More and more often these days I am approached by a starry eyed beaver believer with impatient exuberance saying “WELL the tide is turning isn’t it? That’s the beginning of the end for stupid beaver arguments:” and I slowly shake my head like the wizened believer I am and say, hmm not yet young grasshopper, Not yet. And the newly converted get SO frustrated with me as if my hesitance makes the world slower too. But there’s a dam good reason for my skepticism. I’ve been hurt soooo many times before.
Thankfully this fine column was printed in Virginia today confirming skillfully that it ain’t over till it’s over.]
One of the waterways on our property is a perennial stream with a 3-acre pond and an island. Over the years, beavers have come and gone with minimal activity. Once their habitat was protected, they became more active and more destructive — and there were more of them.
Over time, they clogged the outflow pipe from the pond and barricaded the spillway, causing water to run over and erode the dam. They have flooded mature trees and cut down others planted as part of the CREP program. Most heartbreaking, they have destroyed the dogwood and flowering cherry trees planted on the island.
Ohh pulleeze. And there were more of them? Just how exactly did you count them sir? And did you also count the number of trees that flourished or coppiced because of the added water in the pond? Of course not, I know.
Recently, in an article in the Rappahannock News [“Coexisting with castor canadensis,” May 13, 2021], it was reported that the Virginia Department of Transportation estimated beaver damage in 2008 cost an average of $29,000 per incident.
On the other hand, in the same article, Rappahannock resident Bill Fletcher was reported as seeing benefits of beaver activity returning to his property this year, including re-emerging springs. It was also reported he would like to see a government-funded program to pay to build manmade beaver dams that would attract beavers on the streams of Virginia farms.
I believe this is the part where you say “My mind’s made up. Don’t try to confuse me with the facts!.”
I know Bill Fletcher has good intentions, so I make this offer: He can take as many beavers as he wants from our farm, free of charge. It is a violation of the law in Virginia to relocate beavers, but trust me, I’ll never tell.
See what he did there? He made a funny at the beaver’s expense and he demonstrated that every one worth two cents knows that farmers will accept ecological funding directed at saving water or preserving habitat and continue to do exactly what they have always done because they know best. Sometimes it will be a well kept secret and sometimes every body knows,
Every so often I google search for “beaver dam complex” just to see if there are any new remarkable images worth sharing. This one is still wowing me. From USGS it is described as “Beaver dam complex and lodge at the confluence of Wrench Creek and Kelly River, Noatak National Preserve”. In Alaska of course.
Yesterday I came across a very important resource that had been quietly available online since November. I’m going to spend the weekend reading through all the really important bits again, but I thought I’d let you know about it too, in care you want to do the same. You will remember that there was a huge change to the law in Oregon about beaver trapping on federally managed public lands and a herculean effort by Suzanne Fouty and others to prevent it. This was prepared for the lawmakers who failed to learn.
This document was originally created for a “Petition to Initiate Rule making to Amend OAR635-050-0070to Permanently Close Commercial and Recreational Beaver Trapping and Hunting on Federally-Managed Public Lands and the Waters that Flows Through These Lands” which was brought before the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commissionon September 24,2020. On November 13,2020, the Commission denied the Petitioners request to initiate rule making despite economic and ecological benefits.
Now I would think it’s amazing that lawmakers would protect the right to kill resources but what indeed do I know. In Tennessee they just made it illegal to promote vaccinations in schools so obviously I don’t understand how these things work. The trapping lobby and the polio lobby must be very strong indeed.
The document was prepared for lawmakers so its VERY VERY EASY to read through with a labeled table of contents and an executive summary. Today we’ll just work through the summary but it’s all TOP notch and I’m sure will be useful in many settings across the country.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Beaver, through their dam-building activity, help retain water on the landscape in beaver ponds and on floodplains, leading to reduced flood risk for landowners immediately downstream, improved water quality and stream flows, and an expansion of fish and wildlife habitat. Public utilities which manage reservoirs benefit as improved floodplain connectivity and channel complexity evens out peak highs and lows in streamflows. Oregonians from across the state benefit as opportunities for outdoor recreation such as wildlife viewing, fishing, and hunting expand. Ranchers and farmers benefit as water stored in beaver-created wetlands and behind beaver ponds provides valuable water during droughts. Cities and towns benefits with improved water quality and more dependable flows. And in addition to all these benefits, there is also the creation of carbon capture and store areas as wetlands and wet meadows increase in size and abundance, a response strategy to climate change that has yet to be assigned a monetary value.
Are you with me so far? Good!
There are also the large economic benefits related to salmon as it moves through its life cycle.Beaver-created and maintained habitat provide key juvenile coho salmon winter rearing habitat, decrease stream temperatures, increase channel complexity and habitat connectivity, and expand riparian habitat all along migration corridors. These improvements along migration corridors not only enhance the potential for salmon to survive and expand within a changing climate but provide the same services to migratory birds. Increases in beaver-created habitat would therefore aid ODFW and to the state in their efforts to achieve conservation goals for affected species at little to no cost. In addition, there is the chance to prevent the extinction of salmon due to lack of habitat, something that abundant beavers and their habitat can help remedy. An extinction event would be a devastating cultural and ecological loss. Assigning a price tag to such an event should only be considered a point when considering salmon’s economic, social and cultural importance and value.
Economic benefits. Now you’re talking. I think the politicians in the room just started to pay attention.
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any clearer why we need to save beavers. This helps a lot.
These beaver-generated economic and ecological benefits are currently only future potential benefits because they require landscapes where there are abundant beaver who are creating and maintaining abundant beaver habitat. These conditions that do not currently exist in Oregon because continued beaver trapping and hunting on federally managed public lands under ODFW furbearer regulations has left abundant suitable beaver habitat unoccupied and thus abundant ecological and economic benefits unrealized.
Beaver trapping and hunting prevents Oregonians from receiving these benefits for two major reasons related to 1) family dynamics and 2) dam maintenance needs. First, the beaver furbearer season under ODFW furbearer regulations occurs in the winter when the fur quality is best and thus overlaps the beaver breeding and pregnancy season. Because kits can stay with their parents up to two years, an entire colony can be trapped/hunted out in a single seaon which eliminates dispersal potential. Even if some beaver remain, there is a lag between birth, adulthood, dispersal and finding a mate which limits creation and maintenance of habitat and its benefits and future dispersal. Those that remain are vulnerable to trapping and hunting pressures the following year in addition to all the other mortality causes. Second, removal of beaver leaves dams unmaintained. As a result, when the dams fail, they are not repaired. The ponds drain, water tables drop, water quality declines, wetlands and wet meadows begin converting to drier species and fish and wildlife habitat decreases. The ecological and economic benefits begin to unravel. Therefore, maintaining family units is key for expanding populations, successful dam building and maintenance, dispersal, and habitat creation and maintenance.
Trappers want to kill them just when they want to make a family. And once the family structure is gone all those economic benefits slip away in the undammed water.
This document presents the ways that beaver-created and maintained habitat, though their influences on aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, can generate large market and non-market benefits from the water and habitat-based changes. These potential future benefits are in the 100s of millions of dollars and would occur at little to no cost to Oregonians. Table 1 compares these future beaver-driven benefits versus the existing economic benefits gained by trappers and hunters under ODFW’s furbearer regulations (Table 1). The remaining document provides information on how those numbers were arrived at and their supporting documentation.
Alright, Are you paying attention? LIsten up. Beavers make you money. Killing beavers makes a very small amount of people a very little money. But letting them live will help the salmon population which makes the entire state a lot of money. You like money right?
Well would you look at that! Such a little bit of money changes hands when you let the beavers be killed. I’m thinking this is going to be made real clear.
Well whadaya know. Now we’re playing chess. Now you’re speaking a language I finally care about. Well not that they paid attention. But still. I think I would have gone with some graphics in the report. Maybe a nice picture about how beaver benefit salmon and some colored bullet points delivered by a group of kindergardners in beaver tails so that it was all filmed on the evening news..
Well look what the end of June sent our way. Just in time for the debut article about Doty Ravine in in the Sacramento Bee we get a fine scientific paper published all about it. From the people who know it best.
Design Criteria for Process-Based Restoration of Fluvial Systems
Process-based restoration of fluvial systems removes human constraints on nature to promote ecological recovery. By freeing natural processes, a resilient ecosystem may be restored with minimal corrective intervention. However, there is a lack of meaningful design criteria to allow designers to evaluate whether a project is likely to achieve process-based restoration objectives. We describe four design criteria to evaluate a project’s potential: the expansion of fluvial process space and connectivity lost because of human alterations, the use of intrinsic natural energy to do the work of restoration, the use of native materials that do not overstabilize project elements, and the explicit incorporation of time and adaptive management into project design to place sites on recovery trajectories as opposed to attempts to “restore” sites via a single intervention. Applications include stream and infrastructure design and low-carbon construction. An example is presented in California’s Sierra Nevada foothills.
That would be Doty Ravine in Placer county. But you knew that already didn’t you? Aside from featuring the brilliant minds of THREE helpers at the California Beaver Summit it also has some very solid advice about how to evaluate constructions and source materials. It also has some amazing artwork to explain its thesis.
Beautifully done isn’t it? The entire article is available online and you can access it here. Just in time because people after the summit were asking about the science of PBR and what the data showed. On the VERY SAME DAY a similar paper was published by Ellen Wohl and a host of friends, including Brian Cluer who is the helpful NOAA scientist who assisted in finding the right summit lineup.
River-wetland corridors form where a high degree of connectivity between the surface (rheic) and subsurface (hyporheic) components of streamflow creates an interconnected system of channels, wetlands, ponds, and lakes. River-wetland corridors occur where the valley floor is sufficiently wide to accommodate a laterally unconfined river planform that may feature morphologically complex, multi-threaded channels with vegetated bars, islands, and floodplains. River-wetland corridors can develop anywhere there is valley expansion along a drainage network, from the headwaters to estuaries or deltas, and they are found across all latitudes and within all biomes and hydroclimates. River-wetland corridors may be longitudinally continuous but are commonly interspersed with single-thread reaches in narrower portions of the valley. The development and persistence of river-wetland corridors is driven by combinations of geologic, biotic, and geomorphic processes that create a river environment that is diverse, heterogeneous, patchy, and dynamically stable, and within which patterns of flow, sediment features, and habitats shift continually. Hence, we describe these polydimensional river corridors as “kaleidoscope rivers.” Historically, river-wetland corridors were pervasive in wide, alluvial valley reaches, but their presence has been so diminished worldwide (due to a diverse range of anthropogenic activities and impacts) that the general public and even most river managers are unaware of their former pervasiveness. Here, we define river-wetland corridors as a river type; review paleoenvironmental and historical records to establish their past ubiquity; describe the geologic, biotic, and geomorphic processes responsible for their formation and persistence; and provide examples of river-wetland corridor remnants that still survive. We close by highlighting the significance of the diverse river functions supported by river-wetland corridors, the consequences of diminution and neglect of this river type, and the implications for river restoration.
You can bet both papers generously mention our friend Mr Beaver. And you can bet both will be used as fire power for some pretty high value targets. You can access Ellen’s paper here.
Lots to talk and read about. I would write more but I have a lot of catching up to do.
The first two beaver festivals we ever held I fashioned a kind of flyer for to announce. The third one we met an graphic art student at the dam, Libby Corliss who volunteered to help is. Then she went back to college and could no longer work for free. By the fourth one I learned from my time on the John Muir association about the fine work of Amelia Hunter and I had someone introduce us. She was local, loved animals and thought she could help out.. Amelia designed our brochures every year after that. Bringing her amazing talents to the 5th, the 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th festival. I’m sure she would have done the 13th too but Covid interrupted us so she very kindly agreed to do the logo for the California Beaver Summit instead.
Yesterday I scanned through all the covers and put this together. That’s quite a [beaver] body of work isn’t it?
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