Because the beaver isn't just an animal; it's an ecosystem!

Category: Beavers


When I finally settled down to read this Cody Wyoming article I was glum at the recommendation for relocation, but after the usual discussion of musical beavers it gets even better:

G&F lectures about beaver management

Beavers are a unique species of animal known as keystone engineers, meaning they play a significant role in reshaping their environments, which provides benefits for a number of other species as well as themselves. However, beaver population numbers in the Big Horn Basin are at historically low levels.

By building dams, beavers increase the area of riparian ecosystems and restore the watershed in their respective regions. Over time, this leads to increased growth of cottonwoods and willows, as well as a rise in the water table and reduction of the impact of future wildfires.

However, property owners in the region experience difficulties when beavers dam irrigation ditches and culverts, which can lead to flooding of roads, driveways and pastures.

To assist landowners and beavers, Altermatt has relocated approximately 100 nuisance beavers. He has played a key role in moving beaver colonies from areas where they are unwanted and causing conflict to areas where they can flourish without causing unwanted changes to private land.

“When you’re able to trap and relocate entire colonies at once, there’s a better chance that the beavers establish themselves in their new location,” he said.

Yeah yeah yeah, we’ll take the beavers away and you can pat yourself on the back for not shooting them and maybe they’ll even live when we put the somewhere else! I mean sure, you’ll get new beavers after the old ones move out but this will fix the problem for now.

I liked this very much better:

Other nonlethal solutions for beaver management were presented by Elissa Chott, Beaver Conflict Resolution Fellow at the National Wildlife Federation.

Since 2019, Chott and her team have led a program in Montana to reduce beaver conflicts by installing tree wrap, pond levelers and exclusion fences on properties where nuisance beavers are present.

Chott was trained by Mike Callahan of the Beaver Institute, who has decades of experience on the East Coast in mitigating beaver conflicts by building these apparatuses.

In addition to installing these projects, Chott’s team assists in acquiring permitting and offsetting costs through a cost-share program. To date, they have completed 74 projects.

“We developed our cost-share program because we did not want financial causes to be the barrier to getting these projects completed,” she said. “We’re talking about hundreds of dollars to install these projects as opposed to thousands of dollars if somebody had to pay for everything themselves.”

The workshop concluded with a tour of the beaver holding facilities at the G&F office, as well as the building of an exclusion fence in a culvert on site.

GO ELISSA! You know what they say, “Teach a man how to move beavers and he’ll be free from beavers for a month. Teach a man how to SOLVE BEAVER ISSUES and he’ll be free forever”!

Just remember if you keep the beavers you have and figure out how to deal with them they can keep water on your landscape and make more wildlife for you to shoot later.. So there’s that.


I have often thought grimly of sediment load after a fire. It’s nice to see it studied.

Beaver Ponds: How do Post-Fire Sediment and Carbon Dynamics Contribute to Watershed Resilience?

In 2020 approximately 30,000 acres of Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP) burned in two wildfires: East Troublesome and Cameron Peak fires. Fires on a landscape have many effects, one of which is facilitating carbon and sediment movement. When fire sweeps through a landscape, burning the vegetation, the ground surface is prone to erosion, slides, etc. depending on the terrain. Increased carbon and sediment in water bodies is a concern because it can impact drinking water, infrastructure, and aquatic habitat. The retention of sediment and carbon by beaver dams can dampen potential impacts to drinking water and aquatic habitat. Immediately following a fire is the time when the most sediment enters rivers and creeks. Knowing that the sediments would travel down towards the river valleys, Dunn decided to study the impacts of the fires on the sediment retention in beaver ponds within and outside of burned areas to understand whether beaver ponds impact the ability of a watershed to recover after disturbance such as fire (Figure 1). The ability of a watershed to recover after a disturbance is known as watershed resilience. As part of her graduate program at Colorado State University, Sarah Dunn researched whether beaver ponds increase sediment and carbon storage after fire.

To determine how beaver ponds affect the resilience of watersheds, Dunn set out to perform a research project to answer the following three questions: Do burned ponds store greater relative volumes of sediment compared to unburned ponds?, Do post-fire sedimentation rates in burned ponds exceed pre-fire and unburned sedimentation rates?, and Is post-fire sediment stored in beaver ponds coarser and have a higher abundance of organic carbon relative to pre-fire sediment? The rate and volume of sediment, carbon storage, and sediment grain size are expected to increase after a fire during the period when vegetation is recovering (Figure 2).

So what do you think? Will there be more sediment trapped by beaver dams after the fire? Will carbon be greater?

For the beaver ponds that were sampled and analyzed for this research project, about half were located within a burned area and the other half located in an unburned area. The average sediment volume stored in the ponds was 796 m3 and sediment volumes ranged from 4 m3 (about half a dump truck load) to 7,888 m3 (about 500 dump trucks worth). Sarah determined that burned area beaver ponds stored higher relative volumes of sediment. The sedimentation rates after fires were significantly different from sedimentation rates before the fire (Figure 3). In fact, the sedimentation rates in ponds post-fire were an order of magnitude higher than pre-fire rates in ponds. In analyzing the grain size of sediments in burned and unburned beaver ponds, Sarah found that the grain size and amount of organic carbon did not differ significantly.

Hmm more sediment but not more carbon.  How does that work exactly. Wouldn’t all those burned trees be trapping carbon and when the ash runs into the soil get trapped by beaver ponds? No because what we get from burning is only a little bit carbon. And lots of other stuffTypically, wood ash contains the following major elements: Carbon (C) — 5–30%. Calcium (Ca) — 7–33% Potassium (K) — 3–10%.’ Most of that carbon is released into the atmosphere when the tree burns.

Beaver ponds still hold onto that stuff.

Beaver ponds, which once were abundant on the RMNP landscape and are now less common, drastically changing the hydrology of the environment. Beaver dams (Figure 4) create upstream ponds that store sediment and carbon. Due to the effects, mimicking beaver dams with structures is a strategy under consideration for fire-prone areas. The research that Sarah conducted provides evidence that beaver ponds effectively trap and retain post-fire sediment. The increased sediment in beaver ponds post-fire builds on the existing knowledge that beaver ponds provide to the ecosystem is evident through the increase of pooling water and decreased water flow (Figure 4). These findings contribute to the park’s efforts to restore beaver habitat.

Okay maybe not more carbon BUT knowing all the crap they drop on fires to put them out we’re grateful they can help clean it out of the water.

 

 


It is, in fact, my birthday. And only one beaver event of note has ever happened on my birthday. And its a worth revisiting again.

First Posted on September 21 2011.

Beaver kit painted over on Martinez Mural. Innocent explanation or behind the scenes drama? We’ll let you know what we find out. I can’t help but wonder if  history has repeated itself? Are we talking about a Martinez beaver being relocated or killed?

The uncovered story  is that Main Street Martinez didn’t like the beaver in the fishing mural and couldn’t be bothered to say so before hand. Ahhh dear, troubled Martinez, thank goodness you stopped yourself from being reasonable just in time. I was beginning to worry that people would think I’d been lying about how petty,  vindictive and stubborn you could be.

Now they’ll believe me.

(Bonus points for irony: The beaver was eliminated on my birthday.)


A beaver FB buddy sent this my way yesterday, Look how far beaver believers have reached! Even to France Belgium!

Pretty much all I can translate is beaver and September. So I tried to learn more from Google. As far as I can tell we should all be very interested.

I would very much like to know about the Castor youth centre. And if little Belgium children are walking around with chocolates and beaver tails we deserve to see it.

 

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