The humble beaver could become one of America’s hardest working allies in the race to adapt to climate change.
Beavers are natural engineers. They instinctively build dams and canals of water to keep themselves safe because they’re clumsy on land. And capturing that water creates ecosystems for other animals to survive, earning beavers the moniker of a “keystone species.”
A growing movement of nonprofits, experts and government agencies see a potential to take a lesson from beavers’ natural engineering prowess to capture more of that water for the places that desperately need it.
“Beavers benefit a lot of things in the context of climate change,” Emily Fairfax, assistant professor of environmental science and resource management at California State University Channel Islands, told ABC News.
“The ones that are most directly sort of in our eyesight right now is the beavers’ ability to protect ecosystems during droughts, during floods, during wildfires, during extreme disturbances. And in those patches of habitat that they’re protecting, there’s a huge amount of biodiversity”
This heat wave, and the threat of wildfires, makes me appreciate #beaver engineered fire refugia even more. This complex is on Little Last Chance Creek up in N. California – in some ways these ponds were a "little last chance" for all the critters during the fire here last year. pic.twitter.com/badIjn55Kx
In addition to storing water, Fairfax’s research has shown that areas with beaver dams are more resilient to wildfires because the plants and trees are so wet they don’t burn. And she said they could help capture water from extreme rain events like the atmospheric rivers in California to be accessed by those water systems later.
“Beavers sort of figured this out instinctually over 7 million years of evolution that their dams and their canals work because they take the whole hydrologic cycle and they just make it more stable, more consistent,” she said.
Beavers haven’t always been recognized for their benefits. Fur trapping dramatically reduced the population starting in the 1700s and even today beavers are sometimes seen as a nuisance and killed. The animals are sometimes relocated away from urban areas where their dams could cause disruptions and flooding, which experts like Fairfax said can sometimes be appropriate but is not always the right approach.
Instead of treating them like pests, groups like the National Forest Foundation are looking to take a lesson from beavers’ work to find a nature-based approach to adapt to impacts of climate change like worsening drought conditions.
“There’s a lot of streams and headwaters to the Colorado River that used to run perennially, year-round, that we now see have stopped. And so we might be able to, as we do enough of these, turn some of those stream flows back on on an annual basis. And seeing those regular additions throughout the year could have huge benefits to the system as a whole,” said Marcus Selig, chief conservation officer with the National Forest Foundation.
Photos show an area near the headwaters of the Colorado River before and after the installation of beaver dam analogs by the National Forest Foundation.
The National Forest Foundation is a nonprofit created by Congress to support national forests. Selig said their work building man-made “beaver dam analogs” can help capture more water in the Colorado River, which has been struggling with historically low water levels after more than two decades of drought.
The analogs are a manmade version of what beavers would instinctively build, using sticks and mud to create a natural barrier to slow water down and create a wetland area that feeds into the river.
“The work we do with beaver dam analogs and low-tech process-based restoration is holding that water in the higher elevations as the snow melts and so that it can be released slowly throughout the year, giving more continuous, dependable flows to downstream users,” Selig said, adding that it can help communities downstream receive water more consistently.
“Our big dream is that we can restore every headwater, every watershed that feeds into the Colorado River on national forest lands. And so we’re working on creating that pipeline of projects right now,” he added.
Selig said this kind of work hasn’t been scaled up enough to identify how much of a larger impact it could have and they still need more funding to do so, but said the foundation is working with the U.S. Forest Service to add projects in 14 different national forests around the Colorado River.
Fairfax said river systems like the Colorado have lost a lot of the wetlands that would have existed 200 years ago so replicating them either by creating man-made beaver dams or relocating beavers to streams in the area can help make the river more resilient to the impacts of climate change.
“Bringing back beavers and restoring the wetlands, it’s not like we’re introducing something new to save the Colorado River Basin. We’re just trying to get it back to the state it was in when it was stable and when it was healthier,” she said.
Similar projects are growing around the country, some with support from states or the federal government. California has dedicated $1.6 million to hire staff to start similar projects in the state.
A key legislative committee has approved new limits on killing beavers in Oregon, which will now be considered by the full House. A last-minute amendment allows beavers to be killed without a permit during emergencies, but the Oregon Farm Bureau remains opposed to the bill.
A proposal to strengthen Oregon’s beaver protections is headed for a House floor vote after a last-minute amendment secured its unanimous approval by a key committee.
Beavers would no longer be considered predatory animals under House Bill 3464, allowing state wildlife officials to manage the species on private lands instead of farm regulators.
Supporters of the bill argue that as “nature’s engineers,” beavers make improvements to waterways that are particularly valuable as the state faces increasing droughts and wildfires.
“Despite these clear benefits, Oregon law currently allows unlimited beaver killing year-round, including during breeding and rearing season, without a permit — even if the beaver is not causing any damage,” said Rep. Pam Marsh, D-Ashland.
Under the original version of HB 3464, the changed designation meant landowners would need to obtain permits to kill beavers. Such permits aren’t required for predatory animals, including feral swine, coyotes and rodents.
While the bill would ensure “lethal removal is still an option,” permits would allow beaver populations to be managed and tracked by the state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife similarly to fur-bearing animals, Marsh said.
“This is just another species that will be added to the list,” she said.
Though the bill’s proponents claim these permits can be obtained over email free-of-charge within about 30 minutes, the new requirement didn’t sit well with critics who said they’d impose a time-consuming barrier during pending disasters.
If an irrigation canal is failing, for example, urgent repairs may require taking the life of a beaver to prevent flooding that endangers people and property, said Gene Souza, executive director of the Klamath Irrigation District.
“There are emergency situations that occur at two in the morning, sometimes on Sundays, sometimes on Saturdays,” Souza said.
The bill’s supporters acknowledged that beavers can be damaging but said their usefulness justified regulating their lethal removal more strictly.
Beaver dams reconnect creeks and streams with their floodplains, buffering against drought effects and creating “refugia” that shelter wildlife, livestock and habitat from wildfires, according to proponents.
Unlike human efforts to restore impaired waterways, which can take significant investments over decades, beavers can perform the work within years without charging a single dollar, said Emily Fairfax, an assistant professor of environmental science at California State University.
It will be an improvement but sheesh -lethal removal?- we’re not really that difficult to move to where we’re wanted! Read or listen the whole report.
Dr. Rick Lanman stands in Adobe Creek in Palo Alto on March 31, 2023. Photo by Magali Gauthier.
When Dr. Richard Lanman purchased his Los Altos home in the 1980s, Adobe Creek, which snaked behind his backyard, was at best a rivulet of trickling water in the summer. In good winters, a rushing torrent carried logs, leaves, silt and debris out to San Francisco Bay.
But his neighborhood’s old-timers remembered Adobe Creek as a year-round fly-fishing paradise until the 1950s. His 80-year-old neighbor Herb Bickell told Lanman in 1987 that he’d caught fish from his backyard.
“So too, did Sen. Alan Cranston, who lived just a little bit upstream from us,” Lanman said.
But now Adobe Creek is dry for half the year, and there are no fish. Bickell wondered why the creek had undergone such a drastic change.
“Maybe there were beavers,” said Lanman, a Los Altos-based physician scientist, historical ecologist and president of the Institute of Historical Ecology. “One of my theories is there were beaver ponds or percolation ponds that raised the water table so that in our dry season, when the water table is high enough, it recharges the creek.”
Lanman’s urge to answer that question became an additional career in ecological history, leading to research into the Midpeninsula’s and south San Francisco Bay’s missing links. Now he and his colleagues have published groundbreaking findings confirming the past existence of local populations of Chinook salmon, American beavers and Tule elk.
They’ve also suggested possible ways to bring the species back.
Little is understood about California’s historical ecology prior to the arrival of the Europeans, whose actions wiped out animal populations, he said.
“A lot of the species are already gone by the time the U.S. takes California from Mexico, who had just taken over from Spain,” Lanman said.
Zoological records from the time were also not plentiful.
. . .
Hunting for beavers
A beaver swims in a creek in Palo Alto on Sept. 16, 2022. Courtesy Bill Leikam.
Another species that has intrigued Lanman are beavers.
Scientists traditionally dismissed the beaver as a nonnative to the Bay Area, he said. This stance was largely influenced by the 1937 book “Fur-bearing Mammals of California,” written by Joseph Grinnell. Grinnell was the University of California, Berkeley’s first director of its Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and one of the most well-known figures in American natural history in the early half of the 20th century. Grinnell maintained beavers never lived in the Coast Range and Sierra Nevada watersheds, Lanman said.
“And then I met an archaeologist who found a buried beaver dam in the Sierra Nevada. And that was my first historical ecology publication in 2012. It was a buried beaver dam about 12 feet down, and (we) radiocarbon dated the sticks and it showed this dam had been there for hundreds of years and was rebuilt probably by successive generations of beavers,” Lanman said.
“But it ends around 1850 by radiocarbon dating. Of course, 1850 is the gold rush right? And that’s when all these Anglo Americans hunted everything out,” he said.
By the time Grinnell wrote his book in 1937, the beavers were gone.
“He’s suffering from what we call ‘shifting baseline syndrome,’ where you think the way things look when you were born is the way things always were,” Lanman said.
Lanman searched literature, historical accounts and archaeological evidence for the beaver’s historical presence in local waterways. He didn’t find any beaver specimens in early California museum records.
“But if you look in the Smithsonian, it turns out there’s a beaver skull collected on Saratoga Creek around 1855. So that was the first physical evidence of beaver in the Bay Area in a tributary of the south bay,” he said.
Lanman and colleagues published the findings in the fall 2013 California Fish and Game journal. They studied museum specimens, zooarchaeology specimens, place names, documents and words for “beaver” in local California Native languages for evidence of beavers throughout western California from the California-Oregon border to San Diego and to the southern Sierra Nevada.
The researchers found evidence all over the state. In the Bay Area alone, they found 24 records from Healdsburg to Saratoga and from Bodega Bay to Fremont. These included a zooarchaeological specimen from the Emeryville Shellmound, which included a 1,500- to 1,700-year-old beaver tooth, a more than 2,000-year-old beaver incisor and three beaver bones, dating between 700 and 2,600 years old.
Historical literature also abounds with references to beaver hunts and acquisitions from Native Americans. A 1776 account of the second De Anza Expedition noted that Native Californians wore capes of beaver pelts and pelican feathers.
The famed frontiersman Kit Carson held rights in the 1840s to trap them in the east bay. In Santa Clara County, a 1962 study found historical evidence of beavers “in small numbers at least” in Coyote Creek in Santa Clara County among other places, Lanman and his colleagues noted.
How those beavers might have traveled around the bay and up tributaries in Santa Clara County and perhaps San Mateo County is beginning to be understood due to the presence and growing population of reintroduced beavers.
The semi-aquatic rodents were introduced in the early 1980s to upper Los Gatos Creek near Lexington Reservoir and have been slowly making their way northward. The beavers have expanded their territory by swimming up San Francisco Bay to Coyote Creek to the east; the San Tomas Aquino Creek where it reaches the Sunnyvale Water Pollution Control Ponds; Moffett Gate; and Charleston Slough, just east of the Adobe Creek levee, according to Lanman.
Nine years after the beavers research was published, Palo Alto resident Bill Leikam, co-founder and board president of the Urban Wildlife Research Project and native gray-fox expert, documented the first modern evidence of beavers in a remote section of Palo Alto’s Matadero Creek, where he found two beavers in April 2022. If they are a compatible pair, they could begin colonizing the creek and perhaps slowly lead to a population that would move on to other local creeks, Lanman and Leikam said in November.
Lanman is eager to see how beavers might help revive locally collapsing fish populations. Flood control efforts have altered natural channels, such as San Francisquito Creek, which is dammed by Searsville, the Guadalupe River in San Jose and Palo Alto’s Adobe Creek. Lanman wondered how changes to those habitats have affected fish species such as Chinook and steelhead — and whether nature could reverse the damage.
“Beavers are the one thing we haven’t tried. They have these important ecosystem benefits, not just for our trout and salmon, but for all kinds of critters: red-legged frogs that are federally endangered; birds that are federally endangered that depend on the hunt over water and bats that hunt over water,” he said during a November interview.
Join us in JULY for two days of knowledge sharing, highlighting some of the great work within the field of beaver coexistence in Alberta and surrounding regions. Topics to be covered include: ecological and watershed benefits, coexistence solutions, beneficial management practices, beaver-mediated restoration, and more!
July 13 – all-day, indoor event with presentations, panels, and plenty of time for question-and-answer period and networking (8:00am – 6:00pm)
July 14 – field trip to view nearby coexistence tool installations (8:00am – 2:00pm)
Food included with ticket:
Day 1: Continental breakfast, lunch, snacks, tea/coffee, evening appetizers for networking event
Day 2: Bagged lunch with snacks and water
Please note this is an in-person event. We are unfortunately not able to offer virtual attendance, however, PowerPoint presentation slide decks will be posted on our website following the symposium
*Detailed agenda is coming soon*
A block of standard rooms have been set aside at the hotel venue for $109.49 + taxes per room, per night. If you are interested, these can be booked by using the booking link. The hotel provides a complimentary shuttle to / from Edmonton International Airport as well as complimentary high speed wireless throughout entire hotel.
It appears we have devolved such that a single year’s rainfall decides to come in a matter of days. You look out the window at another wet day, you start to think, “GEE that’s a lot of clean water falling from the sky that will go down the streets and gutters and storm drains right out to the bay”.
And you want that water out of your way, of course, and off your driveway and lawns and schoolyards so you’re grateful for the drains and the pavement. But you also have in the back of your head this nagging sensation that “I bet we’re going to miss that water in July when we the entire Bay Area is looking like dehydrated fruit” Or maybe “Burning up entirely.”
Then one suddenly has a thought “Hey wouldn’t it be cool if there was some way to keep that water in the communities where it’s needed before it disappears out to sea? Like some kind of natural little water holding structures that slowed things down and helped the water seep into the soil and soak into the ground where it can stay cool til we need it later?“.
I know it sounds crazy, but I’ve read that we used to have lots and lots of these things that made little ponds all along our streams. Like some kind of natural champagne fountain constantly trickling down all the stacked glasses so that no cup ever went dry even when it was far, far away from the original bottle.
There has been such loud response to Monday’s Minnesota research that I have been waiting for an interview or two to pop up. WTIP community radio was first with this excellent audio recorded with the study author and host Joe Friedrichs. It really is compelling stuff. Especially when he says that beavers keep water on the landscape AND when we kill them it reduces water on the landscape, but then says “I’m not going to say anything about whether or not we should keep killing them”. HAHAHA
A new study shows the critical role beavers play in regulating water storage along the North Shore.
The project reviewed data and photographs from the Kadunce and Cascade rivers in Cook County, as well as the Manitou, Split Rock and Knife rivers down the shore.
The study is considered one of the most extensive reviews analyzing the extent to which beavers are essential for freshwater conservation and ecosystem stability by creating and preserving aquatic and wetland environments in Minnesota.
A while ago I wrote about the Virginia writer who noticed beavers on his land, thought briefly about their friend’s comment on their value and ended up killing them anyway. Now that same writer has had a longer conversation with his friend and is really starting to think, I believe these are the conversations that everyone who loves the land needs to be having, and it makes me enormously happy to read. Maybe I’ll even send them a copy of Ben’s book.
Aerial image of the Rappahannock river above Fredericksburg, VA
A while back, I met with my friend, Bill Fletcher, to have a bite and pick up where we had left off so many years earlier. Listening to him talk about water as Rappahannock’s most precious asset, I was reminded that change happens when need and experienced-based insight converge. What follows is Bill’s thinking about what we can do next to protect what we all cherish about Rappahannock:
Tommy Bruce: When did your family come to settle in Rappahannock?
Bill Fletcher: My family has been here since the 1740’s. I remember my father telling me that generations back, our forebears came up from the Tidewater area in the summertime to get away from the malaria and mosquitoes. Over time, summer houses became family homes for the family.
Back then there were no real roads and even fewer bridges. Only ferries and low water crossings. My father said that the rivers were navigable and barges transported people and material up from Fredericksburg. In my own time I remember canoeing with my father on the Thornton River on a regular basis. That’s not possible today.
Okay now THAT’S what I would call an old-timer. Family lived in the area since 1740. I sense that in every possible other way Bill and I might hate eachother. But in this are we are of like minds. Wonderful.
Tommy Bruce: Water is a theme in your life. Is it one for Rappahannock?
Bill Fletcher: I’ve always been a bit fascinated with water. When I was 7 or 8 years old, I’d sneak out of the house and go down to one of the little streams on the property and try to build dams out of sticks, reeds and grasses. I’d wait to see how long they lasted. Not very long of course. Later in the 1980’s, a geologist told us the water levels in the 1700’s was maybe two or three feet higher on the Thornton River. That made me curious about where all the water had gone. Since then, I’ve talked to various experts.
Tommy Bruce: So, what is the situation today?
Bill Fletcher: Well, I can tell you what is happening on my land. The old artesian well, down at what we call the Jail House, was drilled in 1980, and is now down 100 feet. We have had to dig additional wells to make do on the property. The challenge these days is… we need to retain water on the land for the good of our lands, but also to build up our aquifers. I’ve been trying to find out the depth of our wells relative sea level. Unfortunately, I haven’t found any records tracking the replacement of wells and why it’s happening.
Let’s talk about your wells. Let’s talk about your water. Let’s talk.
Tommy Bruce: What should we do about it?
Bill Fletcher: Water is life. It is the most important thing you have in life. We can’t just sit by and watch our lands dry up. We need to envision a different future for Rappahannock County. Don’t get me wrong, I’m an old timer and I believe in the old time ways. But, we’ve got to change with the times and learn from what some of our neighbors are doing. This is just my personal opinion.
Tommy Bruce: What are you thinking?
Bill Fletcher: Rappahannock is about water. So, we need to think about ways to slow down the flow of water away from our county. If the water stays longer on our lands, it’s good for the soil, vegetation, the wildlife and will help reverse the very real depletion or our aquifers. If we do nothing, we’re going to be the first ones to dry up.
Tommy Bruce: What do you mean, “be the first”. Who else would be affected?
Bill Fletcher: We are the headwaters for everything east of us, downstream all the way to the Bay. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation also tells us our waters help carry the silt and pollutants that are now affecting the health of the Bay. So, we need our aquifers to remain plentiful and flowing at a more appropriate rate. That’s where my idea about bringing back beaver dams and what they call Beaver Dam Analogs (BDAs). This is where Rappahannock could actually set itself apart and be more beneficial to our citizens, our state and our nation.
Oh Bill. I’m liking where the water and the Chesapeake is taking you. Stay in that stream and lets flow together.
Tommy Bruce: So, how can BDAs help landowners in Rappahannock?
Bill Fletcher: I learned that there are four things beaver dams and the analogs can do for us. First, they slow the flow of water and mitigate flooding damages. They filter sediment which cleans the soil and allows the water to sink in to replenish the water table. They help the wildlife habitat. Fourth, dams help increase vegetation. Also, keep in mind what they call pollutants we call fertilizers. When the ponds overflow, the sediment –to which the pollutants are attached- is then deposited on the ground thereby improving it.
Tommy Bruce: But I seem to remember you liked to blow up beaver dams?
Bill Fletcher: Let me tell you a story. When I was 10 years old, the beavers would build dams on the best crop land we had at Montpelier. When the flooding got to a certain level, my father would tell Ollie Dodson to go down and blow them up and I would go with him. It was a tremendous amount of fun. I loved loud noises. All these years later, I took a friend of mine, who happens to be an avid hunter, down to these same fields where beavers had again been hard at work. The place was transformed and wildlife has come back. We saw a big brunch of turkeys in the field and then 30 feet away, we came upon 20 or so deer and then we drove a little further and a bunch of ducks came up on the pond as geese flew off another pond. I realized this place had become excellent hunting grounds. Now, I rent land on Thornton Hill and Miller farm for hunting and get more money that way than I did from using or renting it for cattle grazing.
Sure it’s fun to blow things up when you’re 10, but it’s also damn fun to see the wildlife come back to an area and realize you’re sitting on a hunting gold mine. Let the rodent do the work. Let beavers be beavers.
Tommy Bruce: When did you really start to think differently about all of this?
Bill Fletcher: My “aha moment” came last year when I went to see my daughter who lives on the Miller farm. We had put up a dam to create a small one acre pond. The beavers had gotten into it and repaired the pond to a certain extent, and expanded it by three or four times. I thought it was really pretty and might be good for both farming and the natural habitat. But, then my daughter pointed out that a spring she hadn’t seen before had come back. That was my “aha moment”. From that moment on, I started to explore my own ideas about what to do to slow down the flow of water away from Rappahannock. I talked to a lot of people. I met with Amy Johnson from the Smithsonian Institution who told me about all the rare orchids and birds we had. Together we’d compare notes with other land owners. I reached out to Jim Abdo to talk through my evolving thought process. He introduce me to Bill Somerlot who is an expert in the field and has helped me through the whole process of discovery. Eventually I met with John Odenkirk, an expert with fisheries and a personal friend, who lives in the County. That’s when a lot of this really started to come together for me. I then met with Bryan Hofmann, Deputy Director with Friends of the Rappahannock, who confirmed that, yes, beavers retain water on the land, something we really need to do in Rappahannock.
It’s wonderful that not I don’t recognize a single name he mentions but I know exactly what they talked about. And I talk about it all the time.
Tommy Bruce: Do you have a specific proposal you want people to think about:
Bill Fletcher: In a nutshell, I think we should get some grants together to plan how to bring the beaver back and deploy Beaver Dam Analogs (BDA’s) or leaky weirs to slow the flow away from our lands. Hopefully, we’d create the conditions for nature to do its thing.
Tommy Bruce: What would you like to see the state of Virginia do?
Bill Fletcher: Well, Virginia has a program, and a good one I’m sure, to fence the streams and rivers, but I don’t think fences alone will replenish our aquifers or stope the erosion down into the Bay. The State should get involved in a BDA program, and provide economic incentives to farmers who help keep and clean the water in Rappahannock. Maybe, even make water conservation a condition of land use. We also need some help with record keeping. For instance, the reports to the county on average rainfall differ by a lot. Without adequate record keeping there can’t be a reliable determination of what’s really going on.
Okay, the purists in me says you don’t need BDAs you just need to stop blowing up B’s. But I appreciate so much your peering into the light and I can understand why it’s valuable to exercise a little more control over where the B’s make themselves at home.
Tommy Bruce: At heart you are a farmer. What are the challenges for farmers in Rappahannock? What else should they consider doing with their land?
Bill Fletcher: I love the land almost as much as I love my children, but, the cost of doing business keeps going up. We don’t have Fauquier loam in Rappahannock and some of our lands have been polluted by heavy metals from coal fired plants. So, we have our challenges. We have no prime agricultural land. Besides, the cost of farming keeps rising along with the taxes that have tripled at least since the 1970’s. Actually the tax baseline is higher than the agricultural value of much of our land. We have tried everything. We tried crop land, beans, corn, wheat, oats, rye, and yeah it is crazy.
I also believe everybody should be self-sufficient. I mean, if the world goes to hell, I keep enough food and fuel and generators to run my farm for six months. It is expensive but I don’t trust the government. Everything’s a vote away from going to hell.
I’d love nothing more than to keep Rappahannock pristine and beautiful and lush. But, we’ve got all kinds of pressure now on us. I think farmers should be able to look at other uses, including solar, to keep the land as open as it is today while still making a living. Personally, I want a solar field on my farm to run my farm efficiently, energy-wise. That being said, I’m not an expert but it makes sense to look into these ideas. I think Rappahannock needs to be open to this kind of thinking.
What’s your mailing address? I think I’m sending you a book today. Keep an eye on the mailbox.
Tommy Bruce: Will it be a challenge to bring along people in the County?
Bill Fletcher: Well, I just say use your common sense. Do your own reading and check out the research being done in the US. I’d start with “Beaver dam analogues drive heterogeneous groundwater–surface water interactions” from the journal Hydrologic Processes. That piece told me a lot. Not so long ago, I didn’t know about beaver dam analogs or even the leaky weirs they’ve been using for a number of year in England and Australia. And, water seemed to be plentiful. But, all that has changed, and we need to seize the opportunity to lead the way.
Tommy Bruce: Any last thought?
Bill Fletcher: We could be the greenest county, we could have the healthiest environment, and Rappahannock could be a tremendous asset. But, our land needs to be healthy with plenty of water for farming to flourish and preserve the viewsheds we all care about. It’s a trickle down economy… just like water. If all our water goes away then all our money will go away. We’ve got to do something to stop that and bring Rappahannock back. You know me, I don’t want to change anything, but like the rest of us, I’ve got to survive. And, if the farms can’t survive, Rappahannock ,as we know it, won’t survive.
And that’s it. If the water doesn’t survive the people won’t survive. And Beavers will help you keep water on the land. And all you gotta do is stop blowing them up. That seems a fair trade doesn’t it?
When the old timers come to Beavers, I get very very happy.
Forrest Gump was wrong. Life is not at all like a box of chocolates.
There are great, nouget filled days to be sure with little sea salt and almond sprinkles on top. But the saying implies that even the rotten days are still sugary sweet, And that’s just not true. Life is more like an Easter basket filled with assorted chocolates and also dotted with hang grenades and root canals.
Yesterday we tasted all of them.
The final signup numbers for the conference look really good. Better than expected even, with a new registration from Kansas fish and wildlife of all places. We stand at nearly 900 registrations, and 600 of them are from the golden state, which is everything I can hope for,
But then we saw that the scrappy newly dam built by an anonymous beaver in the park behind my house had been ripped out by city staff. Totally. You can still see the footprints where they hiked down the hill to do the deed. It feels so pointless. I almost wish I didn’t care at all because then I’d never notice and feel like this,
All the wood and mud and stone gone. The crutches and booze bottle gone. All the fresh grass on the bank dying because of the missing water and their rotten feet stomping down to the bank to wield the rake. Any hope Martinez has of being in National Geographic gone – don’t ask. Sometimes I really hate city staff.
But if the beaver is feeling like sticking around he might try again. And we also got this yesterday, which is as good of good news as your heart ever wanted to hear. If you never even watch videos on this website change your policy today because this is GOOD. And it doesn’t make up for the hand grenade and the root canal but it comes really dam close.
A new study shows the critical role beavers play in regulating water storage along the North Shore.
Tommy Bruce: Water is a theme in your life. Is it one for Rappahannock?
Tommy Bruce: So, how can BDAs help landowners in Rappahannock?
The final signup numbers for the conference look really good. Better than expected even, with a new registration from Kansas fish and wildlife of all places. We stand at nearly 900 registrations, and 600 of them are from the golden state, which is everything I can hope for,
