COMPETENCE REARS ITS LEVEL HEAD

heidi08 BDA's, beavers and wolves January 23, 2021

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I’m sure you feel it too. That lightness and sense of freedom. The feeling that you get when after a long climb you just eased the sweaty backpack off your shoulders and suddenly feel like you might float directly upwards. The dreadful suspense of the last four years where at any moment you would read that hibernating bears could be shot in their caves with their young. or that wolves could be shot from helicopters, or that coal mine tailings could be dumped into drinking water is all suddenly gone. And replaced by responsibility an competence.

And stories like these. Posted the day Biden was inaugurated.

Human-made beaver dams likely save natural wetland from extinction

A natural wetland in southeast Oregon was likely saved from extinction thanks to four years of collaboration and some human-made beaver dams.

In the Oregon high desert, about seven miles northeast of the town of Crane, Alder Creek bubbles to the surface surrounded by sagebrush and juniper trees.

“It’s really the only source of water out in a long way,” he said.

“Really it was 99 percent about preventing the loss of the wetland,” said Lindsay Davies, the BLM fisheries biologist who helped manage the project.

You know what I’m thinking right? If the new head of the Bureau of Land Management understands that human made beaver dams save essential wetlands then they know that beav

“It’s amazing how green everything is and how much wetland – it’s a bigger wetland than we had originally anticipated,” said Davies.

BLM wildlife biologist Travis Miller thinks beavers will have a better chance of escaping predation in the deeper water and have the potential for long-term habitat.

“It would be really good to see those populations rebound and establish in these systems,” said Miller.

Full list of project partners: Malheur County Watershed Council; Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board; Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation; Grant County Soil & Water Conservation District; U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Headquarters; Burns Paiute Tribe; The Nature Conservancy; Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife; adjacent private landowners; and grazing allotment permittees.

Whoo hoo! We’re still operating under an “acting director” but it’s wayyyy better than it used to be. And it’s not just BLM. The same thing is going on at FWS too.

Former FWP Director Appointed To U.S. Fish And Wildlife Service

Former Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Director Martha Williams was appointed on Wednesday as second-in-command at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the Biden Administration. William’s replacement within Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte’s cabinet was also named today.

As principal deputy director of FWS, Williams will oversee a federal agency tasked with managing wildlife and habitat across the country, and in charge of more than 150 million acres of land in the National Wildlife Refuge System. The agency also administers the Endangered Species Act.

Here’s the inside scoup from Sarah Bates at NWF

Named this week as Biden’s choice for principal deputy director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, Williams is serving as temporary FWS director under a secretarial order (E&E News PM, Jan. 21

Martha Williams, the Biden administration’s current head of the Fish and Wildlife Service, knows the Endangered Species Act both as a law school scholar and as a courtroom combatant who once fought environmentalists over the gray wolf.

Now the former director of the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks is getting a bigger bite at the ESA, including the law’s application to the long-litigated gray wolf.

Named this week as Biden’s choice for principal deputy director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, Williams is serving as temporary FWS director under a secretarial order (E&E News PM, Jan. 21)

She also recommended we be more interested in species recovery than simple “Delisting” and appears to believe that habitat is crucial in this effort. So I’m feeling hopeful that she will be interested in beavers. Aren’t you?

And of course it falls under this exciting umbrella appointment of Native American hero and congresswoman Deb Haaland as the secretary of the Interior. Just as soon as the GOP stops sitting on its hands and appoints her.

If you want to play an exciting American version of power rangers, go look at the line up of his cabinet. Every single choice is game changing.

I GUESS TRAPPERS SHAPE STREAMS TOO. WHO KNEW?

And the award for the most credit given to ridiculous helpers goes not, as you may have thought to Rudy Guiliani, but to everyones favorite pack-hunting predator: Wolves. Apparently when wolves kill beavers they make more streams.

Didn’t you know?

Wolves alter wetland creation and recolonization by killing ecosystem engineers

Beavers are some of the world’s most prolific ecosystem engineers, creating, maintaining and radically altering wetlands almost everywhere they live. But what, if anything, might control this engineering by beavers and influence the formation of North America’s wetlands?

In a paper to be published Friday in the journal Science Advances, researchers with the University of Minnesota’s Voyageurs Wolf Project and Voyageurs National Park observed and demonstrated that wolves affect wetland ecosystems by killing beavers leaving their colonies to create new ponds.

Beavers are important ecosystem engineers that create wetlands around the world, storing water and creating habitat for numerous other species. This study documents that wolves alter wetland creation when they kill beavers that have left home and created their own dams and ponds.

Juvenile beavers disperse alone and often create new ponds or fix up and recolonize existing, old ponds. By studying pond creation and recolonization patterns along with wolf predation on beavers, project biologists and co-authors Tom Gable and Austin Homkes found that 84% of newly-created and recolonized beaver ponds remained occupied by beavers for more than one year. But when a wolf kills the beaver that settles in a pond, no such ponds remain active.

This relationship between wolves and dispersing beavers shows how wolves are intimately connected to wetland creation across the boreal ecosystem and all the ecological processes that come from wetlands.

So the idea is that when wolves kill beavers who are making a new pond that pond doesn’t happen, and the new pond made by some lucky beaver who wasn’t killed by beavers will survive. See how wolves shape the streams?

Puleeze….that is like saying that a car hitting squirrels determines the rate of acorn production in the forest that year.

Of course the news is bouncing around the entire internet this morning. It even appeared on ABC. Because nothing says “Fun story” more than a beaver meal making streams.

Wolves preying on beavers in Minnesota reshape wetlands

Wolves preying on beavers profoundly affect northern Minnesota’s wetland ecosystems because dams built by individual beavers — those not associated with beaver colonies — quickly fall apart. The new research doesn’t show wolves reduced the total beaver population in Voyageurs National Park, but that they influenced where beavers were able to build and maintain dams and ponds

Hey, you know what else reshapes wetlands? A beaver Trapper! Depredation! Same logic. Different theme music. Not just in Minnesota but everyfuckingwhere.

Sheesh.

As predicted in my little red hen retelling a month ago the very smart voices who were too busy to take on the beaver summit have indicated they very much want to be part of the first planning meeting. Wonderful. Maybe we’ll get to eat some bread when all this is over! I spent yesterday working on this, which is much harder to do than it looks. At least for me. What do you think? Something like this but better.

SOME ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

heidi08 Beaver ecological impact, beavers and wolves September 9, 2018

Now that was fun. Nature-savvy, interested and diverse gathering. Every single person wrote down the name of Ben’s book, and one woman said she wanted to come help at the beaver festival. One of the attendees was a long time reader of this website (JoEllen) who was one of our first followers. Everyone was very enthusiastic about the presentation, (even Jon who has definitely heard it all before.)

If I was preaching to the choir, it was the very best kind of choir,

Now I can rest on my beaver laurels until spring when I present to Audubon. That gives me lots of time to focus on the grants and applications which are due in winter. Ahem.

In the meantime I heard from BYU radio yesterday that our beaver interview will be coming the week of the 17th when their new program launches. I’ll keep you posted.

This came up yesterday at my talk, and because of Ben’s great book I was able to explain there was more than wolves needed for recovery.

WOLVES, HALF-TRUTHS AND BEAVERS

heidi08 beavers and wolves July 19, 2018

Ben says that the nice part of writing a book, and spending 20 months of your life dedicated to getting the chapters just right, is that later, when it’s done and you’re published you can carve off chapters as excerpts or wholesale and release them to other publications, which serves the dual purpose of promoting the book and paying the rent while you’re waiting for royalties to roll in.

I, of course, wouldn’t know about either. But I’m happy for both because this morning we get another chunk from Outside magazine which gamely tackles the wolves phenomenon.

In ‘Eager,’ Ben Goldfarb Champions the Beavers

In an excerpt from his new book, Goldfarb explores what wilderness looks like with and without nature’s most overlooked architects—and why they have more in common with wolves than you think

If you care one whit about wildlife, you’ve probably seen the YouTube hagiography “How Wolves Change Rivers.” If you’re not among its 39 million viewers, here’s the gist: After the destruction of Yellowstone’s wolves, the story goes, unchecked herds of elk grazed the park’s streamside plants to nubbins. Denuded riverbanks slumped into their channels, leaving behind bare, incised, eroding waterways.

Wolf reintroduction in 1995 changed all that. Not only did Canis lupus thin the herds, wolves also frightened their prey away from narrow valleys, deathtraps whose tight confines made elk easy pickings—a dynamic dubbed “the ecology of fear.” Safe from hungry elk, riparian aspen and willow thrived. Wildlife from flycatchers to grizzly bears returned to shelter and feed; eroding streambanks stabilized; degraded creeks transformed into deep, meandering watercourses. Wolves had apparently catalyzed a trophic cascade, a process in which the influence of top predators—lions in Africa, dingoes in Australia, even sea stars in tide pools—ripples through foodwebs, changing, in some cases, the vegetation itself. “So the wolves, small in number, transform not just the ecosystem of the Yellowstone National Park…but also its physical geography,” enthused the video’s narrator.

“How Wolves Change Rivers” transfixed me when I first saw it. I wasn’t the only one: I’ve since heard the Yellowstone wolf tale repeated at conferences, seminars, and even on the lips of baristas in Scottish fishing villages. “This story—that wolves fixed a broken Yellowstone by killing and frightening elk—is one of ecology’s most famous,” wrote the biologist Arthur Middleton in the New York Times. And it’s a great story: imbued with hope, easily grasped, bespeaking the possibility that our gravest mistakes can be remedied through enlightened stewardship. We live in a world of wounds, quoth Aldo Leopold, but we can also play doctor.

There’s only small problem with the vaunted wolf narrative, Middleton added: “It’s not true.”

Don’t you just LOVE that chapter open? What a perfect way to invite the reader to sit up, pay attention, and read more. Which you can, and definitely should. Ben has a writing style that will keep you turning pages even if you care less about beavers than a city manager or the average caltrans worker.

But of course we know you care much, much more.

So what makes the salvational story incomplete? Well, for one thing, it elides the role of another species—an equally influential animal that, like the wolf, was for decades almost entirely absent from the park. Over 20 years after wolf reintroduction, most of Yellowstone’s streams are still missing their true architects.