Category: Beavers and water

IT’S THE HYDROLOGY, STUPID

Wow! Wisconsin just got a whole lot smarter about beavers. Bob Boucher’s study is making a major spash and I couldn’t be happier.

New Study Finds Beavers Could Be Key To Preventing Flooding On The Milwaukee River

Now, there are calls for beavers to return — not for their fur — but for the potential impact they could have on flood mitigation in the Milwaukee River watershed. A recent collaborative study between the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District, Milwaukee Riverkeeper and UW-Milwaukee analyzed the prospect of increased beavers on the watershed.

GO LISTEN to the whole glorious thing, and remember that Wisconsin is usually soooo stupid about beavers they blow up dams to help fish AND think there are more beavers now than there used to be. Fantastic work Bob. Beaver hats off to you!

Here’s what I spent entirely too much time on yesterday. They lyrics just fit wayyy too well, It can’t be a coincidence. From “defending a COLONY” to ending with RISE UP. I know I’m very weird but if you listen to the sounds track and read my lyrics you’ll see they mostly scan. Beavers need their time on stage.

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Beaverton

BEAVER LAW & ORDER?

heidi08 Beavers and water May 11, 2021

I found this article in the Guardian fascinating. If streams can sue for their right to exist why can’t they sue for their right to have beavers?

Streams and lakes have rights, a US county decided. Now they’re suing Florida

A network of streams, lakes and marshes in Florida is suing a developer and the state to try to stop a housing development from destroying them.

The novel lawsuit was filed on Monday in Orange county on behalf of the waterways under a “rights of nature” law passed in November. It is the largest US municipality to adopt such a law to date

The Orange county law secures the rights of its waterways to exist, to flow, to be protected against pollution and to maintain a healthy ecosystem. It also recognizes the authority of citizens to file enforcement actions on their behalf.

The suit, filed in the ninth judicial circuit court of Florida, claims a proposed 1,900-acre housing development by Beachline South Residential LLC would destroy more than 63 acres of wetlands and 33 acres of streams by filling and polluting them, as well as 18 acres of wetlands where stormwater detention ponds are being built.

Now if a suit can be filed by a stream on it’s right to exist, why on earth wouldn’t a stream be able to sue for its right to have beavers? Maybe don’t even NAME them out right, just say the stream has the right to conservationists who live onsight and make repairs 24/7 and who improve habitat and remove nitrogen.

Then let the court decide if there are any humans willing to do that. And if not you know who can step in.

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.

UWM: WE NEED MORE BEAVER DAMS

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Flooding April 28, 2021

You might remember that on valentine’s day I did a talk with Bob Boucher for the Oakmont Symposium in Sonoma. He was very excited that the final draft of this academic paper had just been released and talked about the difference this could mean to Milwaukee. Fittingly this research was paid for by a grant from the local water agency. Which is the kind of thing that makes sense but rarely happens.

UWM researchers find that beavers could be a remedy for downstream floods

A new study by two UWM researchers shows that restoration of an animal that Wisconsin was known for 300 years ago – beavers – could be a part of the solution.

Enough of the dam-building animals living in the right spots along creeks and streams can alleviate flooding in some of Milwaukee County’s worst-struck areas, according to research by Qian Liao, an associate professor of civil engineering, and Changshan Wu, a professor of geography.

When beavers build homes, called lodges, in wetland habitats, they also construct dams to create a pond so that they can enter the lodge from under water. A significant amount of water backs up as the pond forms, and that hinders fast-moving water, which has a cumulative effect downstream.

Whoohoo! Everything about the opening is perfect, except for that line about Wisconsin knowing beavers for 3oo years. Hmm I’m thinking they’ve been around a bit longer than that. Maybe you want to check in with the Oneida or the Chippewa about that? They might have other opinions.

Bob Boucher, founder of the environmental advocacy organization Milwaukee Riverkeeper, proposed the study to officials at the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District, which funded the research.

“If there are hundreds of beaver dams distributed across the entire watershed, you have many locations where you can reduce the water flow,” Liao said. “And not just the volume, but also the timing, so that the combined delay at each dam has a significant impact on the downstream peak flow.”

Collecting data with their cellphones, Boucher, Holloway and students Max Rock and Madeline Flanner spent much of 2020 visiting 163 locations on the GIS maps. They made observations either by canoe or by hiking into areas at bridge road crossings to evaluate whether locations had ample food sources and the kinds of trees the animals use for building.

A cellphone app that Rock developed helped the team rank the locations by quality, based on all the data. What they found was enough habitat to support around 4,500 beavers – or about one family for each 100 acres of wetlands

That’s right. Bob is so skilled at maneuvering these things he got Milwakee sewage to pay for it and a student to develop a cell phone app that could study it.

Liao fed the model different scenarios of beaver dam activity at 52 locations that would provide the highest potential to reduce downstream flooding, while also having ideal conditions for beaver. According to the model, dams would reduce the peak flow by between 14% to 48%, depending on the details of the storm, but also on the dam location.

“For example, if the storm was relatively uniform across the entire watershed, then you would have the highest reduction of water flow,” he said. “But if the storm dropped most of its rain on southern areas of the river watershed, then dams located upstream where there’s less rain will have a diminished effect.”

How awesome is this research? Beaver dams can make a huge difference. But we need MORE OF THEM. That’s what I take away from this article.

“There have been other studies that showed the effect on flooding of introducing beaver dams, but those studies only measured the effect a few miles downstream,” Liao said. “What we did is a little different. We looked at it on the watershed scale.”

BEAVER FRIENDS AT TROUT UNLIMITED

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beavers, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water April 21, 2021

I found this very inspiring. Quite a way to spend a ‘gap year’. Abelino Fernando Leger has a fine environmental career ahead of him I think.

In New Mexico, beavers and people aren’t so different

In fall of 2020, I worked with Trout Unlimited and Defenders of Wildlife and River Source — a small company specializing in watershed restoration, education and research in New Mexico — on a beaver habitat assessment survey in northern New Mexico. The project goal was to find rivers where beavers could be relocatedand where beavers could do the work to restore riparian water tables, wetland vegetation and in some places, improve the health of trout habitat.

Can you think of a better job description or something you’d rather be doing? No you cannot. I cannot either. Trout Unlimited is one of the few places on the planet where beaver wisdom doesn’t come as a surprise. They know what their fishes need.

Over the course of a few months, I worked with Rich Schrader, my mentor and River Source founder, on what he aptly described as our “dream project.” Rich and I completed the surveys with the help and teaching of former a wilderness guide, David Fay, and River Source water scientist and Cochiti Pueblo member, Carlos Herrera. We did both ground and drone surveys to discover as much as we could about the impact of cattle, riparian geomorphology and the vegetation present to determine if it would be a good beaver relocation site. It was also our job to determine what part of their historic range any beavers were still occupying.

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Can I get an amen? You hit the proverbial nail on the head Abe. I think the rest of your education is going to fall easily into place now that you’ve learned the beaver lesson.

This is not the only common goal we share with beavers. In one ephemeral creek we hiked along, private landowners had built a series of rock berms and grade controls in an attempt to retain surface water on their property. In Ponil Creek, another ephemeral waterway, the beavers we found had managed to keep several large, deep pools behind their dams in spite of seeing four weeks with no rain.

When doing this work, I learned so much about hydrology, riparian ecology, and, of course, the beavers themselves. After hiking along the rivers where beavers were present, I came to really appreciate the animals. They may not be the cutest rodent out there, they are awesome creatures. Hard-working, family-oriented and constantly molding the environment around them to their needs, beavers are not so different from us in the end.

I have to agree with you, Abe. Beavers can teach us most of what we need to know about hydrology, ecology, community and responsibility. You see beavers and humans are pretty different.

Beavers are better,