NEWS OF THE CA BEAVER SUMMIT SPREADS LIKE WILDFIRE

heidi08 Beaver Conference, Beavers and Fire Prevention, Beavers and water, Who's defending beavers now? May 7, 2021

What do you know. The California Beaver Summit made Wildfire Today. I thought I only dreamed that would happen. Along with one of my favorite old stories about beaver lawsuits.

The Oregon Supreme Court ruled in favor of beavers — in 1939

When Paul Stewart bought his rangeland in Eastern Oregon in 1884 it included a meadow with “stirrup-high native grasses”. The sub-irrigation provided by Crane Creek was amplified by several families of industrious beavers who had built numerous dams across the stream to form ponds for their homes.

In 1924 he left his farm for a year and upon returning found that poachers had trapped and removed the beavers. The dams had washed out and over the next 12 years the meadow and the creek was transformed. Uncontrolled flood waters eroded the banks, cutting into his valuable crop land. The stream was flowing 15 feet below its original level and the water table had dropped. The meadow was drying up and a well was barely producing any water.

Do you know this story? IF not you should DEFINITELY go read the whole thing. Is the old chestnut of beaver tales that keeps giving again and again. Anyway, the article by Bill Gabbert concludes the retelling with this fine paragraph:

If you’re still starving for more information about beavers, Heidi Perryman, Co-Chair of last month’s California Beaver Summit, tells us that their website has information about presentations made at the conference, including the effects on wildfires, managing the challenges beavers can cause for landowners, and the value beaver engineering can have for the drying state of California. She said two of the researchers mentioned in our May 5 article, Dr. Emily Fairfax and Dr. Joe Wheaton, gave keynote talks at the conference. There were also speakers from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, US Forest Service, and Bureau of Land Management.

AND a link to the summit website because as we know it’s allllllllllllllll about the links. Thanks Bill Gabbert for the mention. Hopefully the Sierra Club will follow suit and we’ll get something in the Bay Nature Website soon. Carolina Cuellar has been working to put something together since her story on San Luis Obispo Beaver Brigade. Recently she and a photographer made it to Fairfield to snap some photos of beaver dams for the article.

BEAVERS SEND SMOKE SIGNALS

heidi08 Beaver ecological impact, Beavers, Beavers and Fire Prevention May 8, 2021

Don’t you sometimes get the feeling that we’re nickling and diming this beaver thing to death? Chipping away at how beavers are good for salmon, For drought, For flooding. For erosion. For Wildfires. When all the while what we should just be saying is: BEAVERS ARE GOOD!!!

Maybe this is the next step step.’

Beavers can affect wildfires

Their infrastructure raises the water table and creates wetlands used by many other species, and because of their effect on other organisms in the ecosystem, they are considered a keystone species. This storage of water can change the vegetation type as well as the moisture content in the live and dead fuel. Wetlands usually do not burn in a wildfire and they can serve a barrier to its spread.

Well this HAS to make its way to the governor. Don’t you think?

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Sometimes its when you have ZERO IDEA how to solve a problem that you finally take advice from the ones who you’ve been ignoring all this time.

The BeaversandBrush.com website is a not-for-profit publication, “Created by Californians seeking to protect California from wildfire. We can help one another to safety by welcoming back native beavers and traditional prescribed burning of brush.”

Photos from their website show the change in a creek after beavers moved in.

They then go on to talk about Lucy Sherriff’s article in the Sierra club website – the one that I learned yesterday she couldn’t GET THE SMITHSONIAN to pay for or even be interested in. Her article in that magazine was paid for by a grant from SEJ (The society for environmental journalists). Because why on earth would a science magazine pay for information about an ecosystem engineer that can protect the environment?

[Dr. Emily] Fairfax began to carry out the scientific research that she had hoped to find. Using satellite images, she mapped vegetation around beaver territories before, after, and during wildfires (footage of wildfires in progress can show how a fire moves through a landscape). She visited field sites in California, Colorado, Idaho, Oregon, and Wyoming and found sections of creek that did not have beavers were on average more than three times as affected by fire—burning a bigger area—than areas where beavers had built dams.

“I expected some of the time beaver dams would work,” says Fairfax. Instead, she found the presence of beavers had significant effects. “It didn’t matter if it was one pond or 55 ponds in a row. If there were beaver dams, the land was protected from fire. It was incredible.”

Beavers are sending up smoke signals. If we don’t get the message soon it may be too late.

WHAT THE SMITHSONIAN SHOULD HAVE WRITTEN

heidi08 Beaver ecological impact, Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Fire Prevention May 4, 2021

Now THIS is the article that should have been in the Smithsonian. Plus a link to the California beaver Summit.

Killing is easier than paperwork

If a farmer, landowner, or property developer wants to get a beaver out of a certain area, it’s easier to kill the beaver than to apply to move it elsewhere. Across the states, it’s common for landowners to dynamite beaver dams, with whole forums dedicated to the topic and dramatic instructional YouTube videos.

In 2019, the California Fish and Wildlife Department issued 187 depredation permits to kill beavers across the state. In 2020, that number rose to 204. While not all permits are necessarily fulfilled, it’s also true that multiple beavers in a single area can be killed under one permit. Despite the fact that beavers once roamed far and wide across the state’s waterways, it’s illegal under California law to release one into a new location. Though beavers are native to the state, they weren’t recognized as such by California Fish and Wildlife until 2013.

BOOM! This is the article that she wanted to write in the Smithsonian. I’m sure of it. This is the article ALL of california needs to read. Great thinking to start with the Sierra Club.

The beaver does more to shape its environment than nearly any other animal on Earth. They can cause incredible amounts of destruction to infrastructure; downing power lines, and blocking and rerouting waterways. But their dam-building also can improve water quality, reduce flood risk, and create the conditions for complex wetland habitats to form —providing refuge for wildlife and storing carbon in the process.

“It’s not that complicated,” says Joe Wheaton, an associate professor at Utah State’s Department of Watershed Sciences, who developed the university’s BRAT project (short for Beaver Restoration Assessment Tool.). The initiative serves as a planning aid for researchers and restoration managers who are looking to assess the potential of beavers to restore watersheds. Wheaton has worked on the Tule River Tribe’s reintroduction project and many others across the States. “If you wet up the sponge of your valley bottom you have the potential to at least slow the spread, if not at least have the land act as livestock and wildlife refuge during wildfires. If you have a wide enough valley bottom, and beaver are present, it can be big enough to actually stop the advance of these wildfires. That information just needs to get out there.”

Articles like this are going to help. I can tell you that.

Dr. Emily Fairfax and the case of the missing beaver research

One thing that has been missing in the discussion of beavers and wildfires has been science connecting the two. But that is beginning to change. In 2018, Emily Fairfax, a young PhD student studying hydrological science at the University of Colorado Boulder saw a tweet posted by Joe Wheaton, of the wildfire-scorched landscape following Idaho’s Sharps Fire, with a small patch of green at the center. “Why is there an impressive patch of green in the middle of 65,000 acres of charcoal? Turns out water doesn’t burn. Thank you beaver!” wrote Wheaton.

But she found herself struggling to find any previously published research on the subject. “It was no man’s land,” says Fairfax, who found plenty of research on beavers, fish, and waterways, but none on beavers and fire. “When you try to do new research it really helps when you can stand on the work of previous scientists,” says Fairfax. “After a certain amount of time, after a question hasn’t been studied, you start to think ‘oh, it’s because there’s nothing there.’”

Instead, her leads came through people like Wheaton, and an educational site called Beavers in Brush, which aggregates information about prescribed burns, as well as rewetting the lands through beaver protection. “That made me realize this has merit, there are people who are aware that this can work,” says Fairfax “I don’t know why people haven’t studied this, but obviously this is a thing.”

Yes it’s a thing, If you pay attention you’ll realize how much of a thing. Now let’s write the article that SHOULD be written Lucy, Beaver help salmon, help drought, help erosion, help fires, help frogs. When is California going to HELP THEM?

Fairfax hopes her research will help change California’s strict rules around beaver relocation, the way policy is already changing in Washington, especially as wildfires in California have reached record-breaking levels over the past several years. In 2017, while McDarment was still trying to get permission to relocate beavers to tribal lands, the Pier Fire consumed 8,800 acres of Tule River tribal lands, including several giant sequoias.

Meanwhile, Fairfax’s research on beavers and wildfires is only beginning. “I set out to ask a question: Do beavers keep the land green during fires, yes or no?” she says. “The answer was yes. But that’s not the end of the story. Why? How? Does this happen everywhere? What if you have a tight canyon? I’m digging into the specifics now, so people can implement this and actually use beavers for fire prevention. I would love to be able to call someone up and tell them how many beaver dams they need in their creek.

Here endeth the lesson. Allow me to leave you with a special explanation of why beaver habitat is 3xs more protected from fire.

HERE ENDETH THE LESSON

heidi08 BDA's, Beaver ecological impact, Beavers and Fire Prevention April 20, 2021

Anyone who occasionally reads this website knows the name and shame of Placer county. It is the county in California that issued 7 times more depredation permits for beaver om 2013 even when we had a statistician look at the numbers and control for things like water acreage and population density. Well, a few years back Damion Ciotti of US Fish and Wildlife service suggested that the Placer land trust get the rancher to stop killing beavers on Doty preserve and use some BDAs to give them a kick start instead,

And look what happened.

Pop quiz for the good students. Guess which part of this picture is the least flammable?

EARTH DAY IS BEAVER DAY

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers and Fire Prevention, Beavers and Forests April 6, 2021

You’re probably thinking, “It’s not enough!”

“Two half days of talking about beaver benefits! I need more! How can I have more?” Well you’re in luck because there’s another show in time right after ours. This one is aimed at our forest professionals. It’s pricey and shorter, but looks fun anyway.

Symposium Description:

Beavers provide a wide range of ecological benefits, including wildlife habitat creation, pollution filtration, and the attenuation of both drought and flooding. In recent years, researchers have begun to explore another crucial beaver service: wildfire mitigation and post-fire recovery. A growing body of evidence suggests that beaver-created ponds and wetlands offer fire refugia and even fire breaks, and aid the recovery of post-fire landscapes by capturing debris and aggrading incised stream channels. In this Earth Day symposium, hear from experts from the Northern California Prescribed Fire Council & University of California Cooperative Extension, California State University-Channel Islands, Utah State University, and the Methow Beaver Project. Learn about research, insights, and management recommendations. Participants will develop a greater understanding of how these two keystone ecological processes, beavers and fire, interact on North American landscapes.

Basically the same speakers for the heft price tag of 49 dollars for non members but I guess their heart is in the right place. Ours will be better. Mark my words.