Carbondale Colorado, just outside of aspen, is just about as pretty as you’d imagine it with all the mountain trimmings and clear waters to give it fame. I imagine that has something to do with the beavers who are causing a bit of a stir in the area. Fortunately they’ve had some great training from Sherri Tippie and her many disciples…
The serene ambiance of Carbondale Nature Park is currently marred by an unintended consequence of nature’s course. A diligent group of beavers, native to the 33-acre valley park, have constructed dams, causing blockage in the culverts and resulting in significant flooding. These circumstances have not only impacted public areas but have also impacted private property access, forcing officials and residents to seek immediate solutions.
Culverts logged
Carbondale Parks & Recreation Director Eric Brendlinger painted a vivid picture of the challenges the town is grappling with. Beavers have effectively blocked a couple of culverts on the town property. Water, unable to find its regular course, has been rerouted.
“We have a couple of culverts there that have been blocked on our town property,” Brendlinger said. “The damming by the beavers has flooded out that road too. We’re just going to have to wait until the water drops to assess what to do about that for the future.”
That doesn’t exactly sound like havoc to me, unless your definition of havoc is “doing what everyone expects and what improves the environment“. From the headline I assumed beavers were tossing molotov cocktails and shooting beer cans in the streets. Well, let’s see how this unwanted behavior is handled shall we?
Potential solutions are being considered as the town braces to address this unexpected challenge. “Beaver deceivers” could play a pivotal role. These devices employ siphon technology to manage and control the water level, preventing flooding without disrupting the beavers’ natural dam-building activities.
“These devices will effectively manage the water levels, preventing flooding while allowing beavers to thrive,” Brendlinger said. “It’s a solution that respects both our community’s needs and the natural ecosystem.”
Don’t you just love it when characters are introduced to a familiar story that actually know how to solve things??? I sure do.
Action to address the damming and resultant flooding is contingent on the water levels receding. The town has scheduled to turn off its ditches on Oct. 16, which will facilitate a reduction in water levels and provide access for a detailed assessment of the situation.
“We turn off our ditches on Oct. 16,” Brendlinger said. “That will help and then just, of course, natural water level drops allowing us to get access to assess the impact.”
While the beavers’ industrious activities are causing some consternation, the issue is currently localized, impacting the park and adjacent private properties. The town remains committed to addressing the problem without causing harm to the beavers or their natural habitat.
“It’s one of those things, where we are trying to coexist with nature but it can be difficult at times,” Brendlinger said.
As the town of Carbondale anticipates a resolution to the conflict of nature versus human convenience, the beavers, oblivious to the stir their dams have caused, continue their industrious work.
How’s that for a nice story. Here’s the problem. Here’s the solution. Here’s why we want to cooperate with beavers.
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.
Lands managed by Bureau of Land Management (BLM) are often misunderstood, and their conservation values underestimated. However, as the single largest federal public land manager, BLM has a critical role to play in addressing two inter-related crises—biodiversity collapse and climate change. Key to fighting both challenges is the restoration and protection of freshwater resources. And, now, with the passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, BLM has access to new funding it can use to invest in natural infrastructure, restoration, and building climate resilience.(more…)
WORTHINGTON — Beavers and high school students were both on the docket for Tuesday’s meeting of the Okabena-Ocheda Watershed District Board of Managers, as its members continued focusing on improving water quality in the area.
Water leaving Lake Ocheda flows south into the Ocheyedan River to get to Lake Bella, and all winter water was flowing past the beaver lodges there, keeping the animals happy, explained Watershed Administrator Dan Livdahl.
Then stoplogs were put into the dam late last month, halting the water flow until it builds to a higher level.
“No water is coming out of Lake Ocheda yet, so the beaver downstream are going a little crazy,” Livdahl said. “And when they have a good dam building situation, they can build very significant dams in those culverts overnight.”
He’s been going out to the site daily to check, because if the beavers are allowed to build for any length of time, they can plug the culverts badly enough that it’s hard to clean them out.
Those darn beavers! Insisting on having enough water so they don’t freeze to death in their lodge. Just who do they think they are anyway?
Several people do trap beaver in that area, but it’s been a running battle for the watershed district.
“It seems as soon as we trap them, another group moves in, so you have a very short break,”
Our solution NEVER ever works but dammit, we keep trying over and over. You would think we’d learn something new or maybe read something new on our phones. But we are from public works, We only have these hammers in our toolbox but so we keep using them.
It’s exacly a month before the beaver summit! How did it ever get to be March 7th already? I wish I could have played list this weekend but Sonoma State didn’t send the updated version. All I know for certain is that we had some new State Park signups and that’s very good. More importantly, are you registered?
Yesterday I celebrated by playing with the audio of this NPR interview of Juli Scarmado, who was the student of Ellen Wohl and might have graduated by now. I wish every state had a couple Juli’s.
Meanwhile there’s beaver news from Idaho in a town call “Athol” which I would have a very hard time not teasing as the name of mean people with lisps for the same reason as kids used to make you say “My father works in a ship yard” while holding onto your tongue. Remember that?
ATHOL — Beavers caused temporary calamity late Monday at South Athol Road’s intersection with Hapgood, Sanders and Tunnel streets, causing water to rise rapidly due to heavy downpours and disrupting traffic.
The Athol Police Department received more than one call in the early evening, reporting 2 feet of water had built up at the underpass area. One caller described water as being backed up and reported that vehicles were hydroplaning in that area.
Officers responded and assisted with traffic until the Department of Public Works arrived.
Assistant DPW Superintendent Richard Kilhart said the water backup caused by beavers “was the first time this year they have caused some difficulties.” The large, sharp-toothed rodents are building a dam in the drainage pipe and stream that run under the roadway.
Being that Athol is in the same state as Mike Callahan you would think that they have several people who know how to solve this problem with a beaver deceiver but maybe not.
Kilhart said the DPW made initial breaches in the dam to release the water, but could do little else until the department applied for a special permit to address the main problem. Once the breaches were made, the water level dropped.
“The normal trapping season is from Nov. 1 to April 1,” said Kilhart, “but this is a case where it is a threat to health and safety.”
The Board of Health approved the permit Wednesday to hire a licensed trapper to remove the beavers so the debris can be dismantled and the culvert cleaned out.
Carbondale Colorado, just outside of aspen, is just about as pretty as you’d imagine it with all the mountain trimmings and clear waters to give it fame. I imagine that has something to do with the beavers who are causing a bit of a stir in the area. Fortunately they’ve had some great training from Sherri Tippie and her many disciples…
The serene ambiance of Carbondale Nature Park is currently marred by an unintended consequence of nature’s course. A diligent group of beavers, native to the 33-acre valley park, have constructed dams, causing blockage in the culverts and resulting in significant flooding. These circumstances have not only impacted public areas but have also impacted private property access, forcing officials and residents to seek immediate solutions.
Lands managed by Bureau of Land Management (BLM) are often misunderstood, and their conservation values underestimated. However, as the single largest federal public land manager, BLM has a critical role to play in addressing two inter-related crises—
WORTHINGTON — Beavers and high school students were both on the docket for Tuesday’s meeting of the Okabena-Ocheda Watershed District Board of Managers, as its members continued focusing on improving water quality in the area.
It’s exacly a month before the beaver summit! How did it ever get to be March 7th already? I wish I could have played list this weekend but Sonoma State didn’t send the updated version. All I know for certain is that we had some new State Park signups and that’s very good. More importantly, are you registered?
ATHOL — Beavers caused temporary calamity late Monday at South Athol Road’s intersection with Hapgood, Sanders and Tunnel streets, causing water to rise rapidly due to heavy downpours and disrupting traffic.
