Regular readers of this blog know I don’t pull out the ‘Star Wars award ceremony’ for just any beaver article. I did it when the New York Times finally decided to read the memo and report that beavers matter (even if the author did first write that beaver live in the dam). And I do it for this – I’m pretty sure this is better. I’m tearing up so often it’s hard to be sure. This is the kind of glorious article you need to GO READ FOR YOUR SELF in its entirety. But I will serve up some highlights to whet your appetite.

Better with Beavers

by Rob Rich

Beavers seem to know that healthy waters need wood – big wood to scour deep pools, dead wood to fertilize them, racked-up wood to complicate the flow. The intricacies of their dams, lodges, and mazing canals surpass all belief, in spite of – or rather, because of – the ways they are riven with a wild porosity, in need of constant maintenance. With all this industry and adaptive efficacy, beavers are deserving “ecosystem engineers,” even as they compel more expansive definitions for this very term. We typically engineer ecosystems by neatening and bleakening them with inert structures, often at the expense of other species. But the organic approach of Castor canadensis actually increases biodiversity, including direct contributions to over 25 percent of herbaceous plant species along forested rivers and streams.

In this respect, beavers are also “keystone species” that have disproportionately large impacts on their neighbors, including us….The discerning eye can look at maps of the Pacific Northwest and pick out lands where beavers came before. Some remain fertile wetlands, others are now pastures with “good” groundwater, still more are wet floral meadows tucked away in the woods. Our most livable and lovable landscapes are often ancient beaver ponds, first cleared, composted, and irrigated by beavers long ago. For the many happy bovines we see amid the longest-green grass, we can thank a beaver. For the homes that are flood-buffered or firewise with nearby ponds, we also can thank a beaver. And if you drink water in Bellingham, Washington, it’s been stored and filtered by wetlands upstream. At least for this, we can surely thank a beaver. 

Sniff. I love everything about this article. But the bold sentence I love especially. If you love the way your pastures or farmlands look, thank a beaver. If you love that your home is above the flood plane, thank a beaver.  The only thing this article needs is better photos. That scruffy muskrat-looking kit is no way to tell a story. Rob needs to talk with Suzi and have this article properly illustrated.

Yet as trials and errors teach us time and again that no one person can achieve restoration alone, the promise of partnership has taken a new turn. The return of beavers to their former haunts is showing us that even our species – the great Homo sapiens – can’t achieve restoration alone. While the Pacific Northwest remains collectively committed to the ongoing work of restoration, there is the growing awareness that our former salmon abundance was made possible with the beavers’ work. The last five centuries aside, beavers were one of the greatest earth-shapers on the continent, creating the very conditions in which our beloved salmon evolved. However much it jabs at our hubris, we are realizing that our aspirations to restore landscapes may be a kind of beaver mimicry. ELJs are, after all, what beavers do. Near my home, in the Stillaguamish River watershed, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration even estimates that, after the fur trade, winter habitats producing young salmon were reduced by 86 percent without the beavers’ presence.

It’s no wonder that beaver-based restoration partnerships are forming all around the region, eager to dispatch the rodents like mercenaries to the frontlines of damaged watersheds. And where direct reintroductions are not possible or practical, we are learning to welcome the rodents who naturally return.

Sometime you just need to get that second cup of coffee and settle in for a good long read. As wonderful as the article is, it’s even sweeter because the author was at the beaver conference, wrote me a LOVELY compliment about my presentation, and said he agreed with me that Lorne Fitch’s presentation was amazing. He also loved meeting his hero Kent in person.

US Forest Service biologist Kent Woodruff knows that many landowners consider beavers problematic, but his leadership on the project has shown them how these animals can aid us in timely, cost-effective ways. Woodruff can talk about beavers one minute as though they are venerable elders; in another, they might be an Allen wrench, just the right size; in the next, he might be on his knees, pointing out to some visiting schoolkid what makes one beaver’s tail unlike all the others. It’s no wonder that Woodruff has been dubbed a “beaver whisperer.” Since 2008, the project has relocated over 300 beavers around the Methow Valley watershed, most to headwater streams on public land.

Shhh, here comes my favorite sentence:

Glamorous as these intensive restorations are, sometimes the simplest tactic is just to let the beavers come home. But this can also be the most challenging approach – while still the most necessary – because it requires a coexistence that conquers our perceptions of beavers as pests.

You knew it was going to be something like that, right? Let the beavers relocate themselves and if you have to change anything,  spend the effort changing the people. That should be on my tombstone. There’s a very nice passage about Tricia Otto who allowed beavers to reawaken her property. Something tells me we’d be great friends.

Thankfully, there are growing numbers of people who welcome these nomads. Over the past two years, I have worked weekly as a land steward with Tricia Otto, a retired doctor and avid conservationist who had long sought to restore native biodiversity on a wounded piece of land. In 1989, when Tricia bought her hundred-acre parcel of weed-sprung woods outside Bellingham, she never thought beavers would enter the scene. But soon after her arrival, the beavers followed. First they clogged an old culvert, which backed up the little-trickle-of-a-blackberry-strangled-creek, which ultimately drowned her driveway. After a few winters of driving through standing water, she realized the beavers were doing other things: As silent teeth sawed through the nights and wet roots went to rot, trees fell. And in the felling, even-aged woods became a multigenerational community. Light hit the land again, and sometimes the land became water. Without even asking, the beavers were helping Tricia achieve her conservation goals.

Tricia!  You are a girl after my own heart. I love your pragmatic appreciation of the work beavers do. Go Read the article. Why aren’t you going to read the article?

In the past several decades, Portland, with its progressive urban growth boundary to constrict sprawl and keep the city green, has become a destination of the eco-friendly. And ever since officials from nearby Tigard, Oregon rashly breached a beaver dam, locals have started to speak up for their state animal. Greater Portland’s urban parks have become oases touted for “beaver watching” opportunities, and wherever possible, beavers are allowed to do what beavers do. The sheer curiosity these rodents provoke has shown that our natural aesthetics are wildly adaptable. Where the beavers draw too close for comfort, there are options. People are learning to foil the fellers from taking down cherished trees with hardy fences, or by coating the trunks with an abrasive paint-sand mixture.

And where beavers are truly threatening safety, public infrastructure, or private homes, people are turning to the rapidly evolving realm of non-lethal fences and flow devices aimed at beaver-proofing culverts and stream channels where flooding could be an issue. These relatively inexpensive devices include the Beaver Deceiver – a fence that prevents the beaver from coming too close to a culvert, and the Castor Master – which keeps a pond’s water level from rising above a certain height. These remarkable tools have worked for thousands across the continent, and in Europe, where Eurasian beaver (Castor fiber) numbers are on the rise.

Is there any beloved topic that this article doesn’t cover? Beavers help streams and biodiversity – check. Beavers can be relocated to areas to do good work – check. It’s even better when we allow beaver to relocate themselves – check. And when beavers cause problems flow devices can solve them. – CHECK. That’s it. That’s the beaver gospel. Chapter and verse. He didn’t miss anything.

We can’t restore ecosystems alone. We have great resources out there, like the Beaver Restoration Guidebook, an infinitely practical, inspiring tome of case studies and how-tos from leading practitioners. And yet there is many a night when I put my head down, afraid I have not yet done enough, known enough, or tried enough to steward this place. In such times I take heart in how beavers recall the words of ecologist Frank Egler, who said, “Nature is not only more complex than we think; it is more complex than we can think.” I take heart in the ways we increasingly see our fellow animals not as objects to save, but as allies with common cause. The beaver is a model, measure, and motivation for this work, and I trust that we have much to live for, together. When my workday is done, I trust that somewhere, on a dark and fast-dripping stream, a beaver’s shift begins.

PERFECT. PERFECT. PERFECT. This is the very best article I could ever have hoped for. Thank you SO much for your excellent work, Rob. It could only have been slightly more perfect if it mentioned in passing how a certain California city south of Whatcom had decided to live with beavers a decade ago with excellent results including a beaver festival. But, hey. Gift horses and mouths, you know the saying.

How much do you wanna bet that after reading this the execs at Earth Island are kicking themselves that they aren’t Worth A Dam’s sponsor and let ISI get to beavers first?