ATTENUATE MEANS “SLOW DOWN”

heidi08 Beavers and Flooding November 30, 2017

There is much to revisit on the flooding front. I’ve been checking out the recent paper on this front from Puttock et al from Exeter University. Here’s the money quote on flooding.

beavers were likely to have had a significant flow attenuation impact, as determined from peak discharges (mean 30 ± 19% reduction), total discharges (mean 34 ± 9% reduction) and peak rainfall to peak discharge lag times (mean 29 ± 21% increase)
during storm events.

And those effects were only from the 13 dams of a single pair of beavers! Imagine the effect of a healthy stream full of beaver! Apparently I’m not the only one to be really excited by those numbers. I’ll post the article at the end.

Beaver dams helping with floods

Beavers have been acting as engineers of their own craft in wetland areas for over a hundred years with their dams. However, rural people have had their concerns of the future prospects of flooding in their areas and will have the opportunity to learn how beavers can make an impact on water storage during periods of flooding and drought at an upcoming symposium hosted by the Miisstakis Institute and the Alberta Riparian Habitat Management Society (Cows and Fish) on how humans and animals co-exist.

“Beaver can absorb quite a significant amount of medium-sized floods and at the same time they provide benefits for ranchers and the environment,” said Rob Gardner, a Medicine Hat- based conservationist and consultant.

Gardner had noticed on his hikes out in the prairies that there were streams with beavers in them that were looking healthy with lush growth along the banks, while others nearby did not have the same treatment.

“Occassionally they’ll put a dam where it starts to flood something that people have gotten attached to whether it’s a hay field or wintering areas that’s close to a creek. If a beaver dam is flooding your property, then chances are a flood will be flooding it pretty soon. Beavers are giving fair warning that you build your structures close to the creek.”

You have to love Cows and Fish and the Miisstakis Institute for spreading the word so well and bringing it so down to earth for the ranchers. Beavers are giving you a message about your land and what you can expect. Pay attention! You can tell what a difference beavers make by using your eyes by just looking, (like we did in Martinez), or you can science the shit outta this thing, as they are doing in Wales. Turns up you end up with pretty much the same result.

Beavers make the difference, pass it on…

Brazier

TOMORROW’S BEAVER SCHOLARS

heidi08 Beavers and water, Urban beavers November 28, 2017

It’s almost time for the 13th annual Berkeley River Restoration Symposium.

The Keynote will be by Robin Grossinger who we know has very, very interesting things to say about ecology in California.

Urban streaming: cities, storms, and ecosystems flow into the future
Robin Grossinger, Senior Scientist, San Francisco Estuary Institute

Of course you know this means lots and lots of conversations about urban beavers and how good they are for city creeks right? Well, no, But there are some interesting subjects being discussed by the graduate students. Especially this:

Examining the Effects of Beaver (Castor canadensis) Activity on a High Sierra Meadow Restoration Project

Kieran Locke,
Dasha Pechurina,
Andrew Salmon

I wonder if our friend Ann Riley will be there, and if any of the attendees read the chapter of her most recent book that talked about the work Martinez did to restore its creek by letting beavers live there for a decade.

This chapter in particular looks fascinating.

Here she is on WTTW Chicago for their “Urban Nature” series talking about her work daylighting strawberry creek in Berkeley. I can’t embed the excellent segment, but click on the photo to watch it on their website.

CLOSE TO HOME

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers and water November 27, 2017

Rusty Cohn sent word yesterday that his beloved years of filming and photographing the beavers and wildlife at Tulocay creek are being showcased on the website for a Kayak Tour of the area. Just looking at it is enough to make me want to go!

*An Incredible Tour and Only $49

How can anyone resist? Mind you, the odds of seeing an actual beaver on a day paddle in November are not good, but you certainly might see otters, herons or woodduck. Just think what a special treat it would be to paddle around Napa for a few hours and then go reward yourself with one of their five star restaurants.

They would sure appreciate the business now too, as things recover from the fire and life goes forward. So many homes burned in the areas of Napa, Sonoma and Santa Rosa that every available space is being rented while folks rebuild. I just learned that the glorious solar-powered home of the beloved Loren Cole, founder of Inquiring Systems Inc who died last winter, is now being rented to one such family.

This weekend I submitted a nomination to the John Muir Association for a Conservation award in the Business category for the heroic Safari West, who humanized the horrible tragedy with the story of owner Peter Lang staying behind to save the animals and put out spot fires. They reopened their doors on Tuesday last week.

Why not take a paddle, enjoy a local wine, and toast them ALL.

A FLOOD OF BEAVER INFORMATION

heidi08 Beavers and water November 23, 2017

This busy morning, before we do the stuffing, feed the cat or straighten becky’s hair for the grand family palooza we’re expecting this afternoon, let’s stop and be thankful for this letter to the editor. Even if does appear paired with a photo of a nutria which I will not be reposting here for obvious reasons.

Reader’s letter: Beavers can prevent flooding

I read with interest about Green Party deputy leader Amelia Womack’s visit to England’s first beaver reintroduction in east Devon this week. The River Otter Beaver Trial is a five-year project, led by Devon Wildlife Trust in partnership with Exeter University, running until 2020.

The trial is monitoring the beavers’ impact on the landscape, other wildlife, water resources, water quality, local communities and infrastructure, and local farms. Initial results reveal strong evidence for the role beavers might play in reducing flooding downstream, even during prolonged wet periods.

The trial is already producing promising results that indicate the role beavers can play in helping to protect our towns and cities from floods, while giving us a richer, more exciting natural world.

Floods are devastating for communities, as we have seen in Stroud – they destroy our homes and belongings, damage our economy and disrupt our daily lives. Without serious action to tackle climate change, the floods we face every winter are only going to get worse.

But just a small number of beavers can have a disproportionate effect on the environment around them, influencing water flow, improving water quality and increasing biodiversity and bringing great benefits to other wildlife.

Successful flood prevention means working with nature starting with our soils and land management which hold huge capacity to absorb intense rainfall, through to allowing more space for rivers and floodplains to behave more naturally, not covering it in concrete. This is about working with the grain of nature and not battling against it.

But there are potential challenges ahead, not least the possible impacts these industrious creatures could have on farmland. The trial is looking at all the possible impacts, and exploring how we can maximise the positive and minimise the negative ones.

I have heard of attempts to get salmon back to Salmon Springs, so why not introduce the beaver to the River Frome? It may well complement the great work that Chris Uttley at Stroud District Council has been doing with Rural Sustainable Drainage in the Stroud Valleys.

Tracey Fletcher: Ruscombe Stroud

Nice work Tracey! You covered all the basics and then some! If only every letter about beavers was equally well prepared I could retire and move to Florida. I’m sorry about the photo of the nutria and I wish that I could promise that once beaver re-acquaints itself with beaver they’ll know better and these kinds of mistakes won’t happen, but America is living proof that’s not true. It still happens all the time, to our small papers, or nonprofit cousins, and even our scientists from NOAA or the Forest Service!

But the letter was EXCELLENT!

We at Worth A Dam wish you a fine feast with family and friends today. Mine will have a new baby on scene (born a month early, like me!) from my niece and four generations of Perryman’s arguing over who gets the drumstick. I am thankful my sister is hosting it and I don’t have to, Also thankful that we have beavers in Martinez again (even if we can’t see them), that we have will have another festival in a new park, and that Amy Gallaher Hall will be donating her talented chalk art. I am also grateful for the shiny new website (thanks Scott Artis) that I am nearly starting to get the hang of, and that I heard this week from author Ben Goldfarb that he has just completed his first draft of the wonderful new beaver book and is planning on a much better title.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! We are bringing stuffed cherry tomatoes. How about you?

New Territory Ahead

heidi08 Beavers and salmon, Beavers and water November 17, 2017

If you were crazy enough to visit the website yesterday you probably saw something that looked like this telling you we were closed for maintenance. Of course from my perspective I saw something much, much scarier, One huge photo, no photos at all. One time the screen was even black and red. It was quite a day.

I‘m guessing Scott is busily untangling wires as I type, I’m trying to imagine what the finish state will be. At the moment I just know that his vision is way less cluttered than mine. I think of this website like a really rich library crowed with interesting-looking books you might never get around to reading but want definitely want to explore someday. I want it to be a space you could spend hours comfortably exploring or a space you could visit every day and still not see everything. I want it to be immersive and inviting.

But I want the information to be accessible too.

I’m sure we’ll figure out the balance eventually! In the meantime you should take time to enjoy this article about beavers in the tundra where they wonder if beavers moving in will make more habitat for salmon.

Beavers making themselves at home in an unlikely place: Alaska’s northwestern tundra

“It’s kind of the next wildlife you’d expect in tundra, but with much bigger implications,” he said. With their dams and new lakes that hold warmish water, beavers of the tundra ecosystem are thawing permafrost soils through their actions. Beavers could be “priming arctic streams for the establishment of salmon runs” that now don’t exist, maybe because extreme northern waters are too cold for egg development.

Tape and co-authors Ben Jones, Chris Arp, Ingmar Nitze, Guido Grosse and Christian Zimmerman are writing about those changes in a paper with the working title, “Tundra be Dammed: Beaver Colonization of the Arctic.”

“We do not know how beavers reached the Beaufort Coastal Plain, but they would have had to cross a mountain range or swim in the sea,” wrote Yukon biologist Tom Jung, who recently saw a beaver dam and winter store of food just 15 miles south of the Arctic Ocean in northern Yukon Territory.

I’m not so sure it’s that big of a surprise for beavers to swim through the ocean to colonize new places. They are much better than this than you think. But I hope you get lucky and get beavers soon! You will be richly rewarded.