had moved to kneecap efforts to use the historical floodplain as a way to recharge groundwater and to prevent disasters in human-occupied areas.
“In the San Joaquin Valley, we’ve got a product pipeline of about $200 million worth of floodplain expansion projects that are ready to go,” said Julie Rentner, president of River Partners. But the proposed budget, she said, “has zero dollars to be used towards that pipeline.”
Rentner said that habitat restoration cannot wait.
Well I certainly agree that habitat restoration cannot wait! But I still don’t understand why they didn’t mention our potential to do much of this fixing up for free? We’re certainly at work in the San Joaquin River Ecological Reserve! We got some good press on the BBC though:
Credit: UT Jackson School of Geosciences/ National Center for Health Statistics/ USDA Forest Service.
A new species of ancient beaver that was rediscovered by researchers in The University of Texas at Austin’s fossil collections has been named after Buc-ee’s, a Texas-based chain of popular travel centers known for its cartoon beaver mascot. The beaver is called Anchitheriomys buceei, or “A. buceei” for short. Steve May, a research associate at the UT Jackson School of Geosciences, said that the beaver’s Texas connection and a chance encounter with a Buc-ee’s billboard are what inspired the name.
May is the lead author of the paper that describes A. buceei, along with another, much smaller, species of fossil beaver. Published in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica, the paper provides an overview of beaver occurrences along the Texas Gulf Coast from 15 million to 22 million years ago based on bones and archival records in the UT collections.
While driving down a highway in 2020, May spotted a Buc-ee’s billboard that said “This is Beaver Country.” The phrase brought to mind the Texas beaver fossils he had been studying at UT’s Texas Vertebrate Paleontology Collections.
“I thought, ‘Yeah, it is beaver country, and it has been for millions of years,'” May said.
A. buceei lived in Texas about 15 million years ago. To the casual observer, it probably wouldn’t have looked much different from beavers living in Texas today, according to study co-author Matthew Brown, the director of the Jackson School’s vertebrate paleontology collections. However, one key difference is size. A. buceei was bigger—about 30% larger than modern beavers—though still much smaller than the bear-size beavers that lived in North America during the last Ice Age.
The UT collections includes A. buceei fossils from six Texas sites. But most of what researchers know about the new fossil beaver comes from a unique partial skull from Burkeville, Texas. The fossil is a fusion of bone and brain cast that was created when sediment naturally seeped into the beaver’s brain cavity eons ago, creating a rock replica of the brain as the specimen fossilized.
See the rest of the article. And there is another bit of news on PHYS-ORG that might lessen concerns about the greenhouse gas produced in wetlands.
Annual mean near-surface air temperature response to methane, decomposed into (a) longwave and shortwave effects; (b) longwave effects only; and (c) shortwave effects only. Credit: Robert Allen/UCR
Most climate models do not yet account for a new UC Riverside discovery: methane traps a great deal of heat in Earth’s atmosphere, but also creates cooling clouds that offset 30% of the heat. Greenhouse gases like methane create a kind of blanket in the atmosphere, trapping heat from Earth’s surface, called longwave energy, and preventing it from radiating out into space. This makes the planet hotter.
“A blanket doesn’t create heat, unless it’s electric. You feel warm because the blanket inhibits your body’s ability to send its heat into the air. This is the same concept,” explained Robert Allen, UCR assistant professor of Earth sciences.
In addition to absorbing longwave energy, it turns out methane also absorbs incoming energy from the sun, known as shortwave energy. “This should warm the planet,” said Allen, who led the research project. “But counterintuitively, the shortwave absorption encourages changes in clouds that have a slight cooling effect.”
This effect is detailed in the journal Nature Geoscience, alongside a second finding that the research team did not fully expect. Though methane generally increases the amount of precipitation, accounting for the absorption of shortwave energy suppresses that increase by 60%.
Both types of energy—longwave (from Earth) and shortwave (from sun)—escape from the atmosphere more than they are absorbed into it. The atmosphere needs compensation for the escaped energy, which it gets from heat created as water vapor condenses into rain, snow, sleet, or hail.
“Essentially, precipitation acts as a heat source, making sure the atmosphere maintains a balance of energy,” said study co-author Ryan Kramer, a researcher at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Methane changes this equation. By holding on to energy from the sun, methane is introducing heat the atmosphere no longer needs to get from precipitation.
Additionally, methane shortwave absorption decreases the amount of solar radiation reaching Earth’s surface. This in turn reduces the amount of water that evaporates. Generally, precipitation and evaporation are equal, so a decrease in evaporation leads to a decrease in precipitation.
“This has implications for understanding in more detail how methane and perhaps other greenhouses gases can impact the climate system,” Allen said. “Shortwave absorption softens the overall warming and rain-increasing effects but does not eradicate them at all.”
. . .
Scientific interest in methane has increased in recent years as levels of emissions have increased. Much comes from industrial sources, as well as from agricultural activities and landfill. Methane emissions are also likely to increase as frozen ground underlying the Arctic begins to thaw.
Regardless of our contribution to the atmosphere, as the first article shows, we beaver folks have been at this for a very long time. It’s your recent behavior that’s causing the problems! Check out the report.
Should you ever wish to travel back to the times of the Tudors in London, you’ll probably notice significantly more folks on horseback and rows of half-timbered houses. It also will beam you to a time where beavers could be seen scuttling around riverbanks, doing their dam thing.
Sadly, the rodents were eventually hunted to extinction for their fur and meat, but after more than 400 years, it looks like the boys beavers are back in town.
Come this Autumn, London will have its first beaver habitat that’s accessible to the public, when Paradise Fields in Greenford welcomes a breeding pair, who will arrive alongside their kits (infants).
It comes—handily, on World Rewilding Day!—as part of major plans to rewild London, with conservation groups receiving nearly £40,000 in funding from City Hall to create this habitat for beavers.
Canal boots and footbridge near Paradise Fields in Greenford (Image: PawelByl, Shutterstock)
Eventually, this area will become a ‘beaver safari’ for visitors to view the rodents, who are known for their vegetarian diet and their dam-building prowess. It is hoped that this skill will be useful to quell flooding in England made worse by climate change.
Beaver enthusiasts may recall some talk of beavers arriving in London last year as part of rewilding plans, and they were, in fact, introduced in Enfield. Sadly, the male beaver – who was named Justin Beaver (!) and arrived alongside his partner, Sigourney (!!) – passed away due to natural causes three months into the rewilding scheme.
A second beaver is said to have been welcomed at Forty Hall farm in north London, though Paradise Fields in Greenford will welcome more beavers as part of this first ‘beaver safari’ later this year. This safari is part of a new wetland planned in Ealing by Citizen Zoo, Ealing Wildlife Group, Ealing Council and Friends of Horsenden Hill.
In a press release, Nick Swallow, Citizen Zoo Fundraising Operations Officer, said: “Across Europe and North America, beavers are known to thrive alongside urban communities.
“…We hope to challenge the perceptions of Londoners and demonstrate how London too, can embrace these ecosystem engineers as we strive for a healthier, wilder future in which our Capital can become a leader in urban rewilding, which will greatly benefit not only wildlife populations but local communities too.”
“We’re cleaning up our city, re-establishing lost species and reconnecting people and nature as we build a greener, fairer city for all Londoners.”
Cliff Samson has a love-hate relationship with his “neighbours” along Pigeon Creek.
“Behind my property here, I’ve got a nice pond creek that’s running all year, and I’ve got all kinds of animals and whatnot for the past, probably seven years.”
Then one day in the past few years, his “neighbours” moved in … or more precisely, beavers began to build homes and dams on the creek, and according to Samson, there are some good points of having these industrious critters nearby.
“What ends up happening is that there’s a natural waterfall down at the other end and in the summer months, when it’s dry, there’s no water coming over that. Without the beaver dam at this end, all my water would drain out, and I would basically have a marsh behind my house with no water in it. But because of the beaver dam, it keeps water here all the time. And as a result, I’ve got wildlife here all the time.”
While the beavers do allow Samson and his family to enjoy regular visits by various wildlife caused by the flowing water, the situation does come with some overflow issues.
According to the Ministry of Northern Development, Mines, Natural Resources and Forestry, it is illegal to damage or destroy a beaver dam unless specifically exempted through the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Act, such as for the removal of dams to protect private property.
“When a landowner elects to remove a beaver dam, the landowner or agent must exercise extreme caution to prevent downstream flooding, damage to natural habitats and property damage,” said Amanda Vincent, resource management co-ordinator for the ministry.
So what should a property owner do if they spot a beaver dam on their property that could cause infrastructure damage?
The ministry said property owners can make the area uninviting for beavers by planting vegetation that beavers don’t like, such as elderberry, ninebark and twinberry; wrapping individual trees in metre-high, galvanized welded wire fencing, hardware cloth or multiple layers of chicken wire; or painting tree trunks with a sand and paint mix to protect trees from beaver damage.
One can also hire an experienced trapper or wildlife technician to properly remove the beavers from the region. [But we’ll be back!]
In cases of flooding due to a blocked waterway or culvert, some experts recommend using a beaver deceiver, a structure that utilizes a plastic culvert and heavy-duty fencing installed in the beaver dam, allowing water to drain to a lower level.
Beavers! They’re baaack! Beavers are amazing animals. Hear about their incredible physiology, Heidi Perryman and Mitch Avalon relate the story of the Martinez beavers, and what’s next for them in the Bay Area.
Over the past decade, beaver populations have returned to southeast Michigan in places such as Belle Isle, Stony Island, the Conner Creek Power Plant and other places along the Detroit River.
Why did beaver populations decline?
When settlers moved into metro Detroit, beaver trapping for the fur trade was plentiful, eliminating much of the population. The existence of this species was almost wiped out due to 300 years of trapping and trading. Along with trapping, industrialization and habitat loss pushed beavers out of the area and they were last reported in 1877 as a result, said Great Lakes Now.
When did beavers return to the area?
Beavers were first reported back in the area in 2008, according to Friends of the Rouge. For the first time in over 100 years, beavers gnawed away at trees and built damns near Conners Creek Power Plant. Since then, beaver sightings in the Detroit and Rouge Rivers aren’t uncommon and continues to increase.
But not necessarily welcome throughout.
Are beavers good for urbanized areas?
The DNR has beavers categorized as nuisance wildlife due to damage caused in urban and industrialized areas. They often gnaw on trees and their damns cause flooding and problems for homeowners. The DNR does offer trapping services and permits for those impacted in certain areas.
Cooley wrote the DNR is given a difficult hand because they want beavers around but not at the expense of someone’s property.
“Beaver in residential areas typically lead to problems, it’s their nature to back up and flood a waterway to create a pond,” he wrote. “Up North or out in the country, they can do that and it doesn’t impact anyone, most people would never even know it happened. However, down here in southeast Michigan if they back up a drain or a river, it is eventually going to flood someone’s yard and possibly impact their house.”
The Cropton Forest beaver project, which saw two beavers released on enclosed land upstream of Sinnington in April 2019, has been credited with helping to reduce the flood risk for the village and for transforming the ecology of the area for the good.
The five year project, which is overseen by Forestry England, hopes to examine the impact of re-introducing beavers to the wild in England after they were hunted to extinction in the sixteenth century. It’s one of a number of pilots across the UK which have support from a number of organisations including the RSPB.
Ecologist Cath Bashforth next to a beaver dam at Cropton Forest in North Yorkshire. The beavers in the pilot scheme at the enclosure have “far exceeded” her expectations. (Image: Forestry England)
At the centre of the North Yorkshire beavers’ habitat is an enormous 70m long dam that the original beavers have built over the years alongside the kits that they’ve had since being re-introduced to the area four years ago.
Ecologist Cath Bashforth, who leads the project, said that the pilot has “far exceeded what we expected.
“We never expected such a dramatic impact in such a short space of time.”
In terms of the dramatic impact, the slowing of water flow through the site helps protect downstream areas from flooding, however the beavers’ presence has a knock on effect in many areas surrounding their habitat.
“At the start of the trial we had some fantastic volunteers who helped us take a baseline biodiversity survey to examine what impact the beavers would have,” says Cath.
The view of the enormous beaver dam in Cropton Forest from above. (Image: Forestry England)
Having built their enormous dam along with five or six smaller ones Cath is optimistic that the beavers will be able to stay in North Yorkshire on conclusion of the pilot scheme.
As the project looks to reach its conclusion in a little over a year, the fate of the beavers presently on site remains undecided.
Peregrine Audubon Society Program will be hosting a zoom presentation on Tuesday, March 21 at 7 p.m. featuring The Beaver Believers hosted by Sarah Koenigsberg of the Beaver Coalition.
In this film, we follow our Beaver Believers out into some truly spectacular landscapes of the interior West, from the east slopes of the Cascade mountains in Washington to the Rockies in Colorado, from the parched red rock deserts of southern Utah to an urban park in central California.
We take you to places where beaver have already begun to transform damaged watersheds, and we learn of the many challenges that stand in the way of larger scale efforts to use beaver as a restoration tool, including trapping, which is tragically still legal in most states.
Perhaps most importantly, we meet incredible people who, undaunted by climate change, are working tirelessly to protect and restore beaver out on the landscape, who embody the spirit and joy that comes from “thinking like a beaver,” who show us that collaboration and watershed restoration truly are possible. All we have to do is let the beaver come home.
The coalition is dedicated to strategically advancing a paradigm shift in society’s relationship with beaver. Learn more at beavercoalition.org
Researchers in Poland have found another reason to love beavers: They benefit wintering birds.
The rodents, once maligned as destructive pests, have been getting a lot of positive press lately. And for good reason. Beavers are ecosystem engineers. As they gather trees and dam waterways, they create wetlands, increase soil moisture, and allow more light to reach the ground. That drives the growth of herbaceous and shrubby vegetation, which benefits numerous animals.
Bats, who enjoy the buffet of insects found along beaver ponds, are among the beneficiaries. So too are butterflies who come for the diversity of flowering plants in the meadows beavers create.
Some previous research has found that this helping hand also extends to birds. For example, a 2008 study in the western United States showed that the vegetation that grows along beaver-influenced streams provided needed habitat for migratory songbirds, many of whom are in decline.
A beaver dam in Bierbza Marshes, Poland. Photo: Francesco Veronesi (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The new study published in the journal Forest Ecology and Management found further evidence by focusing on birds in winter. The researchers looked at assemblages of wintering birds on 65 beaver sites and 65 reference sites in a range of temperate forest habitat across Poland. Winter can be a challenging time for birds in that environment, as they need to reduce energy expenditures in the cold weather and find habitat that has high-quality food and roosting sites.
Wintering birds, it turns out, find those qualities near beaver habitat.
The researchers found a greater abundance of birds and more species richness near areas where beavers had modified waterways. Both were highest closest to the shores of beaver ponds.
“All beaver-induced modifications of the existing habitat may have influence on bird assemblage,” says Michal Ciach, a study co-author and a professor in the department of Forest Biodiversity at the University of Agriculture in Krakow, Poland. “But different bird species may rely on different habitat traits that emerge due to beaver activity. It’s like a supermarket.”
The Eurasian beaver. Photo: Per Harald Olsen/NTNU (CC BY 2.0)
The growing research about beavers suggests a greater need to protect their habitat and understand their important role in the ecosystem.
“Beaver sites should be treated as small nature reserves,” says Ciach. “The beaver, like no other species, is our ally in stopping the decline of biodiversity.”
The City of St. Albert is upping its engineering-ante in an ongoing duel with the local beaver population by installing some new water infrastructure safeguards over the next few years.
The City of St. Albert plans to add a couple of new tools to its water-management tool belt over the next few years to counteract problems caused by the local beaver population.
Melissa Logan, the city’s environmental coordinator, said staff will install pond levellers in high-priority spots throughout Carrot Creek and the Sturgeon River, starting this summer.
Unbeknownst to the estimated 16 individual beavers who call these rivers home, pond levellers allow water to flow through dams to prevent flooding, Logan said.
“The pond levellers you can put right in the middle of a dam and it will keep the water flowing through so that we don’t get flooding, but still allow the beaver to create some of the habitat that it needs,” she said.
“It’s just a method of coexisting with beavers on the landscape instead of getting rid of them entirely.”
City staff are getting some new tools to counteract regular infrastructure damage caused by the estimated 16 local beavers. FILE/Photo
“Best-case scenario is that beavers are still able to be active on the landscape and do their natural water management,” Logan said of what she hopes the new tools will accomplish.
“Protection of our infrastructure in the long term is really what we’re looking for.”
Logan said staff will install the tools in high-priority areas this summer, and in lower priority areas over the next few years.
Major cost savings
Glynnis Hood, an environmental biology and ecology professor at the University of Alberta’s Augustana campus in Camrose and author of The Beaver Manifesto (2011), told The Gazette she has seen pond levellers save municipalities thousands of dollars.
“There’s cost savings, there’s ecological advantages, (and) there’s infrastructure advantages for reducing maintenance needs,” said Hood.
“For instance, in Cooking Lake-Blackfoot, we installed about 13 (pond levellers) and then we monitored them over seven years. The maintenance that was required … was maybe pull a few sticks out here and there and they worked really well,” she said.
“The cost savings was in the tens of thousands of dollars, and if we added on some other economic drivers … it could even be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars of cost savings just for those 13 sites that otherwise have been chronically flooded for over 10 years.”
Hood said pond levellers, culvert protectors, and other beaver-damage mitigation can improve how people in the community view their neighbourhood beavers.
Beavers as extreme-weather mitigators
As part of an ongoing five-year project, Hood and Dr. Cherie Westbrook from the University of Saskatchewan are studying how beavers and their dams might help mitigate extreme climate events, such as floods and droughts.
“Over 60 per cent of the beaver dams actually held even in the 2013 flood that devastated Calgary and downstream areas,” she said. “Many of the beaver dams were only partially breached or didn’t breach at all.”
“They actually played a role in holding back some of that floodwater or at least delayed or slowed its downstream flow.”
Hood said it’s too early to say definitively if beaver dams could be a significant tool during extreme-weather events in Alberta, but current data and modelling looks promising.
“In climate change, you’re going to get more extreme-weather events, like these big rainfall events, but you’re also going to get drought, and beavers (might) play a role in a natural and nature-based solution for some of these things.”
To learn more about beavers and, as Logan described, their unmatched water management engineering ability, Hood was recently featured in a TED-Talk YouTube video.
The recent winter storms on the Central Coast didn’t just affect humans — they’ve also damaged the habitat of the local beaver population.
Audrey Taub is the Executive Director of the SLO Beaver Brigade, who describe themselves as “beaver advocates.” It’s a group of local biologists, science enthusiasts and community members who educate people about the rodents and the role they play in our ecosystem.
While talking and teaching about beavers is often a joyful experience, Taub said there has been some sad news recently about local beaver populations.
“The big rains pretty much washed everything out. This particular storm definitely displaced them,” Taub said.
“We found one dead juvenile. So they really can’t live on their own until they’re at least two. So these one-year-olds just didn’t have a chance.”
The SLO Beaver Brigade helped paint, “The Beaver Mural” on a local coffee shop they meet at once a week.
Taub said after the heavy rain, local beavers will have to rebuild their dams in places like streams and ponds. She said it’s not clear how long that will take, but she’s “excited for the whole community to watch the ponds develop,” Taub said.
Beavers play a major role in fighting climate change by building dams, which helps create and restore wetlands.
That’s important, because it’s estimated that globally, wetlands can store about 190 million cars’ worth of emissions every year.
Cooper Lienhart is the SLO Beaver Brigade’s Restorations Director.
“I used to think we would engineer our way out of the problem and make synthetic trees to suck CO2 back out of the atmosphere. But yeah, I learned that wetlands are [the] most efficient land ecosystem at absorbing and storing CO2,” Lienhart said.
Last week the SLO Beaver Brigade received the California Coastal Commission’s WHALE TAIL grant. Taub and Lienhart said the money will be used to offer educational tours, river cleanups, and translations for Spanish-speakers interested in learning about beavers.
More information on the emissions-fighting rodents is online at slobeaverbrigade.com.
Read the whole article here.
And there is more news from the SLO Beaver Brigade: The First Annual SLO County Beaver Festival!
Beaver Festival Info:
The SLO Beaver Brigade invites eager beavers of all ages to the First Annual SLO County Beaver Festival on Saturday April 1 in SLO Mission Plaza from 10 am to 3 pm. Kids are welcome and encouraged to come learn about beavers with us! The festival will be a celebration of our local beavers with live music, speakers, food and drink, educational displays, crafts and games, and local booths
Why do we celebrate beavers? Because we see them as climate change superheroes! Beavers build dams in our creeks and rivers, turning them into lush wetlands. This SLOWS the water down, allowing it to SPREAD out and SINK into our aquifers (slow it, spread it, sink it)! Not only does this help us in droughts, but their wetlands also create refuge from wildfires. Come join us on April 1st to learn about all this and more at our first ever SLO Beaver Festival.
And for the last bit of news, there is a very lively and informative interview with Ben Goldfarb by Taya Jae at The Pen and The Sword.
This petition is a good dam thing to support! But I don’t understand why they didn’t mention our ability to help out in this piece below:
Beavers! They’re baaack! Beavers are amazing animals. Hear about their incredible physiology, 
