Category: Beavers and climate change

MEET THE NEW JAKOB AND SARAH STORY

How did I miss this? A fantastic interview with Jakob Shockey and Sarah Koenigsberg gearing up for the recent film festival in preparation for the Siskiyou Film festival last weekend. They both do an excellent job and deserve your listening time.

What Beavers Can Do For The Landscape

Wasn’t that excellent? Jakob has gotten to be such an wonderful speaker that I can only dream how awesome his presentation will be at BeaverCon in a few weeks.

Coming soon to the deep-benched Nehalem Watershed is this fine presentation:

Lower Nehalem Watershed Council Speaker Series: “Beaver Dam Analogues” w/Steve Trask Feb. 13

On February 13th, 2020 at 7 pm the Lower Nehalem Watershed Council will host Steve Trask for a presentation about Beaver Dam Analogues. In this talk, Steve will talk about the importance of Beavers as ecosystem engineers and keystone species, the watershed impacts of not having enough beavers, and finally what beaver dam analogues are and how they can help! This is an exciting opportunity to learn about an unusual technique for habitat restoration.

Don’t you wish you could be there? I certainly do. Steve is a new name to us but one I bet we’re going to hear again.

Steve Trask is the Senior Fish Biologist for Biosurveys Inc. He has over 25 years of experience surveying river and stream habitat on the Oregon Coast. In collaboration with the Mid Coast Watershed Association and ODFW, he created the Rapid Bioassessment process that is currently being used to map juvenile salmon distribution in the Nehalem Watershed. He also is currently working with the Upper Nehalem Watershed Council to install beaver dam analogues.

I think we talked about Biosurvey’s once with some footage that showed beavers swimming with the salmon. I’m sure we’ll hear more fro this Senior Fish Biologist that thinks beavers are good news.

I came across this yesterday and thought how many historic ways there are to draw beavers wrongly. Let’s call this the beaver-mountainlion.

BEAVERS NEED US TO GET OUT OF THEIR WAY

heidi08 Beavers and climate change February 6, 2020

So we shipped off the package of booklets for the conference yesterday. They were heavy so we tried for ‘media mail’ but god knows the criteria is pretty hard to meet. They are clearly educational and not retail, but they do contain a staple and that might be too bound for the cheap seats. We’ll see, In the meantime to co-director of BeaverCon has a nice article with a snappy title. You are registered, aren’t you?

Of bivalves & beavers: Let’s leave our landscapes to these experts

They might seem an odd couple, Crassostrea virginica and Castor canadensis — the Eastern oyster and the North American beaver. But ecologically, for the Chesapeake Bay, the mollusk and the rodent are a lovely pairing, a compelling linkage of water and watershed.

Both were keystone species, the one’s dense reefs and the other’s ubiquitous damming and ponding create habitat and enhance water quality to the benefit of a host of other species.

A restored Chesapeake could use lots more oysters and beavers. Work on the former is well under way, with Maryland and Virginia creating sanctuaries where reef building can once again occur. Watermen, and to a point the Hogan administration, oppose this as a loss of fishing opportunity.

As your eyes and your brain adjust to what McGill has done to the Baltimore County gully, you begin to notice his “mess” is aflutter with butterflies, hopping with frogs and ablaze with the flowering of asters, daisies, Joe Pye weed and the new growth of willows.

I don’t really think of bi-valves as a keystone species. Do you think they get a festival? I bet they do. But one where people eat them, which isn’t nearly as educational. Shhh this is the good part:

McGill is an apostle for how to share the watershed with beavers, using “beaver deceiver” devices such as pipes placed in their dams to control flooding. He is organizing a major conference on beavers (BEAVERCON 2020) near Baltimore this March to spread the good word.

Ho Ho Ho! The conference gets a sliver of press! Let’s hope more follows! Excellent news and an excellent way to think about our natural systems. Often letting nature do its job and getting OUT OF ITS WAY is the most useful thing we can do for the planet.

Take climate change for instance.

Rewilding can help mitigate climate change, researchers highlight after conducting global assessment

A new study has shown that rewilding can help to mitigate climate change, delivering a diverse range of benefits to the environment with varied regional impacts.

Research led by the University of Sussex and published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, provides a global assessment of the potential for trophic rewilding to help mitigate climate change.

Trophic rewilding restores lost species to ecosystems, which can have cascading influences over the whole food web. This typically means reintroducing large herbivores (e.g. elephants) and top predators (e.g. wolves), or species known to engineer more diverse and complex habitats and benefit biodiversity (e.g. beavers).

Dr Chris Sandom , Senior Lecturer in Biology at the University of Sussex, said: “The key thing to remember here is that nature is complex and needs to be complex.

Agreed! A landscape with a single species isn’t a landscape. Lets let nature take her course and help her along to make up for the mistakes we made along the way.

NOT A ‘SHAPE-SHIFTER’ BUT A LANDSCAPE-SHIFTER

heidi08 Beavers and climate change February 5, 2020

Time for some serious beaver reporting. I feel like it’s been a while since we sliced through real information but this article from ajb at “The rugged Indivualist” offers some great perspective. It even brings a metaphor about beavers Ben Goldfarb missed. And that’s saying something.

Nature’s Underappreciated Ecosystem Architect

I was inspired to write this article when I took a walk along the river at the back of my property, through the domain of a woodland theriomorph. A mysterious shapeshifter, not of himself, but rather of land and water, wedding the two in a harmonious embrace. He is simultaneously a sculptor in soft earth and an architect of raw timber, masterfully designing and crafting his surroundings into a vision of his own. He creates a product that is naturally arresting by virtue of the tireless dedication, pragmatism, and ingenuity involved. His intuition is preternatural, creating opportunity with nothing but physical refinement and acute mental faculties.

Now I would argue that he probably had a little help being inspired by reading Ben’s book to get to this place, which he does not admit to but from which he posts photos from of Susie Creek’s grand transformation. There’s no time to quibble because its wonderful to read well written appreciation of our favorite subject.

Many would be surprised to realize that beavers, in the same family as mice and squirrels, create rich, biodiverse habitats unrivaled by any other creature on our planet. Beavers don’t just make themselves homes and blockade rivers; they create sanctuary for everything from tiny invertebrates up to our most iconic species such as deer, moose, and bear. In fact, the effects of their actions are so great that much contemporary research and thought revolves around these creatures being indispensable buffers in a world becoming ever more variable and inhospitable by the climate change we’ve manufactured.

An excellent start. Go on…

Where does one begin in their adulation of the almighty beaver? Well, let’s start with the most impressive thing that they do: create wetlands. Let me say that again: beavers create wetlands. A species consciously capable of changing the land’s form and function. This environment is rarely even created by the invisible grace of Mother Nature, making it even more impressive that it is frequently accomplished by a woolly rodent. But beavers, well, they make it look easy when they siphon water to make moats around their stick castles with ease. Whether wet climate or dry, beavers use the existing water in their environment to create hydro engineering marvels. Take a look at the pictures below of an area in the arid southwest of landscape before and after beaver introduction. You will be stunned by its transformation into an oasis.

You have all our attention. Consider this your chance to ‘preach to the choir’.

By constructing a dam and reducing the flow of waterways, beavers are able to collect and disperse water over a large surface area which heavily saturates the underlying soil, raising the water table in effect. This slowed water creates a pond of still or slightly flowing water that allows aquatic plants to take hold below and above the surface with shrubby vegetation establishing itself along the water’s edge. This leads to an overall richness of habitat complexity that draws in and supports burgeoning levels of biodiversity from birds to mammals and everything in between. This is the general process by which these beavers establish a wetland. But, the benefits to the environment are not over.

When beavers create their pond ecosystems, the newly formed body of water penetrates deep into the soil. This water leaches into underwater aquifers and recharges what is many times a parched groundwater supply. A benefit that many perennially dehydrated parts of this country could desperately use. Additionally, beaver dam impoundments help decontaminate water sources by reducing siltation and filtering out impurities. That’s right, beavers even make our most precious resource clearer and cleaner. So, not only do beavers alter hydrodynamics within the ecosystem to create new opportunities for flora and fauna, but they also make the environment more resilient by allowing for greater storage and spread of filtered water supplies. To put it simply, beavers fundamentally change the capacities of the land around them. They make an environment that can absorb increasingly unpredictable amounts of precipitation that prevents destructive run-off and flooding, while also preserving water when it is scarce. This is a major reason beavers are such powerful agents in preventing catastrophic effects from climate change.

Yup, Yup and yup. Beavers change things for the better. And they would do it a helluva a lot more often if we would just stop killing them. We sing that song every day. Anything else to add?

the work of beavers help keep our landscape and resources in equilibrium. It is now time to restore this competent creature back to its rightful place and allow them to clean up a mess we cannot contain.

Hear Hear! I’ll drink to that! And I bet you all will also! It’s like watching a great stadium wave across the nation, seeing other folk get the point of Ben’s gilded prose and appreciate what’s right in front of them. Sometimes I wish the wave went faster, or bigger, but I’m always grateful for it.

Monday night Radio1 in the UK had their own discussion of beavers which I’m sure you’ll enjoy.

THE BENEFITS OF A BEAVER BASELINE

heidi08 Beaver ecological impact, Beavers and climate change January 20, 2020

One of the things I said in my chat with James Wallace of the beaver Trust that beavers can show off best in England is ecological impact with a baseline. As in our stream looked like this for years and years, then we added some beavers, and now it looks like THIS. But with statistics, so that scientists pay attention and people take it seriously. Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks so. This nice writing is from Joshua Harris of the Ecologist.

Bringing back beavers

We tend to overlook the effects that living organisms have on their physical world because most of the ecosystems around us have been “downgraded” as we have removed the important species – thus, in these cases it is mainly physical processes that determine how organisms survive.

But there is now an increasing weight of evidence that the interaction works both ways: the earth shapes life, and life shapes the earth.

Beavers’ engineering work benefits many kinds of wildlife: ponds are perfect for frogs and fish larvae, riffles and gravel banks for dippers, swampy areas for water rails and moorhens, dead trees for woodpeckers and owls, and lush coppiced vegetation for songbirds.

The fact that beaver habitat is ideal for so many species should not come as a surprise: beavers were present in our ecosystems for millions of years, so many wetland species may have actually evolved to live in beaver habitats.

Oh yes the beavers make the difference. And a stream without a beaver is like a car without a steering wheel. It will probably still go places. But probably not really the places you want.

Through studying the effects that beavers have on streams, it has become clear that deeply incised river channels disconnected from their floodplain, which we perceive as the norm, are in fact a consequence of the removal of beavers, and other human impacts.

Before we deforested and farmed the land and hunted beavers to extinction for their fur and scent glands, wetlands would have filled the bottoms of valleys, with snaking channels, ponds, wet meadows, and willow scrub.

By bringing back the beaver, and allowing our rivers to freestyle through the landscape, we could revive these incredible ecosystems. Beaver engineered wetlands could fan out into every valley in an interconnected network, like arteries pumping life back into the landscape.

So many other species could flourish in the habitats that beavers create: otters, water voles, marsh tits, spotted flycatchers, lesser spotted woodpeckers, water rails, egrets, lapwings, redshanks. Incredible species which we’ve almost forgotten could return – white tailed eagles, cranes, and even white storks, which last bred in the UK in 1416 but are just starting to make a comeback.

Be still my heart. The author of this fine blog entry is a young ecolologist at Cambridge. He volunteers with the beaver Trust and we are expecting great future contributions.

A revival of beaver ecosystems would have wider environmental and economic benefits beyond increasing biodiversity and bringing wildness back into our lives. Their leaky dams hold back water in floods, and release it gradually in drought.

By retaining water in the headwaters of catchments where the land is less valuable for farming, they could protect more productive arable land further downstream. As we experience more extreme weather events due to climate change, reintroducing beavers to our river systems could make a valuable contribution to reducing the damage to villages and towns.

The lush swamps that beavers create have been shown to filter out fertiliser and pesticide runoff, and reduce the washing away of soil to the oceans – something which is currently visible from space whenever heavy rain falls.

As vegetation builds up in the ponds it forms peat, and the carbon that was sequestered by the growing plants is locked away.

We’ve spent thousands of years trashing the complex connections in our living world, and we’ve created ecosystems which are a mere shadow of their former selves.

If there is one animal which we need in Britain right now, it has to be the beaver. The bang for your buck in terms of biodiversity and wider environmental gains is huge.

Gosh I like reading about people who are finding out how awesome beavers are by watching the difference they make for the first time. I believe it was Voltaire who wrote famously “If God didn’t exist man would invent him”. Very true, but I’m going to say if, by some chance, the UK hadn’t existed for 500 years without beavers we would have had to invent them, because they are SO DARN USEFUL at proving our point about why beavers matter.

Thanks Joshua.

BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A BEAVER?

heidi08 Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Fire Prevention January 3, 2020

Good morning. It’s he last official day of vacation, we’re getting ready for the annual ravioli feast and making cookies today, which is always pleasant in a slightly terrifying way. The fires in Australia are notching up the panic about climate change and lots of folks are pinning their hopes on beavers. Which is okay by me. Better late than never, I always say. Here are some thoughts from Steve Jones of the UK who maintains the Natural Areas Blog.

Re-wetting the countryside

As I write this, parts of Australia are gripped by what seems like a perpetual drought and, with its forests and shrublands tinder-dry, forest fires are raging across some coastal areas.

Climate scientists project increasing summer heat in the UK, as the Mediterranean climate space shifts progressively north. We can expect our average summers to be warmer, and more frequent, on average hotter, summer droughts.

So, to help to mitigate the fire risks posed by the warming we’re already locked into, we need to re-wet floodplain corridors and re-moisten whole farmed landscapes. Here’s how:

A how-to ;list on avoiding wildfires. Now this is useful. Are you paying attention?

River-floodplain corridors should be formally designated as Critical Natural Infrastructure, and managed as integrated wholes. Management should be restricted to enabling natural system recovery, in an expansion of natural coastal management into fluvial systems.

Beavers should be reintroduced at key sites to provide strategic source populations for progressive re-colonisation of all river systems across the UK.

Did you catch that? Beavers are the answer to a drying planet. Also a flooding plane. Also a burning planet. Also a species deprived planet, There are few more suggestions on the list regarding not building in flood plains, but that seems like a DAM good start to me.

In the absence of beavers or pending their return, all surface field edge drains and streams should have leaky dams and small wetland features installed, across entire catchments.

BDA’s for everyone waiting in long lines for beavers. It should stretch for miles. There should barely be enough beavers to go around. You know is coming. In a few short years everyone will want theirs.