Category: Beavers and trout

WISCONSIN GETS THE ATTENTION IT DESERVES

As long as I’ve been writing about beavers, and probably long before that there have been two stares where fish and wildlife has been diligently blowing up beaver dams to “protect trout’. Explosives must be very fun because they have ignored all the data from Pollock and Wheaton that show how essential beaver habitat is to rearing salmonids and how the dams keep temperatures low. I figured that the single blessing of Emily Fairfax leaving California for Minnesota might be to push this argument to the forefront. Along with Bob Boucher’s fantastic Milwaukee research and subsequent legal action who has finally pushed it into the light.

Leave it to the beavers

As Madison endures a long, hot summer of drought and wildfire haze, maybe it’s time to embrace what beavers have to offer.

These industrious hydrologic engineers are champing at the sticks to restore the 50% of Wisconsin wetlands that were drained for farming, including much of Madison’s isthmus. Their ponds slow flooding during rainy seasons, store water for times of drought, create a swampy barrier against wildfires, and build habitat for other species ranging from woodpeckers to fish to amphibians.

Because of beavers’ documented ability to mitigate climate change, western states are encouraging beaver populations, and protecting them with new laws. In June, California declared beavers a “keystone species,” Seattle has installed pond levelers so beavers can build dams in its parks without flooding them, and groups such as the SLO Beaver Brigade document the health of local populations.

Europe, where beavers were wiped out during the craze for beaver skin hats, is restoring beavers into wetlands from Scotland to Russia. And with a documentary called The Beaver Believers, and the publication of two recent books extolling their virtues — Beaverland by Leila Philip and Eager by Ben Goldfarb — beavers are having their moment of fame.

Except, not so much in Wisconsin.

“We’re the only state that has a budget to destroy beavers; we’ve spent $15 million in the last 20 years to kill beavers,’’ says Bob Boucher, who claims the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources is pursuing “a policy of beaver holocaust.” In the past decade, Boucher says U.S. Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services statistics indicate that federal and state policies have killed 28,141 Wisconsin beavers and blown up or destroyed 14,796 beaver dams through hand removal or explosives, accidentally killing 1,091 river otters in the process.

Good for you Bob. This is taking the fight right into the lion’s den. The department of natural resources in Wisconsin has been repeatedly shown the truth over the years, I know because I and other believers have personally have received letters back from them. They know better. It’s high time they do better.

But Midwestern attitudes may be changing and there are moves afoot to rethink beaver management. Boucher’s group, Superior Bio-Conservancy, filed notice in late June that it intends to sue the wildlife services division of the USDA, which carries out the DNR’s orders to remove beavers along 1,800 miles of trout streams in Wisconsin. Boucher, who was co-author of a 2021 study that proposed using beavers to build $3.3 billion worth of flood-proofing along the Milwaukee River watershed, says he’s made 17 requests to meet with the DNR on its beaver policy, only to be rebuffed.

“I hope that a stern talking-to from a judge may get them to pay attention,’’ he says.

And beavers in northern Wisconsin trout streams will be the topic of the annual trout stream improvement workshop Aug. 15, co-sponsored by the DNR and UW-Stevens Point. Another Midwest beaver and trout management conference, sponsored by the American Fisheries Society, is set for a week later in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Dynamiting beaver dams to “improve” streams for trout has long been a DNR policy.

Sometime, when you’ve ignored information for so long it’s become automatic, and everything still isn’t working even though you have poured buckets of money into your projects, sometimes when that happens and you’re at a loss to know what to do next, it’s time to try something NEW. Maybe even listening.

Trout biologist Ray White, who will be a speaker at the August event in Hayward, grew up in Madison and remembers watching a nature movie at the Wisconsin Historical Society in the 1940s that showed game wardens ridding Wisconsin of beavers to encourage trout.

“I knew even as a kid that Wisconsin wanted to remove beavers,’’ says White, who worked at the Wisconsin DNR before going on to faculty positions at Michigan State and Montana State. “And then I became a biologist and I became involved in it. We felt beavers were messing up our work.”

Today, White, 88, sees the issue as less clear cut. Eastern brook trout, Wisconsin’s native species, and beavers evolved together in Wisconsin. While trout improvement dogma declares that beaver dams cause trout streams to warm up and silt up behind the dams, White says that isn’t necessarily a problem for trout spawning.

“It turns out that eastern brook trout spawn where groundwater comes up through the gravel, they seek out places where they can feel the upwelling water,’’ he says. “If the silt is thin enough at the edge of a beaver pond, they can still spawn there.”

Whoa. He’s very close. Is this story going to have a happy ending?

Still, White doesn’t oppose removing beavers from trout waters, saying, “we don’t need beavers everywhere.”

Nope. Maybe not that close.

Another workshop speaker Emily Fairfax, a hydrologist at the University of Minnesota, says that her research shows that beaver dams can have a beneficial effect, forcing moving water downwards, where it mingles with chilly groundwater and remerges much colder.

“I’ve felt this, walking down beaver-dammed streams, and suddenly you’ll feel this ice cold stream of water coming up,’’ Fairfax says. “So beaver ponds will have super cool pools that trout love, warmer pools that turtles and amphibians love, there’s something for everyone in this habitat. Beavers are really, really good at creating these biodiversity hotspots.”

Fairfax, who did her beaver research in California and other western states, says Wisconsin lacks solid data on its beaver populations because the DNR does not track the number of beavers killed by private landowners. (In his complaint, Boucher notes the USDA wildlife services kills three times more beavers per year than planned in its 2013 environmental assessment plan.)

Go Emily. Go Bob. Go Beavers.

“We have what I call ‘ecological amnesia,’ because it’s been 200 or 300 years since beavers were really abundant,’’ Fairfax says. The first Europeans who arrived in Wisconsin were fur traders, and they encountered a wet, paleo landscape of braided streams that would flood during wet seasons and contract during dry times.

Based on her California experience, Fairfax says it may take a lawsuit to get Wisconsin’s beaver believers working with the trout fanciers. It also may take a climate-fueled disaster or two.

“The West was confronted with climate disasters much sooner, and those are situations where you really see the benefits of beavers,’’ Fairfax says. “If we want to be climate resilient, we need more wetlands, and beavers are great builders of wetland

Just remember, first they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight with you. Then you win.

I would say the badger state has officially moved into stage 3. Stay Tuned.

BEAVERS GO THE WHITE HOUSE but TWS SAYS THEY HURT TROUT

This is unbelievable. It’s been days since there was a significant beaver news story and this morning there are two stories of exact opposite dramatic weight. Neither one can wait until tomorrow. There’s no alternative, you must hear about BOTH of them. The best of times and the worst of times. The zenith and the nadir. The story we’ve all been waiting for and the story that we’ve never expected to read.

My only love sprung from my only hate, said Juliet. I can’t do a split screen but let’s just look at the headlines side by side, shall we?

Lest you think I exaggerate YES that headline says President Biden and YES that other headline is from The FRIGGIN’ WILDLIFE SOCIETY. So you can see my dilemma. Let’s start with the good news. It will give us strength for the other part.

by Western Watersheds Project

Yesterday, this letter was delivered to President Biden requesting an executive order protecting beaver on federally managed public lands. “In order to fully realize the wide array of social, ecological, and economic benefits that beavers provide to human and wild communities, the federal government must take bold and decisive action,” said Adam Bronstein of Western Watersheds Project. “This executive order would provide clear direction and is needed because state wildlife agencies are too narrowly focused on the interest of hunters and trappers, leading to their continued failure to protect this critical keystone species. Anxieties are high and cut across state boundaries and addressing them requires a national strategy rather than a piecemeal approach.”

Why are beavers so important? Beavers and — the habitats they create — sequester vast amounts of carbon, provide vital habitat for fish and wildlife, create natural firebreaks, filter drinking water, store water during drought and temper flooding events. When beavers are removed from the landscape, these important benefits are lost. Beavers nearly went extinct in North America after centuries of fur trapping and extermination efforts and their populations have yet to recover across most areas of the United States. Protecting beavers by closing public lands to beaver trapping and hunting will vastly improve survival rates.

Suzanne Fouty wrote me weeks ago about this being in the works and Worth A Dam is a signatory to the letter but it’s nice to see the headline. The attached letter is a wonderful read and the signatories below are like a who’s who in the beaver world. Of course you know me, I wish it said something about killing beavers for other reasons like blockign culverts, but it’s a start and we all have our own fish to fry.

“Beavers are a keystone species, meaning that they play a crucial role in maintaining the biodiversity and stability of ecosystems,” adds Dr. William Ripple, Distinguished Professor of Ecology at Oregon State University. “Beavers have been referred to as ‘nature’s firefighters’ due to their ability to create wetland habitats that can act as natural firebreaks, slowing or even stopping the spread of wildfires.”

And as weather becomes increasingly unpredictable and severe and the economic, ecological, and emotional costs rise, we need all the help we can get. Long-time environmental advocate and singer/songwriter Carole King summed up the reality of the situation, “No matter how far downstream we live, beavers and their dams are beneficial to all of us because they create wetlands, mitigate drought and flooding, and filter pollutants from our rivers and streams.”

Nicely said. Beavers do a lot of things for the country that you say you want done. So lets not kill them. Except of course for in Michigan and Wisconsin where they degrade habitat and pollute our streams. How’s the whiplash coming along? This is from article II:

Beaver dams are a major cause of habitat degradation in the streams that drain into Lake Superior, Lake Huron and Lake Michigan. While beaver ponds can be beneficial to some species of wildlife, obstructions on these small tributaries can negatively impact critical habitat for migrating fish, including brook trout, particularly during spawning season. A single obstruction has the potential to impact fish passage over miles of the stream and can disrupt gravel stream bottoms necessary for successful spawning, decrease stream flow causing lower oxygen levels and negatively increase water temperature.

We expect malarkey like this from USDA. I mean goodness what else are they likely to do. But to read this report in THE WILDLIFE SOCIETY? Honest TWS has done some of the best and earliest beaver education in the country. In fact way back when the Martinez beavers were in danger I remember one of my most hopeful moments was when fellow committee member Igor Skaredoff attended a TWS beaver conference in Oregon. I expect better from them. Good lord.

Wildlife Services coordinated with the Michigan and Wisconsin departments of natural resources to identify stream locations that represented traditional coaster brook trout habitat. Staff then surveyed designated streams on foot, watercraft and fixed-wing aircraft to identify stream barriers. After locating beaver activity and dams through surveying, barriers were removed using a combination of hand pulling and explosives.

From 2018 to 2021, where the goal was to protect areas of coastal wetland and other habitats in Michigan, Wildlife Services staff monitored targeted areas along 19 streams, surveying approximately 200 acres and removing 120 beaver dams. During the same timeframe, Wildlife Services staff in Wisconsin worked to maintain stream connectivity established for aquatic species. Wisconsin Wildlife Services staff monitored targeted areas along 32 streams, spanning just over 300 miles, and removed a total of 225 beaver dams.

We are living in times of feast and times of famine. The best of times and the worst of times. The beaver renaissance and the beaver dark ages. It ain’t over until it’s over, Your help is still need.

Stay vigilant.

“IF YOU WANT TROUT, WORK FOR BEAVERS”

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers and trout November 29, 2022

Things are looking up for beavers of the Rio Grande. At least their a hot commodity now.

Saving the #RioGrande Cutthroat Trout: Beavers show the way — @AlmosaCitizen

THE Rio Grande cutthroat trout is the Rio Grande National Forest’s only native trout. It needs help. Biologists from Colorado Parks and Wildlife and Rio Grande National Forest are trying to bring the cutthroat back to its full glory, but they need help, too. So who do the humans look to for help?

Easy answer: Beavers.

Jason Remshardt, wildlife and fisheries program manager for the Rio Grande National Forest, recently gave a presentation on the Rio Grande cutthroat trout. He is the only fish biologist in the RGNF. He talked about the effort to create and conserve habitat for the cutthroat, and how the answer might just come from nature’s finest engineers.

The Rio Grande cutthroat trout used to exist in just about every part of the Rio Grande basin, but due to a wide range of circumstances, these fish only occupy a fraction of the area they used to. Part of conservation and successful reintroduction is habitat restoration. Right now, the experts are looking at nature’s experts. These projects are imitating “what the beaver dams are doing,” said Remshardt.

These “Beaver Dam Analogues” or “Temporary Wood Grade Structures,” or TWGS, (pronounced like twigs), are designed to help back up water and create a lively wetland habitat that encourages healthy biodiversity not just for the cutthroat, but the entire ecosystem.

Now when I read an article like this I’m stroking my chin suspiciously and saying “Do you really just want an excuse to play in the mud? Or do you really want beavers?” I guess they are the real deal,

Beavers in the national forest are alive and thriving. Remshardt says that the RGNF is happy with current populations, but there is room for expansion and improvement. With that, the benefits of beaver dams create healthy, expansive wetlands. Beaver dams and habitats also make great fire breaks.

These animals, however, are considered a nuisance species to certain areas of the Valley. Beavers can be troublesome to infrastructure like irrigation canals and roads.

“There’s this stark contrast of existing as a pest species on the Valley floor while being highly beneficial up in the headwaters. The logical solution,” Born said, “is an efficient, legal, and humane way to translocate them to areas where their engineering is more appreciated and doesn’t impact infrastructure.”

Relocating the beavers pairs well with the restoration efforts. Born said that the structures may encourage beavers to stay in areas that “have habitat that would otherwise be too degraded.”

Remshardt says there’s plenty of space to relocate any problematic, or displaced wood-chopping rodents.

“We’re ready to take them and we have places all over the forest to take them. Plenty of places we can put them,” Remshardt said.

Identifying where beavers are and where beavers aren’t is a part of the job that requires a lot of work from a lot of people. Software like iNaturalist allows anyone to report animal sightings and tracks to help in identification. These reports can help biologists like Remshardt identify populations and locations to help further studies and surveys.

Helping the beavers help us really boils down to, Remshardt said, the fact that “beavers are the best at doing their own work.”

Yes well that’s a helluva lot better than some. But I’m a crazy optimist. I dream of a day when any beaver anywhere that decides to make a dam any old place makes folks stop and scratch their heads and think “WOW that beaver is really doing good things RIGHT HERE. For the watertable, and the fish and the fire potential. Maybe I should just cooperate with it and keep it around if possible”.

Yeah well I said I was an optimist.

Most of the streams and lakes are easy to access, but the Rio Grande Cutthroat Trout lives in the alpine, too. Remshardt said almost every drainage and lake in the Sangre de Cristo mountain range has cutthroat populations. So, in order to keep these high mountain lakes stocked and healthy, they conduct High Mountain Lake Airplane Stocking. A video from CPW shows just how these operations are done.

Conservation of the cutthroat, Remshardt said, remains the most intensive and expensive project. Ongoing research for more cutthroat introductions to expand them into their historic ranges is an ongoing and expansive effort. Currently, an effort to successfully reintroduce the cutthroat to the Sand Creek drainages at the Great Sand Dunes National Park is taking place. The project first started in 2005.

Well if you CARE about cuttthroat you better care about beavers. It’s really that simple.

WISCONSIN IS STARTING TO THINK TWICE ABOUT BEAVERS

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beavers and trout September 21, 2022

Well, maybe thinking once would be an improvement. Yesterday’s outrageous burst of lying was fun, but Ben Goldfarb and I agree we’ve seen worse from the actual news in our day. Just this morning I got an email from Rocklin where they are planning to rip out a beaver dam and the report to CDFW said this:

Types of materials to be removed, displaced, or added: Remove sediment from Beaver Dams Evasive trees Tully’s Evasive Plants Pompous Grass

God I hate that pomous grass. It’s soo full of itself! And the evasive trees are so hard to corner! Always changing the subject and growing in the opposite direction!

Ignorance abounds. Apparently it is a renewable resource. Just look at Wisconsin where they are spending many dollars to restore streams for trout and getting rid of any beaver that horns his way into the conversation. At least things are getting controversial.

Wisconsin wildlife officials say controlling the state’s beaver population is key to healthy trout streams. But some conservation advocates are pushing back.

Wisconsin is home to more than 13,000 miles of trout streams. Every year, the state Department of Natural Resources works on habitat restoration projects to help trout populations thrive, both on public lands and on private property where the state has an easement to allow fishing access.

Wildlife officials say part of this work involves keeping another native species from undoing their efforts: the beaver. But some conservationists are pushing back on the idea that beavers are a threat to trout populations.

David Rowe is head of the DNR’s fisheries team in southwestern Wisconsin. He said beavers are a part of the native wildlife along these waterways, but the work his team does to create the ideal habitat for trout often attracts beavers to the area.

He said the rodents love the shrubby plants like willow and box elder that grow along the streams and the rocks used to stabilize the banks are an ideal foundation.

“It looks very attractive to a beaver to lock his dam in with a hard spot and his dam will persist longer. So the beavers you know that are going up and down these streams are like, ‘Oh, wait a second. This is a great place now to build a dam now,'” Rowe said. “So we do make it more attractive for them.”

“There’s an expectation with the landowner that if a beaver shows up on these places that we fixed up … and now starts flooding out their cornfield, starts flooding out their pasture, starts flooding out their driveway, we have to manage that beaver,” Rowe said. “We don’t want to create a situation where we invite a beaver in and now there’s a giant pond on their property instead of a trout stream.”

He said the DNR mostly does beaver culling on a case-by-case basis, but officials do some surveillance for problems in areas that have seen repeated beaver damage.

He said a beaver building a dam can undo the DNR’s habitat work on a stream, which is paid for through the $10 trout stamps purchased by Wisconsin anglers.

He said a beaver building a dam can undo the DNR’s habitat work on a stream, which is paid for through the $10 trout stamps purchased by Wisconsin anglers.

Hey how many beaver stamps do you have to sell to get a beaver to do the same work? Um, that would be none. The nice thing is that when you read a horrific report like this at LEAST you are getting some push back. That never used to happen.

But as the state sees more frequent heavy rainfalls and resulting flooding due to climate change, some conservationists say the practice of culling beavers is harming trout streams and the surrounding area.

Bob Boucher studies beavers and how they affect hydrology and is the founder of Milwaukee Riverkeeper, an environmental advocacy group focused on the Milwaukee River basin. He said wildlife officials started culling beavers based on faulty science that beaver dams block fish migration and cause harmful warming of waters in trout streams.

“Actually what they do is they stabilize stream temperatures to be cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter,” Boucher said. “When you stabilize the thermal climate stream, you also have more productivity from it because there’s more bugs being grown.”

He said those insects are key to helping trout populations thrive. So while fish may prefer to live in cooler sections of the water, they need the warmer parts for food.

Beyond trout populations, Boucher said beavers’ dams reconnect rivers and streams to their natural floodplain. In the last two decades, Wisconsin has seen a growing number of severe storms with heavy rainfall that led to flash floods, especially in northern and southwestern Wisconsin. Boucher said allowing beavers to make their dams on these waterways would help waterways better manage the influx of water and keep it from rushing through the system.

He said wildlife officials are also killing otters on these waterways because they continue to use lethal traps for beavers. The USDA Wild Services accidentally killed 146 otters last year as part of beaver removal efforts.

“They could go to non-lethal techniques by using flow devices and things like that,” Boucher said. “The (state) Department of Natural Resources is really damaging the wildlife of Wisconsin and I would say the waters of the United States by doing this.”

Rowe said the DNR recognizes the need for more research to better understand the actual impact of beaver dams on local trout populations.

He said the department has a research scientist currently working on this topic. He also said the DNR has worked to improve their habitat restoration process so that they don’t accidentally attract beavers to an area that will later have to be removed. And he said the agency tries to reconnect trout streams to the natural floodplain in every habitat process because it has been shown to help the projects be more successful and long-lasting.

I’m so old that I remember when you’d read an article like this and the benefits of beaver dams wouldn’t even come up. It would just be BLOW THEM UP all the way. Now with Bob Boucher on the case we are really starting to see some changes. Nothing happens over night. But read through the comment section. Attitudes are shirting in the right direction.

Just remember what Gandhi said:

BEAVERS HELP TROUT EXCEPT IN GEORGIA

heidi08 Beavers and trout July 22, 2022

Real Trout fishermen are usually good friends of beavers. There are a few stupid ones that blow up dams but if they are worth their salted cod they know that beaver ponds are the best place to fish.

TALKING TROUT: The good, the bad and the beaver

In a recent TU National on-line newsletter there was an article called “Be the Beaver” detailing work that Lizzie Stifel participated in, in Northeast Oregon headwater tributaries, including streams in the North Fork John Day and Grande Ronde river basins. The work was with the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and Trout Unlimited. Lizzie is a TU intern.

The project was to place manmade structures that mimicked or resembled beaver dams

Quoting Lizzie from the article: “In Oregon, our crew forged this connection through a relatively new type of restoration tool: beaver dam analogues (BDAs). Water that backs up behind BDAs recharges the floodplain and increases the wetted width of the stream flow. Essentially, a BDA creates a porous wall of sticks, logs, and leaves that slows the flow of water in one part of the stream and retains much of this flow behind the ‘dam,’ allowing some of this backed-up water to seep into the floodplain. This beaver-like engineering helps promote channel aggradation, or in other words, prevents channels from incising into themselves and away from the natural floodplain.”

Well sure BDAs are popular until their popularity is tested by getting actual beavers. Then how do they fair?

The BDAs that have been and are being built in Oregon and other areas with high altitude, and that are located much farther north than Georgia, have been very beneficial to trout, giving the fish places to live and to feed. Many areas of Oregon suffered from devastating forest fires of recent times. Again, quoting Lizzie, “While many square miles of forests were devastated, after the burn, scientists discovered occasional patches of land that looked untouched in many cases due to beaver dams. Where many streams became troughs of black slush, the waters near beaver dams were clear and still harbored trout.”

Beavers are not always welcome in heavily populated areas and in close proximity to farms. Homes near beavers often lose favorite trees and shrubs. Smaller young trees are often first to go, as well as things from the garden such as green beans, apples, potatoes, lettuce and broccoli. My friend Steve, who lives on the river, complains of beavers every year.

Beavers in locations such as Oregon and northern areas such as Minnesota and Maine can be of great benefit to trout and other salmonids. In Georgia, the beaver ponds on most streams help with flood and sediment control and provide great habitat for all types of sunfish and other warm water fish.

Hmm. That’s confusing. So beavers from one side of the country to the OTHER side can be a great benefit to trout and other salmonids. But in Georgia they only help warm water fish? Is it a latitude thing? Are you saying that in the southern states beavers make the water so warm that trout can’t benefit from them?

I’m putting on my thinking cap and I can’t pull up a single southern study on beavers and trout. Can you? I better ask Ben or Michael Pollock.