Category: Beavers and Wetlands

BEAVERS CONTINUE THEIR ATTACK AGAINST BELARUS

Sometimes the universe feels badly about all the many depressing stories it spreads over the year and just reaches into its pocket like Santa and gives us a present. 12 people emailed to make sure I saw this yesterday and you can bet I smiled every time. As I’m sure you will now.

Ukraine credits local beavers for unwittingly bolstering its defenses — their dams make the ground marshy and impassable

Kyiv is bracing for the possibility of Russia opening a new front via the border with Belarus. But the area is tough to penetrate due to its swampy conditions, Reuters reported.

This is in part because of beavers building dams, with nobody stopping them due to the war.

This morning its front page news in the Telegraph:

Local beavers are helping Ukraine defend itself from a potential new front in Russia’s invasion, Reuters reported on Thursday.

The animals are unwittingly helping Kyiv by building dams that keep the ground marshy and impassable, a military spokesman told the agency.

This helps Ukraine by making it less likely that an attack could come via Belarus, which borders Ukraine not far north of the capital Kyiv.

Ukrainian officials had warned that Russia may wage an offensive through its ally Belarus into a region of Ukraine called Volyn.

Defense forces there, however, have been reassured by conditions on the ground, left impassable by miles of burst river banks, thick mud, and waterlogged fields.

Just you wait. Some day even our cursed skills will be appreciated!

The swampy conditions have given Ukrainians an advantage, and time to prepare: a local military unit called the Volyn territorial defense has been conducting daily training exercises in the area, according to Reuters.

Its spokesman, Serhiy Khominskyi, praised the beavers, which he told Reuters were more working unimpeded, unlike in other years.

“When [the beavers] build their dams normally people destroy them, but they didn’t this year because of the war, so now there is water everywhere,” he said.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand Scene!

Hows that for the vest beaver news ever? Wow the Ukrainians are really brilliant at sharing credit, I guess it’s the mark of a good leader. Make everyone feel personally invested in their victory. They sure have got it down.

Viktor Rokun, one of the brigade’s deputy commanders, told Reuters: “On your own land, everything will help you to defend it — the landscape, lots of rivers, which have burst their banks this year.”

Beavers are known to be remarkable builders, using tree branches, vegetation, rocks, and mud to create dams that protect them from predators.

The unusually mild winter has created ideal conditions for Ukrainians to defend their country.

Analyst Konrad Muzyka, who runs the defense consultancy Rochan Consulting, told Reuters that Volyn would be a “horrible place to conduct an offensive operation.”

Beaver Warriors! I’m sure we all remember that horrible story from Belarus years ago where a man was bitten in the artery by a beaver and bled to death awaiting treatment. Hmmm. Seems like this watery attack was against Belarus too. Coincidence?

Maybe that was all just the first wave!

TELL BLM THAT BEAVERS IN WETLANDS IS NOT A COINCIDENCE

heidi08 Beavers and water, Beavers and Wetlands November 23, 2022

The life of a beaver is a life of exposure to the elements. I know beavers have fur coats they can waterproof and stay toasty but what about their feet? This is a lovely video by Jos Bakker but honest it makes me cold just to see that slushy water.
If you listen closely you can hear the little guy vocalize. We aren’t sure the other beaver is big enough to be a parent, maybe an older sibling?

There a nice article from the Bureau of Land Management this morning, observing that beavers make wetlands and not having beavers make drylands.

Spruce Creek rekindles its connection with wetlands in Summit County

In September 2022, Spruce Creek, a small perennial stream in Summit County managed within the Kremmling Field Office was reconnected to its floodplain and began to rehydrate over 22 acres of wetland habitat. Spruce Creek and nearby wetlands provide many benefits to the ecosystem, such as prime locations for moose, elk, beavers and habitat for genetically pure Colorado River Cutthroat Trout. Not only do wetlands provide habitat, but they naturally improve water quality, provide drought resiliency and well… they’re just beautiful!

In 2014, a case of tularemia, also known as “rabbit fever”, wiped out the beavers in this area and the unmaintained dams began to fail. Since beaver dams enhance wetlands and elevate the water table, when they began to deteriorate, the wetlands also began to deteriorate. By 2019, there were only a few small pools of water left in the wetlands and most of the area was disconnected from Spruce Creek.

Do I believe that Tularemia wiped out that beavers and not trappers? Well maybe I do. I guess its possible. Sure okay, I’ll play along. Saying that “Wetlands make prime habitat for beavers” is like saying banks are great places to find money. Or spider webs are great places for spiders to live. They’re there BECAUSE of the beavers. Beavers build and maintain them in the same way a spider builds and maintains its web. Only all kinds of other animals get to use it. Not just spiders.

The BLM began to work with our partners in 2020 to restore the wetlands. The BLM and Blue Valley Ranch replaced a culvert with a bottomless arch culvert, improving stream connectivity below the wetland complex. The ranch also moved their irrigation diversion downstream, improving flows in occupied habitat for the Cutthroat Trout. Beaver Dam Analogs, manmade structures to mimic natural beaver dams and attract beavers, were proposed to improve pool habitat. To maximize the benefits of the dams, the BLM worked with private landowners to build structures on both BLM and private lands. With help from Partners for Fish and Wildlife, EcoMetrics, Colorado Open Lands, Friends of the Lower Blue River, Upper Colorado River Watershed Group, and Rocky Mountain Youth Corps interns, we were able to construct 75 dam structures over a two-week period.

This restoration work has allowed Spruce Creek to reconnect with wetlands and the future looks promising for this ecosystem! Not only are we proud to support the environment on your public lands, but we are grateful to have wonderful local partners who understand the importance of our mission and providing the best public land experience possible.

I’m sure that sending the day in the creek is a lot more fun than what they usually do. But I bet beavers would do it better. And cheaper. And stick around to make repairs night after night.

I WONDER HOW WE CAN MAKE MORE WETLANDS

heidi08 Beaver ecological impact, Beaver ponds, Beavers, Beavers and Wetlands September 19, 2022

Gosh marshes and wetlands are useful and valuable for biodiversity, but they’re really really hard to make. Whatever can we do?

The Outside Story: Freshwater marshes are biodiversity hotspots

In addition to providing outstanding wildlife habitat, freshwater marshes perform several vital ecological functions. Marsh plants capture sediments running off the land from roads, development, and farm fields and filter out excess nutrients that would otherwise degrade water quality. These wetlands store floodwaters, control erosion, and recharge groundwater supplies. Marshes also offer recreational value and are popular places for paddling, birdwatching, hunting, and fishing.

Unfortunately, only in recent decades have people recognized the value of marshes and other wetlands and, to some extent, given them legal protection. Since European settlement, many marshes have been filled for agriculture or development, polluted by industrial run-off, or converted to ponds or lakes by dams. In some locales, there have been restoration efforts, but it is challenging to replicate a natural marsh, although beaver activity can create new marshes or change them to create other forms of wetlands.

Hey I remember spending hours next to beaver created wetlands. Watching herons and egrets and merganser and wood duck and mink and otter and frog. I remember counting how many species I saw in a single morning. And that was in the middle of a town.

Tell me more about how hard wetlands are to create?

Marsh plants have special adaptations that enable them to survive the wet conditions. For example, cattails and arrowhead can exchange gases between their emergent leaves and submerged roots. The type of vegetation that grows in a particular marsh depends on hydrology and soil. In shallow marshes, the water level varies from just a few inches to a foot deep. The soil may be always saturated, or it may be flooded periodically. Deeper marshes are permanently flooded, with large areas of open water. Marsh soils range from decomposed muck to high- organic mineral soil.

Along the edges of lakes, ponds, and rivers, marsh vegetation often grows in distinct bands, influenced by water depth and exposure. Sedges, for example, will grow in moist to saturated soil. Cattails and pickerelweed, with its distinctive stems of purple flowers, prefer standing water through most of the growing season. Aquatic bulrush and wild rice are found in deeper water.

These and several other plants, such as floating duckweed and arrow arum, form the foundation of the marsh food web. Waterfowl and other birds feed on the plants’ seeds, fruit, and vegetation, and the plants’ decomposed remains nourish a host of invertebrates such as snails, worms, crayfish, and insects. The invertebrates in turn provide food for frogs, fish, turtles, and songbirds, which feed water snakes, raccoons, herons, osprey, and bald eagles, among others. Muskrats are common marsh residents, eating the rhizomes (roots) of cattails and water lilies and building their dome-shaped winter lodges with cattail leaves. Mink slide through the lodges’ underwater entrances to prey on muskrats. Many birds, including hard-to-see bitterns, nest in marshes, and red-winged blackbirds often attach their nests to old cattail stalks.

Gosh that sounds beautiful! And familiar. I want to introduce you to a friend of mine…I’m guessing he can help.

NRDC IS INSPIRED BY CAROL EVANS BUT FORGETS HER NAME

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers and Culvert Protection, Beavers and water, Beavers and Wetlands April 13, 2022

Now this is what I’m talking about. I like everything about this article except for the huge sight around mentioning its inspiration.

Restoring Riverscapes and Beavers in the West

Lands managed by Bureau of Land Management (BLM) are often misunderstood, and their conservation values underestimated. However, as the single largest federal public land manager, BLM has a critical role to play in addressing two inter-related crises—biodiversity collapse and climate change. Key to fighting both challenges is the restoration and protection of freshwater resources. And, now, with the passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, BLM has access to new funding it can use to invest in natural infrastructure, restoration, and building climate resilience. (more…)

BEAVERS ARE GOD’S ENGINEERS

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver ecological impact, Beavers and Wetlands September 23, 2021

Their are very few things that put me in a better mood than a headline and article like this. I’m sure you understand my ebullience. Get ready to feel it too.

‘God’s engineers’: How beavers can repair an ecosystem

Faithful readers know that I have become a beaver believer. For most of the time that the Chesapeake Bay has existed, beavers by the millions inhabited every nook and cranny of the six-state watershed (and most of North America).

By damming, digging and ponding, the rodents controlled the continent’s hydrology and shaped the landscape in ways that delivered profoundly cleaner, clearer water to streams and rivers and estuaries. Their work also created rich habitats for a host of other denizens of the air and swamps.

So the premise of a forthcoming Bay Journal film, Water’s Way: Thinking Like A Watershed, is that more beavers — virtually trapped out by the 1750s — could significantly and cost-effectively boost Bay restoration.

I am starting to think that Chesapeake bay is the Washington State of the East, Beaver Brilliance seems to shine from there and hopefully will beam across the land, The author of this article is Tom Horton who I think attended Beaver Con last year and is a good buddy of one of it’s founders. Beavers are finally getting something to be grateful for.

Still, there is immense potential. Beavers are adapting to even highly developed locales; we have filmed wonderful wetlands complexes they have built behind a Royal Farms in the pavement-clad heart of Baltimore’s White Marsh-Middle River urbanization.

And they are relentless, bundles of instinct and compulsion, constantly expanding their projects up and down every stream, always exploring around the next bend, and the next, and the next (kind of like humans).

So what ecologists term “carrying capacity” — physical habitat — for beavers to return abounds. The real question is “cultural carrying capacity”: the willingness of landowners and governments to accommodate a critter who chews trees and plugs drainageways and floods landscapes for a living.

The Bay Journal film I’m working on with Dave Harp and Sandy Cannon-Brown aims to expand that cultural carrying capacity, to show why we must champion beavers (and emulate them) and to show that there are relatively simple, cheap ways for humans and beavers to coexist. (If you can’t wait for the film, search the web for “Beaver Institute for beaver conflict resolution.”)

Here the author does a very good job of showing how people can have a hard time accepting the saviors on their land. We know that pretty dam well in Martinez, but it’s good to write about it.

Being our salvation doesn’t mean being our buddies.

When beavers move in, their flooding and chewing can initially degrade forests, creating a more open, sunny complex of braided stream channels and weedy vegetation — which to many people looks messy.

More ecologically sophisticated folks than I (The Nature Conservancy) have trapped out beavers that were ruining nesting trees for great blue herons. Post-trapping, the herons moved anyhow, for reasons known only to herons.

The beavers that Ken Staver, an ag research scientist and farmer, initially welcomed on his farm undermined a dirt roadway, causing a hauler to flip over and spill several tons of corn into the water. Ken still likes beavers, but now more guardedly and with some trapping to keep them in check.

Allie Tyler, with a large property near Easton, has made a game of it in retirement, letting his beavers plug a pond outlet every night, then during the day removing it with his backhoe.

GRRRRRRRR. The nature conservancy trapping out beavers because they ruin blue heron nesting sites? Beavers are FAMOUS for making great nesting sites for blue heron. Did they put that on a calendar and send it to your mom? Famous animals we kill to make room for better animals?

There’s a lot of evidence with salmon and beavers in the West that such fears may be largely misplaced, but no such research has been done in the eastern U.S.

On one of our filming sites, Bear Cabin Branch in Harford County, MD, neighbors were horrified at the look of a restored stream where beavers have moved in and prospered. Then their kids began playing in the pond and catching bass, and folks mostly got used to the shaggier look of the beaver landscape.

Similarly, some farmers have become aware of the superb duck hunting where beavers move in, and they see potential for their own acreage for sport and income from waterfowlers.

Sometimes I have been surprised at the tolerance for beavers. I was stopped by a farmer as I snooped around his creek looking for evidence of beavers. He had a bolt action rifle lying on the front seat of his pickup.

When I told him what I was doing, he chuckled, “Oh, yeah, they’re in here. Some people say get rid of ’em, but you’ll never do it … those animals are God’s own engineers.”

Yes they are, I cannot wait to see the film. I’m sure there’s going to be beautiful footage of canoing through beaver swamps. Here’s the last film he made with Dave and Sandy. You can see beavers fit right into the cannon.

[wonderplugin_video iframe=”https://youtu.be/85H2k_qaer0″ lightbox=0 lightboxsize=1 lightboxwidth=960 lightboxheight=540 autoopen=0 autoopendelay=0 autoclose=0 lightboxtitle=”” lightboxgroup=”” lightboxshownavigation=0 showimage=”” lightboxoptions=”” videowidth=600 videoheight=400 keepaspectratio=1 autoplay=0 loop=0 videocss=”position:relative;display:block;background-color:#000;overflow:hidden;max-width:100%;margin:0 auto;” playbutton=”https://www.martinezbeavers.org/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/wonderplugin-video-embed/engine/playvideo-64-64-0.png”]