Category: Beavers

“IF YOU WANT TROUT, WORK FOR BEAVERS”

Things are looking up for beavers of the Rio Grande. At least their a hot commodity now.

Saving the #RioGrande Cutthroat Trout: Beavers show the way — @AlmosaCitizen

THE Rio Grande cutthroat trout is the Rio Grande National Forest’s only native trout. It needs help. Biologists from Colorado Parks and Wildlife and Rio Grande National Forest are trying to bring the cutthroat back to its full glory, but they need help, too. So who do the humans look to for help?

Easy answer: Beavers.

Jason Remshardt, wildlife and fisheries program manager for the Rio Grande National Forest, recently gave a presentation on the Rio Grande cutthroat trout. He is the only fish biologist in the RGNF. He talked about the effort to create and conserve habitat for the cutthroat, and how the answer might just come from nature’s finest engineers.

The Rio Grande cutthroat trout used to exist in just about every part of the Rio Grande basin, but due to a wide range of circumstances, these fish only occupy a fraction of the area they used to. Part of conservation and successful reintroduction is habitat restoration. Right now, the experts are looking at nature’s experts. These projects are imitating “what the beaver dams are doing,” said Remshardt.

These “Beaver Dam Analogues” or “Temporary Wood Grade Structures,” or TWGS, (pronounced like twigs), are designed to help back up water and create a lively wetland habitat that encourages healthy biodiversity not just for the cutthroat, but the entire ecosystem.

Now when I read an article like this I’m stroking my chin suspiciously and saying “Do you really just want an excuse to play in the mud? Or do you really want beavers?” I guess they are the real deal,

Beavers in the national forest are alive and thriving. Remshardt says that the RGNF is happy with current populations, but there is room for expansion and improvement. With that, the benefits of beaver dams create healthy, expansive wetlands. Beaver dams and habitats also make great fire breaks.

These animals, however, are considered a nuisance species to certain areas of the Valley. Beavers can be troublesome to infrastructure like irrigation canals and roads.

“There’s this stark contrast of existing as a pest species on the Valley floor while being highly beneficial up in the headwaters. The logical solution,” Born said, “is an efficient, legal, and humane way to translocate them to areas where their engineering is more appreciated and doesn’t impact infrastructure.”

Relocating the beavers pairs well with the restoration efforts. Born said that the structures may encourage beavers to stay in areas that “have habitat that would otherwise be too degraded.”

Remshardt says there’s plenty of space to relocate any problematic, or displaced wood-chopping rodents.

“We’re ready to take them and we have places all over the forest to take them. Plenty of places we can put them,” Remshardt said.

Identifying where beavers are and where beavers aren’t is a part of the job that requires a lot of work from a lot of people. Software like iNaturalist allows anyone to report animal sightings and tracks to help in identification. These reports can help biologists like Remshardt identify populations and locations to help further studies and surveys.

Helping the beavers help us really boils down to, Remshardt said, the fact that “beavers are the best at doing their own work.”

Yes well that’s a helluva lot better than some. But I’m a crazy optimist. I dream of a day when any beaver anywhere that decides to make a dam any old place makes folks stop and scratch their heads and think “WOW that beaver is really doing good things RIGHT HERE. For the watertable, and the fish and the fire potential. Maybe I should just cooperate with it and keep it around if possible”.

Yeah well I said I was an optimist.

Most of the streams and lakes are easy to access, but the Rio Grande Cutthroat Trout lives in the alpine, too. Remshardt said almost every drainage and lake in the Sangre de Cristo mountain range has cutthroat populations. So, in order to keep these high mountain lakes stocked and healthy, they conduct High Mountain Lake Airplane Stocking. A video from CPW shows just how these operations are done.

Conservation of the cutthroat, Remshardt said, remains the most intensive and expensive project. Ongoing research for more cutthroat introductions to expand them into their historic ranges is an ongoing and expansive effort. Currently, an effort to successfully reintroduce the cutthroat to the Sand Creek drainages at the Great Sand Dunes National Park is taking place. The project first started in 2005.

Well if you CARE about cuttthroat you better care about beavers. It’s really that simple.

WINNING HEARTS AND MINDS ABOUT BEAVERS

So I have been using the holiday weekend to buckle down on my upcoming presentation to the Alameda Fisheries Work group in December. They are eager to think about the new beaver rules about beaver introduction and whether they can be welcomed in the upper watershed there for their positive impact on fish. Of course Michael Pollock is the speaker they really want but they allowed me to tag along because they thought maybe I would have some insights on navigating alliances and persuading stakeholders about beaver benefits. This made me think about what worked and what didn’t work in Martinez.

And I have to say honestly that like any new student I went naively to the beaver library and came back with an armful of facts about why beavers are good for streams and fish and fires and watertables and birds and otters. And I was sure that with this great knowledge, a patient spirit, a dispassionate presentation, my formidable professional psychologist skills and some excellent graphics the whole thing would be a slam dunk. An easy win. After the fair hearing the court would be adjourned in my favor.

I really thought introducing people to the well researched facts would change their behavior.

Um.

What I found looked a lot more like this. A firm quarter of the committee members were persuaded by science. The watershed people and the flood control people were interested in what I was talking about. To persuade them I had to present it to them really cleanly and compellingly, connect them to alternate sources of information, and be willing to answer questions or present information at the drop of a hat. I couldn’t appear to care too much about the outcome. One night I filled in for an Audubon speaker and suddenly the next evening Alhambra watershed asked me to present. Another night the wildlife chair of the sierra club invited me at the last minute to their meeting in Alameda and I actually had to cancel patients to be there because I knew it was a deal-breaker, The science part was hard work. I had to talk about things outside my comfort zone to intimidating professionals that had lived their adult lives steeped in words like riparian and hydrology. But it was familiar dissertation-like doable work.

The rest required more subtle forms of persuasion and I had to figure that out on the fly. It took the form of massive public interest (in which media and children played a huge part) and correspondingly significant self-interest. To my great surprise, when people decided they cared about the beavers and couldn’t be talked out of it the city leaders decided they cared very much about their own careers and political futures and were willing to listen to information that might help. It reminded me of that horrible old joke about the donkey and bricks. First you really did have to get their attention.

I’ve since learned that the self-interest piece can take many forms, not just re-election: Salmon population. Amphibian population. Cattle forage. Climate Change. Fire risk, Waterfowl numbers. I consider it my job to find what my audience cares about and drive beaver lessons in that direction. Fortunately beavers are good for pretty much everything. Only rarely is their interest about the beavers themselves. Sometimes that bothers me. But mostly it’s okay.

If beavers are allowed to stick around, I find they will make their own impression.

BEAVERLAND IS COMING TO TOWN

heidi08 Beavers November 16, 2022

This morning’s landscape bears a bright Ben Goldfarb review of Leila Philip’s new beaver book. It’s definitely worth visiting.

A Busy History

How beavers shaped America—and not just its ecology

Beavers, you may have noticed, are having a moment. These tireless engineers build woody dams that form ponds, which in turn filter out water pollution, sequester carbon, furnish wildlife habitat and avert drought. The Los Angeles Times recently called the beaver a “superhero,” and the New York Times has deemed them “furry weapons of climate resilience.” Wetlands with beavers are so good at fighting megafires that some researchers have urged the U.S. Forest Service to switch mammal mascots from Smokey Bear to Smokey Beaver.

“[T]here is an element of the sacred in the beaver, if only in its deep weirdness …” writes Leila Philip in her engaging new book, Beaverland. “Is it any surprise that beavers have fired the human imagination in every continent that they are found?”

Well I believe Ben will be hired for the introduction of every beaver volume for the foreseeable future. And I’m okay with that, aren’t you? Leila’s take on Beaverland hits the shelves in a few short weeks and her personal journey with beavers started like this very website and some beavers that moved in close to home and captured her fascination.

Although Beaverland may never fully return to its former grandeur, the rodents have made a remarkable recovery. Philip’s odyssey takes her to many sites integral to their comeback, such as the farmhouse in upstate New York where conservationist Dorothy Richards once kept colonies of semidomestic beavers. (They sometimes chewed the legs off mahogany dressers.) She also visits a forest in New Hampshire where contemporary scientists are studying the hydrology of rebuilt beaver meadows: “giant underground sponges that can soak up and hold large stores of water,” thus saving watersheds from drought.

Beaverland visits many of our good friends – Owen and Sharon Brown of Beavers Wetlands and Wildlife, Mike Callahan of the Beaver Institute and Scott McGill of Ecotone, Sarah Koenigsberg, Ellen Wohl and even the dusty shores of Martinez.

Philip spends a lot of time with contemporary fur trappers. Pelts rarely fetch more than $20 these days, but some trappers still make a half-decent living killing beavers at the behest of agencies and landowners, who fret that expanding ponds will damage roads and private property. Philip admirably negotiates these complex interactions: she’s respectful of trappers’ hard-won knowledge of beaver behavior yet rightly skeptical about whether lethal control is the best way to solve conflicts (although she could have more forcefully refuted the self-serving claim that we need trappers to prevent beaver populations from running amok). Rather than resorting to traps, it’s better to use “pond levelers”—pipe systems that partially drain impoundments, thereby balancing human needs with rodents’ instinct.

Ben is in fact much kinder than I’m ever inclined to be. So I will only say that I have zero idea who the trapping chapters are being written for because I’m pretty sure it wasn’t me. And I doubt Bud from the Sportsman club is picking up this book any time soon. I can only assume it is an East coast thing. Where the wild world is so far away and long ago and the rocky shores are so peopled with undergrads that there is a warm golden nostalgia for the trappers who live by their own wits off the land the way we used to do.

Me? Not so much.

Near Beaverland’s end, Philip travels to Maryland, where a stream restorationist named Scott McGill collaborates with beavers to capture pollutants that would otherwise flow into Chesapeake Bay. “To build a stormwater management pond with that kind of water retention would cost one to two million dollars,” McGill says, nodding to a beaver compound. The rodents, of course, built it for free.—Ben Goldfarb

Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America
by Leila Philip
Twelve, 2022 ($30)

BEAVERS IN PLEASANT HILL

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beavers, Urban beavers November 15, 2022

One of the by-products of being the unofficial champion of urban beavers is that folks contact me asking for helping saving their beavers. I especially like when it’s local because I imagine we’re seeing our beavers grandchildren or great grandchildren. I was contacted recently by Maggie in Pleasant Hill and look at the lovely vision she was treated to behind Dick’s sporting goods.

Not a bad way to start the day right? She’s been watching as the experiment with a little dam of mud in walnut creek. It is just 3 miles up from the beaver we were watching behind target. Walnut creek connects to Grayson creek down by imhoff which is a quick swim for beavers.

SACRAMENTO SAYS NICE THINGS ABOUT BEAVERS

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers and Nitrogen removal November 14, 2022

Doesn’t Jesus say something about the prophet being accepted everywhere but in his home town? Well let’s say that applies to beavers and Sacramento too, because they’ve been very slow to say anything nice about their once not-native rodent. That is until this morning, When they were on Cap radio.

A new study finds beaver dams can boost water quality during a drought

The beaver dam showed up right in the middle of Christian Dewey’s research site. As the lead of a Stanford study, Dewey spent months looking at water quality along the Colorado River. This river is a water source for numerous states aside from Colorado, including Arizona, Utah and California.

The dam re-directed the study. In the end, researchers unearthed a surprising finding: the beaver dam played an important part in improving water quality in the river – so much so that in some areas, it’s mitigating water degradation caused by drought and climate change.

Dewey observed the dam during the summer of 2018, a drought year for multiple states, including Colorado. Dewey said that when water levels are low, minerals tend to become concentrated in the river. This deterioration of water quality can have devastating ecological impacts.

One example of that degradation is a high level of nitrates in the water. When the mineral is too concentrated in a river, it can cause explosive algae growth. When that algae dies and begins to decay, it eats up “dissolved oxygen,” which refers to the level of oxygen in the water. This can negatively impact species throughout the surrounding ecosystem.

“When dissolved oxygen levels suddenly drop, those species become imperiled,” Dewey said. “If we have all these watersheds contributing nitrate to the Colorado River, then the more nitrate within each watershed that ends up downstream is potentially a problem.”

But as Dewey took samples of water downstream from the beaver dam, he realized that its quality was improving. The dam was pushing water out toward the sides of the river, where it would then have to move through soil before reentering.

“The soils then essentially acted as a filter and removed that nitrate,” he said. “And so the water discharged from the soils was lower in nitrate than it was when it entered the soils.”

Yes that’s the way it works. Pretty darn shocking for everyone that isn’t reading this website right now but I’ll bet sacramento was BESIDE themselves.

“Where our study site was up and near Crested Butte, Colorado, you can see pronounced beaver activity that you didn’t see 50 years ago,” said Fendorf. “These ecosystem responses, the rebound of the American Beaver, is actually having this really counter impact on the degradation we’re seeing from climate change.”

Fendorf said that different species play large roles in their environments – many of which researchers might not yet know about, as was the case with this finding.

“This is a sign of why it’s so important for us to have ecological preservation,” he said. “Healthy people [come] from having a healthy planet, meaning a healthy, thriving ecosystem.”

Well of course they do. I wrote Dr. Fendorf this weekend and introduced myself saying Worth A Dam had tons of video and photos documenting the difference beavers make in an urban streams and suggesting he let us know if we could help in anyway. And he wrote back much impressed and said he loved our name.

To which I said again, “Of course.”