Yesterday was crazy good for beavers with the article in Bay Nature, and three new donors to Worth A Dam because of it. Today looks even better with a great new edition of Oregon Field Guide about fires and a segment about our furry friend. Every is in it, Jakob Shockey, filmaker Sarah Koenigsberg and Emily Faifax, Send it to your non believing friends and make sure eveyone shares it on their phone or fb page.
This was nice to see, from the Colorado Rockies side of the Audubon family. Of course it’s true for all the other places water flows too. But you knew that.
Colorado and the West face unprecedented drought conditions, impacts from wildfires, and water scarcity driven by climate change. These changes threaten our local and regional water supplies, our food supply, bird habitat, economies, and our quality of life. Beavers can help mitigate these impacts. Beavers re-shape the landscapes where they live, creating wet meadow complexes in an otherwise dry area. These diverse wetlands provide important habitat for birds and other wildlife. Beaver wetlands even survived Colorado’s largest wildfire, the Cameron Peak Fire, and continue to provide critical water quality and wildlife habitat functions, a weighty win-win.
To learn more, Audubon Rockies staff went into the Poudre Canyon to capture images of the stark, burnt landscape surrounding vibrant green vegetation and clear flowing water at the Cameron Peak burn scar. We also caught up with an ecohydrologist and researcher who specializes in beavers, Dr. Emily Fairfax, to ask questions about the resilience and benefits of beaver complexes. Here’s what we learned. (more…)
This report ran on Colorado NPR just after my birthday but last night it was played again to a national audience on All things Considered. I’m especially happy because the reporter swapped out the negative Joe Wheaton soundbyte for a more informative one, leaving a better overall message. Good work, Emily.
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Last year Colorado saw the two largest wildfires in it’s history, destroying hundreds of homes and 600 square miles of forest. Largely unbothered, though, are beavers, whose wet habitats offer refuge. It can take decades for landscapes burned by wildfires to recover. Colorado had its two largest fires ever last year. Those fires left more than 600 square miles of ashy soil and charred trees. But there are spots that were largely spared thanks to one animal. Alex Hager from member station KUNC has this report on what researchers are learning about fire resistance from beavers.
Nice. So here’s the mundane reason why this matters. If you’re a plucky new affiliate reporter that gets your story to run on NATIONAL All things considered you think, HEY, that was cool. Maybe beavers are hot news. Maybe I should report on them again so my mom hears my name on the radio.
Lets hope it catches on.
Another beaver made a famed appearance in Detroit last night, I thought you’d find it amusing.
The Detroit RiverWalk’s swoon-worthy views are open to all — beavers included.
A popular destination for families, friends and couples wanting to go on a relaxing walk, the RiverWalk was graced with a special guest Friday. The beaver, spotted in the Cullen Plaza area, is part of a family that lives in a nearby state park, according to Marc Pasco, director of communications for the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy.
“(It) has been spotted before in and around the state park,” Pasco said in a message. “That’s where he/she lives. There was no reason to involve the DNR or animal control. He/she was just going about her business and heading home.”
Come to think of it I’ve never seen a beaver carousel. I’ve seen horses and tigers and even an colorful ostrich but none of the decorative mounts are ever made to look like a beaver. Fix that okay?
There are a few different ways to try to save beavers. Dam by dam at the local level, which we have in Martinez. County by county like we have by reviewing the depredation permits and shaming the offenders.. State by state like we did the summit.
Or larger scale still, like trying to keep beavers in National Forests all across the country.
A Guide to Advocating for Beaver Restoration in National Forest Plans offers guidance for public engagement in the national forest planning process to ensure that newly revised plans include affirmative and proactive language around beavers and beaver habitat restoration.
National forest plans set the overall management direction for a given forest and provide guidance for the design and execution of specific management actions. As the pace, scale, and magnitude of climate change has become increasingly evident, there is an urgent need for these plans to explicitly address the impacts and implications of a rapidly changing climate, and offer solutions to build resilience and ecological integrity.
WOW! Describing this as a ambitious undertaking undercuts it. This is an lofty mic drop of a move by our friends at the National Wildlife Federation. The main report is 21 pages long and the appendix contains specific resources like how to structure comments about including beavers in National forests.It comes out of Montana and credits these authors mainly
Contributors: Sarah Bates (National Wildlife Federation), Taylor Simpson and Taylor Heggen (University of
Montana Alexander Blewitt III College of Law), and Lowell Chandler (University of Montana W.A. Franke College of Forestry & Conservation)
Citing forest service policy and specific language about climate change it is meant to be a useful tool in beaver advocacy. It talks about forest policy and how to best engage the public, Go Download the whole fascinating report by clicking here:
Thanks Montana! Now if you need good beaver news from another state check out this guide from Hermit’s Peak Watershed Alliance in New Mexico. We are building up our tool kit, one beaver at a time.
A couple of weeks ago Emily Fairfax posted some photos on FB showing her trip to Colorado and saying she had shown a reporter from NPR around the sight of the largest fire which happened to have some amazing beaver habitat that survived. You’ll remember I shared her google map of the visit which is very cool and if you haven’t seen it you still should.
Well that story dropped this morning on the local KUNC station and its definitely worth a listen. After which I am sure you will join me in a hearty chorus of “Go Emily!” as we raise our glasses and click our coffee mugs together.
Enjoy!
Deep in the Cameron Peak burn scar, nestled among charred hills, there’s an oasis of green — an idyllic patch of trickling streams that wind through a lush grass field. Apart from a few scorched branches on the periphery, it’s hard to tell that this particular spot was in the middle of Colorado’s largest-ever wildfire just a year ago.
his wetland was spared thanks to the work of beavers.
The mammals, quite famously, dam up streams to make ponds and a sprawling network of channels. Beavers are clumsy on land, but talented swimmers; so the web of pools and canals lets them find safety anywhere within the meadow.
On a recent visit to that patch of preserved land in Poudre Canyon, ecohydrologist Emily Fairfax emphasized the size of the beavers’ canal network.
“Oh my gosh, I can’t even count them,” she said. “It’s a lot. There’s at least 10 ponds up here that are large enough to see in satellite images. And then between all those ponds is just an absolute spiderweb of canals, many of which are too small for me to see until I’m here on the ground.”
Do see the charred brush there? The fire burned right to the waters edge. Everything went in flames. Except what the beaver had made and flooded and maintained. Maybe their lodge even burned. But no matter, they dumped the seared logs and made it anew.
Fairfax researches how beavers re-shape the landscapes where they live. Across the West, she’s seen beaver-created wetlands survive wildfires.
“When you’re at this beaver complex,” she said, “it never stops being green. Everything else in the landscape – the hill slopes on either side, they both charred. They lost all their vegetation during this fire. But this spot, it did not. These plants were here last year and they’re still here today.”
Fairfax stands in the middle of a vibrant meadow, with golden-green grass up to her knees. She points to a row of trees about 100 feet away, where the trunks have clearly been singed, but brown needles still cling to branches – a sign of “moderately intense” burning. Just another 100 feet past that, another row of trees has been scorched completely black and free of needles – a telltale indicator of “high intensity” burning.
Isn’t it amazing to think that Emily was inspired to change direction in her own life and leave engineering to go study beavers after she watched Jari Osbourne’s awesome documentary? Who knows who is right now getting inspired by Emily’s work and going to make the next transformation?
“The beaver complex and the beaver wetland is so much more than the dam,” Fairfax said. “It’s the channels, it’s the digging, it’s the chewing, it’s the constantly changing the landscape, the dynamics, the flexibility.”
Beavers have millions of years of practice repairing dams and shaping rivers, and that makes them capable water managers.
Fairfax did see a beaver complex serve as a fire break one time in Colorado, but she said it’ll take far more research before we can figure out how effective they are when it comes to slowing down wildfires on a large scale. But for now, these areas are surviving as oases of green in big fires all across the West.
I will say Joe Wheaton sounds like a little bit of a killjoy in the quote alex chose to use from him. Lots of little bits of water add up. And he knows that better than anyone.
