Category: Beavers and trout

STRAIGHT FROM THE HORSES’ MOUTH

heidi08 Beavers and trout March 15, 2019

What the big boys had to say about Ted Williams article.

Ben Goldfarb

Here’s my own blurb, spoken from the heart as a graduate of the Yale School of Forestry (Aldo’s alma mater) and a former Leopold Writing Fellow. Feel free to share wherever:

Setting aside all the unscientific junk in this piece, here’s what bothers me most: the spurious invocation of Leopold’s “Thinking Like a Mountain,” which actually says precisely the opposite of what Williams thinks it does. The point of “Mountain” is that, by killing a native keystone species (wolves) to benefit a recreationally targeted game species (white-tailed deer), we inadvertently inflicted profound ecological harm upon the broader natural community. And yet Williams is advocating that we… kill a native keystone species (beaver) to benefit a recreationally targeted game species (brook trout)! In other words, he’s committing the exact mistake that Leopold cautioned against in his iconic essay — advocating for short-sighted, heavy-handed lethal management driven by recreational biases rather than ecology.

It’s a shame — I’m actually a big Ted Williams fan. Here’s hoping he goes back to defending public lands and holding corporate polluters to account, rather than misguidedly punching down at beavers.

Michael Poilock

I do think that we have created a lot of drainage ditches across this country, to drain “swamps” etc. and that beaver tend to restore these drainage ditches back into swamps or wetlands, when left alone. Another way of thinking about it is that in places like Wisconsin, there was a lot of wetlands, and that getting rid of beaver made it easy to drain these areas, or to convert wetlands into streams, or essentially, to extend the stream network into places where it didn’t previously exist. The same process has arguably gone on in the Sierra and elsewhere in the west, where erosion and incision has extended stream networks into areas that were once wet meadows with no discernible stream channel.

So if beaver are playing a role in zipping up drainage networks and reducing their extent, then yes, they will be reducing the amount of stream habitat, and increasing the amount of wetland or wet meadow habitat, and species that like streams, such as trout, will be less plentiful in those areas. I haven’t been to Wisconsin lately, but I speculate that something similar is going on and that the extent of the stream network is an artifact of land use practices from current and previous centuries. I also speculate that better land use management might reduce the extent of trout, but that on a watershed scale they would be more plentiful, since the increase in wetlands would improve water quality and quantity, as well as modulating hydrographs, creating more stable flows. If we think about streams as habitat networks, with different types of habitat in different parts of the network, rather than as drainage networks, with the implied goal of “draining” the landscapes, I think that helps point us in the right conceptual direction. We do better when we think about watershed restoration and process restoration and ecosystem restoration rather than focusing on the needs of a single species such as trout.

There you go. Expertly said by the real experts. I believe both brilliant minds think you’re WRONG and plenty of other brilliant minds wrote back that you’re very, very wrong but they hadn’t time that day to deal with your wrongness.

I just thought you’d want to hear from folks why are way, way smarter than me about this.

“OH NO YOU DIDN’T!”

This morning’s title is the actual header of the mortified email sent to me yesterday by famed and familiar author Ben Goldfarb who had always considered Ted Williams a kind of conservation legend.

Ahh, how the mighty have fallen. Over beavers, of course.

Thinking Like a Trout Stream

A case in point is its inability to accept biological realities of beaver overpopulation.

The causes of ecological damage by deer and beaver are identical. Wolves, the major predator of both species, have been extirpated or severely reduced in most deer and beaver range. Heavy logging in deer and beaver range has replaced poorhabitat old growth with deer and beaver candy such as aspen and willow.

Beavers in natural abundance have usually been good for native ecosystems, trout included. In much of the Pacific Northwest, beavers are depleted, and managers are rightly attempting recovery.

You can see right away where this is going. The argument is that numbers of beavers when controlled by wolves and mt lions are helpful. But the number we have NOW! Oy vey! He starts by quoting the praise of beavers given by Oregon and Washington fisheries.

Beavers .. . create reservoirs of cool water that salmon need to survive,” report the Northwest Treaty Tribes of western Washington State in a news release titled “Beavers Relocated to Improve Salmon Habitat.”

Such assertions are accurate in Oregon, Idaho, and Washington, at least on most high-gradient streams. But when they’re cited as alleged evidence that all beaver populations are great for all species in all states, they’re flat wrong; and they hurt the cause of native ecosystems. Do a Google search for beavers and trout, and almost all you’ll find are effusions about the alleged value of beavers everywhere and excoriations of fisheries managers who attempt to modestly control gross irruptions.

Oh those little NOAA scientists and their crazy ILLUSIONS! Obviously what you do in the Pacific states doesn’t matter because they’re already insane anyway. But what here in Wisconsin or Massachusetts we’re OVERRUN with beavers.

BUT BEAVER BLIGHT IN THE EAST IS MILD COMPARED TO THAT IN THE MIDWEST. Angler/photographer Len Harris of Richland Center, Wisconsin, describes the pre-hangover high that comes with the discovery of a new beaver pond: “It’s smile-producing at first because of bigger trout. But the flooding cycle cleans out that dam and all the barren bank. The streams widen and increase in temperature. . . . My home waters have warmed by at least four degrees in the last twenty years. This is from a combination of beavers not being kept in check and climate change. Warmer water, resulting gill lice, and resulting competition from brown trout have stacked the deck against the natives. Humans need to limit beaver expansion near our brook trout streams. Thankfully, a new regime is in place in Wisconsin as of 2019. Science will be back on the books, and our DNR will once again be staffed with caretakers of the streams, not climate-change deniers.”

So wait a minute. You’re equating beaver believers with climate change deniers? Because they’re both on teams you dislike? That’s so entirely provoking I’m not even sure what to do with you. Ben says you’re revered and I’m sure [Brutus is an honorable man} so I won’t write what I’d like to. But maybe you could spend five minutes in an actual trout stream with an actual beaver dam before you accept funds to write something ridiculous like this again? Or hey maybe snorkel in it and see all the baby trout swimming around? He goes on to describe several “misguided” environmental groups that think beavers have any value. I’m just sorry he didn’t mention US.

“There are a lot of people in our organization who really value the beaver ponds as something that attracts wildlife and increases biodiversity,” the group’s chair, Corlis West, told the Lake County News Chronicle. “Not just beavers, but for moose and mink and waterfowl and frogs and turtles.”

“They [beaver ponds] provide special habitat,” added retired University of Minnesota Duluth geology professor John Green. “They’re wildlife magnets for breeding and migrating birds. All kinds of wildlife like them, and people enjoy those.”

Notice how he goes after the little guys like beaversprite not NOAA fisheries and their years of data. He knows exactly what he’s doing here. When a giant like Ted Williams writes a giant amount of BS like this, it’s going to take another giant to knock him down. David and her little GIFs aren’t going to do it. But good LORD this is irritating. Does he really truly believe that there are MORE beavers now than there were in 1730? Even knowing the numbers of pelts reported? Really? Even knowing all the economies they funded?

Does Ted secretly know a story about the great native american salmon famine of 1630 that all of us don’t?

SALMONIDS BENEFIT FROM BEAVERS IN MUCH OF THE WEST; but beaver irruptions are nuking lots of coldwater habitat even there.

Wildlife advocates need to keep two different thoughts about beavers in their heads simultaneously. Beavers in moderation can be good for coldwater species. What’s bad for coldwater species is not beavers; it is too many beavers—unnatural proliferations caused by human activity, such as clear-cutting and wolf eradication. “Letting nature take its course” doesn’t mean sitting on our hands after we’ve disrupted natural balances.

The funniest part of this ENTIRE article, and believe me there are several, is that he presents the “pro-beaver” lobby as if we were SO powerful. As if we had frightened Fish and WIldlife in Nevada and California so that they’re afraid to do all the killing that’s required. As if we had scared people away from killing all the beavers they need to kill!

As a woman with her toes on the very front lines of beaver defense allow me to offer a counterpoint after reviewing 10 years of depredation permits in California alone:

You’re so funny, Ted. I think maybe you and Ben are going to have a dynamic discussion some day soon. And maybe Michael Pollock will want in on it. Worth A Dam will pay for the beer. I’ll just be over here. Trying to get over the giggles.

“It’s unlikely that managers will ever be able to restore more than a tiny fraction of trout streams destroyed by beavers. But, as Leopold wrote in a 1946 letter to his friend Bill Vogt: “That [a] situation appears hopeless should not prevent us from doing our best.”

Just a final thought. The famous Leopold and his famous son who inspired this article was famously ignorant about the importance of beavers. Neither of them had any idea how important beavers are to streams or fish. And I’m quoting two of the most knowledgeable voices I know on this matter. Aldo was a visionary voice who knew and understood many, many things. But beavers wasn’t one of them.

So it’s perfect that you frame this entire argument around him,

BEAVER BOXING DAY

heidi08 Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout December 26, 2018

A fish-minded friend posted a great image on facebook yesterday and I thought it just needed a little tweaking. I couldn’t resist for obvious reasons. What do you think now?

MISSI PICOUTAU AMISCOU

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers and trout November 18, 2018

Sunday must be beaver day, because this morning we get beaver stories from two nations. The first is a little morbid, but the second will leave you smiling. Let’s start morbid and cheer ourselves with the thought thought of natives pulling a missionary’s leg.

Can there be a more obvious symbol of Canada than the beaver? No other animal, except for humans, is credited with the creation of the country. (Historically, the cod fish might have had something to say, but no one is listening to it.) “The beaver makes everything,” said an Innu hunter to Jesuit missionary Paul Le Jeune in the seventeenth century: Its valuable pelt could be traded for whatever people desired. Maybe the beaver could even make Canada.

If you think, like HBC and so many trappers did, that he was talking about the beaver pelt having many uses. you’d be wrong. You and I know very well that what he meant was literally “THE BEAVER MAKES EVERYTHING”. Because the beaver builds the dam and stores the water which grows the trees which feeds the wildlife which shapes the soil which grows the crops which brings the settlers which make the country.

“The beaver makes everything.”

Of course the missionary took it like Johnny in the movie Airplane and thought “I can make a hat, a coat, a vest, a blanket…”

I’m sure he knew the priest would take it that way, but we know that’s not what he meant. Heck, maybe he even knew destroying the beaver would destroy the land and thought, if you’re going to steal my home then hey, I’m at least going to ruin it.

*Cree artist Kent Monkman captures the ambiguity of the beaver as a national symbol in his 2016 painting Les Castors du Roi.*

But Cree artist Kent Monkman captured the essence of the ambiguity of the beaver as a national symbol. In a parody of, and ironic commentary on, different genres of art, Monkman’s 2016 painting Les Castors du Roi riffs off relevant images, including fanciful historical depictions, of the beaver. French and Indigenous hunters savagely murder the beaver with spears, daggers, leg-hold traps and guns, while church representatives stand idly by. On the right of the canvas, an anthropomorphized beaver prays to a Christian God, while beaver spirits ascend toward heaven.

Of course we know that beavers hold their hands together like they are praying or saying grace when they eat, but other than that I appreciate the art analysis. This is a complex painting, and I like it better when I realize it’s ironic. Do you think we could get Kent to do one of the beavers slaughtering the fur-traders? Because that would really interest me.

On to a story which knows full what what that native meant when he said “the beaver makes everything“.

Iroquois Confederacy Timeline

“The Savages say the beaver is the animal well-beloved by the Europeans. I heard my Native host say one day jokingly, ‘Missi picoutau amiscou. The Beaver does everything perfectly well: it makes kettles, hatchets, swords, knives, bread. In short it makes everything.’ He was making sport of us Europeans. The English have no sense; they give us twenty knives like this for one Beaver skin.”

– Father Paul Le Jeune, French Jesuit missionary in New France

Your Watershed column: A story of ecological restoration

Butler Creek is located in the White River National Forest at the headwaters of Rifle Creek. It is directly north of Rifle by about 16 miles, and “if you look at pictures from decades ago, Butler Creek was a mess,” said Clay Ramey of the U.S. Forest Service.

“The management practice back then was to actually spray herbicide down onto the willows along the stream so that there would be more water for grazing,” he recalled.

The Butler Creek grazing pasture, one of many pastures in a massive allotment, was modified to allow grazing only in the early summer when the willows don’t taste as sweet to the cattle as they do in the fall. Colorado Parks & Wildlife made a donation as well: the East Branch of Parachute Creek had plenty of beavers, and they figured they could gift some to the cause.

When the cows away, the beavers will – well think of something that rhymes with away but means build dams and store water and save fish.

“It’s really all about the beavers,” said Ramey. The entirety of Butler Creek used to be a series of beaver dams, and when they were chased away and died off, the dams broke, and the gradient of the creek changed to increase erosion.

“The dams of the beavers also keep water around for longer and raise the water table,” he said. The beaver dams will catch the sediment that suffocates downstream native fish populations.

“We plant the willows to give the beavers something to feed on and to build their dams out of. The willows are great anyways for their purpose of stabilizing the streambanks, but we’re hoping it’s the beavers that truly fix up the mess and bring ecological health back to Butler Creek.”

Yes it is. Because beavers make everything. An Innu hunter knew that 300 years ago, but it’s nice to see one branch of the federal government finally getting the message.

Recovery takes time, but within a year, positive changes are already happening.

“The beaver population is thriving, and the willows we transplanted have had a great survival rate, despite the dry summer,” said Nate Higginson, watershed specialist for the Middle Colorado Watershed Council. “We’ve seen Colorado River cutthroat trout spawning in the creek. Time will tell if they flourish, but at least they’re still there, and the entire ecology, from the grazing cattle to wildlife, benefit from this return to balance along Butler Creek.”

Move over and let the beaver do the work. Seems right to me.

BEAVERS MAKE HEADLINES

heidi08 Beaver ecological impact, Beavers and trout September 12, 2018

Don’t you wish folks everywhere were so excited about beavers building dams that it was in the news every day? I can see it now. “Our top story tonight, Dad beaver starts another secondary dam on Wilson creek. Will he use poplar or Willow? Turn in at ten to see our exclusive report!”

Well a girl can dream can’t she? Until that day arrives we can just enjoy headlines like this.

Forest of Dean beavers build their first dams

Excitement has been growing in the Forest of Dean and across Defra, the Forestry Commission and our partners as the beavers introduced during July have completed construction on their first dams in the Greathough Brook!

Evidence from the trail cameras positioned around the enclosure shows that beavers have set up home close to the release point, in a burrow in the bank of the brook, and this is the area where the most significant evidence of feeding is in terms of gnawed willow trees and feeding debris on site.

Further downstream from this point three significant dams have been created from woody debris lying around the site but ingeniously engineered through packing with a variety of material including vegetation and mud to create permeable dams that are already holding back large volumes of water.

Before the release, the brook could be easily crossed in wellies – now the water is thigh deep in places, simply as a result of the beavers’ dam-building actions.

Oh my goodness! Beavers saving water! It should be in the news EVERYwhere!

Camera evidence shows that the beavers have explored the whole site and created smaller exploratory dams in other areas further up and down stream.

Trails through fool’s water cress beds lower down the site also provide evidence that they are not simply remaining within one spot – allowing people visiting the site good views of their activities.

The public are backing this project and there is a voluntary group of fence checkers and positive interest from numerous visitors to see the beavers.

As it should be. Beavers being beavers should make headlines EVERYwhere. They are amazing and we’re lucky to have them. Defra sure has changed their tune. Amazing what an election and a little flooding can do. Beavers are wonderful.

Even Trout unlimited thinks so.

The Beaver Believers

Throughout North America beavers play a significant role in creating ideal salmonid habitat. They are the perfect example of an ecosystem engineer, which is an organism that creates and modifies entire environments. Beavers construct dams using trees, mud, stones, and just about anything they can get their paws on. Woody debris helps to roughen a stream channel. Ponds provide protection from predators and sustain water supplies during dry summer months. Riparian vegetation and bird habitat are also improved by the increased water storage in beaver ponds.

Unfortunately, the ecological benefits of beavers were not always understood. Before European settlement, as many as 400 million beavers are estimated to have lived in North America. Demand for hats made of felted beaver fur started a boom of beaver trapping. By the end of the 1800s, beaver populations were decimated.

Today, beavers and humans do not always engineer ecosystems with the same goals in mind. These rodents have a reputation for damming culverts, flooding properties and chopping down trees. When conflict arises, beavers often end up with the short end of the stick and are lethally removed.

But there is a growing movement to coexist with beavers so we may reap the ecosystem services they provide. This summer, Trout Unlimited joined the group of beaver believers and started a new fisheries habitat enhancement program in north-central Washington. The Wenatchee Beaver Project relocates nuisance beavers from developed areas and agricultural lands to remote tributary streams. Relocation sites are selected based on beaver habitat suitability, high fish-enhancement potential, and minimal risk of human conflict. We also install beaver dam analogs, offer tools to landowners struggling with beaver problems, and engage the community about the many benefits of beavers.

Ahhh! Nice article Megan Euclide. Of course I’d rather you were installing a flow device than taking a beaver away from his chosen pond, but this is nothing but good news as far as I can see. I can’t wait for the day when all trout fishermen, salmon fishermen and duck hunters argue vehemently for beavers. Their voices will motivate the politicians and bureaucrats better than ours do. Don’t ask me why. But they will. Just put them at the head of the line for now.

Shhh after the revolution we can talk about the value of letting things live afterwards