A team led by Ducks Unlimited is currently assessing areas in B.C. where beavers — which were historically over-trapped to make room for engineered dams — could wind up replacing them. (Submitted by Robert Perkins)
Members of a Canadian conservation organization are working on a project to increase biodiversity and healthy wetlands in British Columbia with the help of beavers. Ducks Unlimited Canada is mapping areas in the province where beavers can replace artificial dams once they’ve been decommissioned.
“Beavers are a keystone species,” said Jen Rogers, a master’s student at Simon Fraser University working with Ducks Unlimited Canada. “They’re considered ecosystem engineers.”
“The team is currently assessing areas across the province where beavers were historically over-trapped to make room for engineered dams.”
Many of those artificial structures are now decades old and due to be replaced. The team hopes to restore the beaver population, not only to replace the dams but to provide the added value of restoring biological diversity to the landscape.
Roger Dunlop, a biologist and the manager of lands and natural resources for the Mowachaht/Muchalaht First Nation, says bringing the beavers back would have a positive domino effect on other parts of the ecosystem.
He has been monitoring Gold River water levels since the 1950s and is concerned about the increasingly low levels. He blames the change on reforestation.
“We’ve replaced [old-growth forests] with young, rapidly growing super tree plantations that require much more water,” said Dunlop. The water loss has, in turn, caused a decline in freshwater species, and as warmer months approach, the risk of drought increases.
He says that reintroducing beavers can “rehydrate the landscape,” giving it a break from overuse. Beaver ponds help surrounding land absorb water, allowing it to resist droughts and floods.
“If you think about it, forestry in B.C. is really overgrazing, just at a larger scale,” said Dunlop. “The blades of grass are just trees, right?”
Dunlop says his expertise as a biologist informs his work, as does his identity as a member of the Mowachaht/Muchalaht First Nation. He says First Nations communities involving themselves in biodiversity work is important.
“They’re exercising their right to take better management control of this particular landscape that’s really been over-harvested,” he said.
Staff Photo by Olivia Ross / Painted trees are seen along Rosss Landing on Tuesday. The trees were painted with nontoxic latex paint with sand added to deter beavers from chewing on the trees.
Chattanooga beavers are especially eager this year to acquire building materials for their dams from Ross’s Landing, where the city’s Parks and Outdoors Department is taking unusual measures to manage the damage to the trees along the riverfront.
The parks team recently planted new trees along the riverfront at Ross’s Landing, and team members chose to plant bald cypress trees because beavers usually leave those alone. But the trees repeatedly were being damaged or taken down completely, sometimes within 24 hours of planting, city of Chattanooga Parks and Outdoors Communications and Marketing Director Brian Smith said in an email.
The beavers’ chewing can damage or kill the trees and cause them to fall onto the nearby playground and path, making them a safety hazard, he said.
The parks team tried several methods to deter the beavers from gnawing on the trees. Team members put fences around them, but the beavers climbed the fences and continued to chew. Then they put hot sauce on the trees, which kept the beavers from chewing them, but the sauce washed off in the rain.
Park staff cannot trap and relocate the beavers, because according to state law, beavers must be euthanized if trapped, Smith said.
Staff Photo by Olivia Ross / Painted trees are seen along Rosss Landing on Tuesday. The trees were painted with nontoxic latex paint with sand added to deter beavers from chewing on the trees.
The best solution they settled on — which is recommended by the Humane Society of the United States — was to paint the trees using nontoxic interior latex paint diluted with water and mixed with sand, which irritates the beavers’ teeth enough to encourage them to look elsewhere for a snack.
Wednesday’s have always had a special place in my heart ever since Nov 7, 2007 when I tremulously attended the very first city council meeting on beavers I believe Martinez has ever held. It definitely changed the fate of this city and it certainly changed my life. It may have been the first meeting about beavers but it apparently will not be the last. Tonight the city moves to approve the plan for the Lower Alhambra Creek Watershed Management, which discusses guess WHAT?
When I was a little girl looking for a clean piece of paper to scribble on I accidentally found my mother’s Xmas shopping list in the kitchen. It had the names of all my siblings and appropriate gifts for each. Of course I can’t remember a single item on that list for anyone else but I remember MINE – and I knew exactly what I was getting that year. I was old enough to read her handwriting and feel guilty for seeing it, but not old enough to cross out what she wrote and write in what I really wanted instead. Now I remember that moment of illicit discovery. That unused and overlooked corner of the kitchen. And I think, THIS.
THISis my new shopping list. How do we make THIS happen after the first ever beaver summit? It’s the natural outcome that I want to see for water drinkers everywhere.
A bill in the Oregon Legislature would direct the Oregon Department of Agriculture to establish a grant program to explore nonlethal deterrence between ranchers and wildlife.
House bill 2689introduced by Dan Rayfield, D-Corvallis, would establish a new grant program under the Department of Agriculture to explore nonlethal deterrence between specific wildlife species and ranchers and farmers. Big game species and wolves would not be impacted by the nonlethal deterrence grants.
Under the proposed bill grants may be awarded to nonprofit groups, counties who have established a nonlethal deterrence program and individual farmers and ranchers; this includes people who are raising crops or animals for noncommercial purposes.
This is what I’m talking about. This is it. This is all of it. It just needs a snappy new name. Like the “Natural resource preservation act” Or the “Water saving Treatise” “Fire Prevention Fund” but this is my fantasy about what comes out of the beaver summit. Even if it dies on the floor I want it to be talked about. Written about. Considered.
Money can be used to purchase a guard dog or other animal. Building or enhancing fencing around property to prevent wildlife species from entering. Money can be used to acquire visual or acoustic scare devices, or flow devices such as beaver pond levelers. Ranchers and farmers would be allowed to trap an animal in a nonlethal trap and release the animal in another area with prior approval from the Department of Agriculture. Money for the new grant program will be distributed from the General Fund.
As of press time the bill has been referred to the House Committee on Agriculture and Natural Resources. No public meeting date has been scheduled and no public testimony has been submitted either in support or opposition.
For more information contact Rayfield’s office at 503-986-1416.
It’s early days. We start with an idea and go from there. How do we make this happen in California? That’s what I want to know. How. How, How,
What a great headline! This article by Leila Hawken does an excellent job of stating its case. Beavers have been having a whole bunch of lucky days in a row. Good for them. They might not have gotten their festival this year but they got a whole bunch of positive attention anyway. As it should be.
SHARON — Beavers are unquestionably cute and great for ecosystems, but they are also pesky. Their dams interfere with the town’s drainage culverts and flood roads in some instances. They contribute to erosion and washouts in other places, particularly on gravel roads.
The problem seems to have been solved in June through ingenious trickery, thanks to the Beaver Institute of Massachusetts and grants from the Wiederhold Foundation of Connecticut to fund work by Beaver Solutions, LLC of Southampton, Mass. Grant funds to support the work totaled $750 for two locations (one was $500, the other $250), said Sharon First Selectman Brent Colley, who was reached for comment on Thursday, July 2.
The Wiederhold Foundation is active in support of the Connecticut Beaver Initiative, which assists landowners with beaver problems and raises awareness of the beavers’ ecological contributions as a “keystone” species, creating natural wetlands.
Hurray for the trickle down philanthropy of the Beaver Institute! And beaver themselves for that matter! We all win when beaver win and the beavers got lucky this time!
The two problem locations were West Cornwall Road near Roy Swamp and West Woods Road #2, where erosion and flooding were a constant threat to the roadbed and motorists. Fences paired with pipes were the answer.
Because the highway is paved going past the Roy Swamp site, the problem was not pavement erosion, but rather that the beavers installed their blockage in mid-pipe, causing water to back up and cause erosion around the drainage pipe.
The “Beaver Deceivers” as they are called were invented in Maine by Skip Lisle, in partnership with the Penobscot Indian Nation. Beavers are attracted to the siren song and the feel of running water, such as is found in a culvert for example.
Hurray for the other beaver philanthropist Skip Lisle! And all the good work he’s made possible over his many years! Of course only the culvert fence is a beaver deceiver if you want to get all namey and technical and IT doens’t so much deceive beavers as prevent them, But hey. Ports in storms. Am I right?
Installing a flow device to silence the sound does the trick. Fencing to further protect the culvert makes it a cost-effective, long-term humane solution.
“It would cost more to trap them than to do this,” Colley added.
From a beaver’s perspective, the presence of the fencing is a deterrent to any construction project because it would just be too much work. Besides, there is no sound of water flowing. So, the beavers pass the culvert by and the roadway remains safe.
Maintenance is minimal, Colley said, requiring only intermittent cleaning of leafy debris from the fencing. “I hope more towns get into this,” Colley said. “It works — so far, so good.” He said the town will budget to continue the effort at other local beaver problem sites.
The creator of the wonderful image is Catrin Welz-Stein of Germany who is an alarmingly talented graphic artist that creates digital collages. Doesn’t it make you want to look at things more closely? Good. I added Amelia’s awesome hobo-beaver and the headline because I wanted to use the image in our activity for the festival. It seemed like destiny that the beavers kit-sack matches she-sherlocks cl0ak. Isn’t that just a marriage made in heaven?
Destiny also released this study in time for my grant writing. How unbelievably lucky am I that this meta-analysis came out with exactly the right results?
Kuo M, Barnes M and Jordan C (2019) Do Experiences With Nature Promote Learning? Converging Evidence of a Cause-and-Effect Relationship. Front. Psychol. 10:305. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00305
What emerged from this critical review was a coherent narrative: experiences with nature do promote children’s academic learning and seem to promote children’s development as persons and as environmental stewards – and at least eight distinct pathways plausibly contribute to these outcomes. Below, we discuss the evidence for each of the eight pathways and then the evidence tying nature to learning, personal development, and the development of stewardship.
This entire study was so wonderful you should really go read the whole thing. Very well laid out and a summary of the 8 learning paths that change in contact with nature. A paragraph on cause and effect towards the end had me in tears. I swear.
And second, spending time in nature appears to grow environmental stewards. Adults who care strongly for nature commonly attribute their caring to time, and particularly play, in nature as children – and a diverse body of studies backs them up (for review, see Chawla and Derr, 2012). Interestingly, the key ingredient in childhood nature experiences that leads to adult stewardship behavior does not seem to be conservation knowledge (knowledge of how and why to conserve). Although knowledge of how and why to conserve, which could presumably be taught in a classroom setting, has typically been assumed to drive stewardship behavior, it is relatively unimportant in predicting conservation behavior (Otto and Pensini, 2017). By contrast, an emotional connection to nature, which may be more difficult to acquire in a classroom, is a powerful predictor of children’s conservation behavior, explaining 69% of the variance (Otto and Pensini, 2017). Indeed, environmental attitudes may foster the acquisition of environmental knowledge (Fremery and Bogner, 2014) rather than vice versa. As spending time in nature fosters an emotional connection to nature and, in turn, conservation attitudes and behavior, direct contact with nature may be the most effective way to grow environmental stewards (Lekies et al., 2015).
Read that again, will you? Contact with nature drives learning about nature which in turn fosters stewardship. It isn’t lectures about biology, but outdoor positive experiences – like beaver festivals and watching beavers themselves, for example – that drive children to later care for the environment.
We care about what we know. Not ‘know’ like books. But ‘know’ as in play in, discover in, spend joyful time in – breathe in.
Take a look at the whole article. There’s a recent interview with Ducks Unlimited Canada‘s Jen Rogers and Roger Dunlop from the Mowachat/Muchalaht First Nation by CBC’s Gregor Craigie that you can listen to, plus a couple of links to past posts about how dam important and brilliant we beaver folks are!
Wednesday’s have always had a special place in my heart ever since Nov 7, 2007 when I tremulously attended the very first city council meeting on beavers I believe Martinez has ever held. It definitely changed the fate of this city and it certainly changed my life. It may have been the first meeting about beavers but it apparently will not be the last. Tonight the city moves to approve the 
A bill in the Oregon Legislature would direct the Oregon Department of Agriculture to establish a grant program to explore nonlethal deterrence between ranchers and wildlife.
The two problem locations were West Cornwall Road near Roy Swamp and West Woods Road #2, where erosion and flooding were a constant threat to the roadbed and motorists. Fences paired with pipes were the answer.
