This is especially timely because the city is in the middle of an election cycle right now, and candidates are trying to look like they are doing the right thing by making friends with them. Which is good because the DFO is still rejecting all the science from NOAA and wants to rip out the beaver dams to help the passage of their poor, disabled salmon that can’t make it over.
Our heroes have been working at top speeds trying to talk sense into anyone that will listen, and quite a few that won’t, which is exhausting. This award helps remind them of the incredible difference they are making. Of course, it still won’t guarantee everyone will listen – but it surely can’t hurt.
Congratulations on the much deserved recognition of your hard work! Here’s a reminder of part of their journey.
The Beaver Believers tells the urgent and whimsical story of an unlikely cadre of activists – a biologist, a hydrologist, a botanist, an ecologist, a psychologist, and a hairdresser – who share a common vision: restoring the North American Beaver, that most industrious, ingenious, furry little engineer, to the watersheds of the American West.
Speaking of friends in high places, Sarah Koenigsberg is eagerly awaiting the film festival premier in Portland next week of her film on beavers and climate change. (You might remember that parts of this were filmed at the 2012 beaver festival!) Well as she’s been promoting it on facebook the alerts have been taken down. She recently received word that “they are “not authorized to promote posts about subjects of political content or national importance.”
Which of course beavers are.
See after facebook’s Russian bot fiasco they are trying to keeping all sides happy by hurting liberals (or anyone that mentions climate change) too. So do your part to combat global warming, punish Mark Zuckerberg and reject stupid false equivalence self-defense and SHARE THIS POST with all your Oregon friends.
A red-banner day for beavers and Ben Goldfarb came with yesterday’s interview on PRI, which means it aired on public radio stations in roughly 50 states. I am SO happy that ben’s fame continues to unfold in ways that benefit the cause, (although, to be honest, if he never answered another question on squeezing a beavers anal glands it would still be too soon for me).
Beavers, the largest rodents in North America, are sometimes seen as pests. But a growing cohort of self-styled “Beaver Believers” is celebrating the dam-building creatures as a keystone species on which entire freshwater ecosystems depend.
In his 2018 book, “Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter,” author Ben Goldfarb examines the history, ecology and physiology of beavers — and describes why some landowners are welcoming beavers to help store water and revitalize streams in the increasingly arid American West.
So, what does it mean to be a “Beaver Believer?”
“The Beaver Believers are a tribe of scientists, land managers, farmers and ranchers — really anyone — who believes that restoring these incredible little ecosystem engineers can help us deal with all kinds of environmental problems,” Goldfarb says. “The Beaver Believers are people like me who have come to recognize that this is an incredibly important animal that we should cooperate with in landscape restoration.”
And child psychologist! You forgot to mention child psychologists. I hear some of them are beaver believers. Ahem.
When beavers build their dams, they create ponds and wetlands; they help store water for farms and ranches; they help filter out water pollution, which improves water quality; they create habitat for many kinds of fish and wildlife that we care about; they slow down floods; and their ponds can act as fire breaks.
Beavers might even be able to help humans cope with some of the consequences of climate change — wildfires, heat waves and drought. Goldfarb describes, for example, a pond he visited in the Methow Valley in Washington State.
“The Methow is a very dry place that has been hammered with fire in the last several years,” he says.
At this particular pond, one side had been totally scorched and the other side remained green.
“It was clear the fire had hit the pond and basically hadn’t proceeded any further,” Goldfarb says. But, he adds, “the ability of beavers to act as firebreaks is one of those things that hasn’t really been quantified in any kind of meaningful way.”
Ya think?
I like to imagine those radios all across the country in kitchens or in cars tuning in for beaver benefits, This is what I hoped for with Glynnis’ book, or with Frances’ book. Or with the great work out of NOAA or Utah. But it took the right kind of message and the right kind of reception. Thanks Ben for letting us watch this unfold.
Beavers deserve this.
Mean while yesterday our wildlife friends in England were part of a dynamic “Peoples’ Walk for Wildlife” and I thought you want to see some photos. This is Derek Gow from Devon with one of my favorite signs and below are a bunch of his photos of the day I snagged off his facebook feed. Thousands of people turned up to march on Whitehall, which is basically government central in London. Most of them carried signs or wore wonderful costumes. Here is an article in the Guardian in case you want to read all about it. Click on any photo for a larger view or to scroll through them all.
So close and yet so far. Yesterday’s magically returned website didn’t disappear into thin air like I worried it would. But it did eventually grow a crippling handicap that I’ll still have to wrestle with today.
If you want to see what it is, try clicking on any “Page” in the drop down menus.
The problem with inheriting a large website of patches is that fixing one part often breaks the other part! I’m sure we’ll get there. It will just require another robust dose of snappy hold music.
But enough shop-talk, lets go to Oregon and talk about BDA’s.
Now, in an about-face that bodes well for beavers, stream restoration professionals are turning to small wooden impoundments as a way to improve fish habitat and riparian areas across the West. Made of pounded posts and woven willow whips, these beaver dam analogs are considerably cheaper than other restoration techniques.
Even if BDAs don’t attract beavers to an area, they mimic the action of natural beaver dams — slowing stream flow, improving groundwater connectivity to the surrounding area and building up sediment to improve riparian areas. Juvenile fish can swim through gaps in BDAs, and the minimum fish-jumping height for older fish can be achieved by installing multiple BDAs.
Beaver dam analogs can also help reduce stream water temperature, according to Stephen Bennett, an adjunct professor in watershed sciences at Utah State University. BDAs can increase groundwater connectivity through annual spring flooding and by the hydraulic action of the standing water behind the dams.
Hey! I got an idea about bring back beaver benefits. Just stop killing them! How’s that for a novel idea?
Getting the word out on beaver dam analogs was the goal of a workshop held in Grant County July 24-26. Thirty-five stream restoration professionals attended talks at Grant County Regional Airport and field trips to Murderers Creek, Camp Creek and Bear Creek in the Malheur National Forest.
Attendees included people from watershed councils, soil and water conservation districts, federal and state agencies, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs and private contractors.
The purpose of the workshop was not just instructing people on how to build beaver dam analogs or persuading them to use the technique, but also to release new information on what’s been accomplished, said Elise Delgado, project manager for the South Fork John Day Watershed Council.
“Not everyone will leave a believer,” she said.
The workshop was sponsored by the John Day Basin Partnership, which represents groups from Prairie City to the Columbia River. Herb Winters, a project manager at the Gilliam Soil and Water Conservation District, sits on the partnership’s steering committee.
Well gosh. If you can get people excited about beaver dams by letting them build them themselves I guess its a good thing. But you do know beavers have their own ideas, right? They might happily use that BDA and then add three more upstream when you didn’t plan to have a beaver dam at all. You know how it is when you bring in a designer. They always have their own plans for the space.
At least Nick has the right idea.
Nick Bouwes, a professor at the College of Natural Resources at Utah State University, advised workshop members to be efficient in how they build BDAs because a project might require a lot of them. He said he prefers a messy one, the messier the better — if a post goes in crooked because of rocks, let it be, he said.
Bouwes was a leader in the largest beaver dam analog project in the United States, on Bridge Creek near Mitchell, where a powerful stream had gouged a 6- to 10-foot-deep incision. About 2.5 miles was treated to improve habitat for steelhead starting in 2005.
Bouwes and his team built 121 BDAs from 2009 to 2012. By 2013, beavers had fortified 60 of the BDAs and built 115 new dams. The stream bed gradually filled with sediment and rose back to the top of the trench, and the submerged area tripled.
Monitoring showed Bridge Creek produced nearly three times as much fish as a nearby control stream, and water-temperature spiking eased. The results made Bridge Creek the poster child for BDA projects, drawing international attention and documentary filmmakers.
As it happens I’ll be using Nick’s video tomorrow in my presentation at Sulpher Creek Nature center, which makes it a very good time to re-share.
Look up! Now that’s a beautiful header image. Don’t you think? Cheryl took a few photos that are long enough to be stretched across or bow, as it were, so I plan to experiment with them. There’s a ton of news to catch up, some of it glorious and some of it grim, which do you want first? Let’s intersperse.
A few more articles like this and I’m going to say we’re in the middle of a full cultural beaver renaissance!
This amazing, large rodent is very important to water systems and aquifers.
It also used to be thought that beaver dams would keep spawning steelhead and salmon from getting upstream, and so many beavers were trapped, shot and their dams blown up to open channels up for fish to get upstream.
This whole idea was not correct, and the destruction of beavers and their dams was a very bad idea, as the very fish we thought we were assisting were deprived of pools and water.
There is an old saying that states, “Beavers taught steelhead to jump.”
Beavers, water, habitat and fish are all connected just as tightly as your hand is to your arm. The trees and willows that beavers cut down have adapted to survive beavers by re-growing at great rates and in large numbers, as the water table rises due to the beavers’ dams.
Beavers are vital to all aquatic species.
Starting in the late 18th and through the 19th centuries, humans decided to go after the beaver for its winter pelts.
By the early 20th century, many Western drainages had all or most of the beaver populations trapped out.
As a result of this, water tables vanished, rendering many areas deserts and all plants and animals that depended on the beaver’s dams and pools suffered greatly.
So now we know that beavers are super important to any drainage they are in and that water managers need to protect these amazing engineers.
As more and more folks move into areas and demand more water, then the beaver will become all that more important.
Beavers are important for the species that need water to live, which is as it happens, every species, Thanks for the lovely column Mike Denny! Apparently he attended a lecture by Sarah Koenisberg earlier in the year and cemented his belief in beavers. I love when acolytes keep spreading the word!
Okay lets visit the ridiculous bad news now. I swear that people who can’t find beaver solutions in Massachusetts are like people who can’t find ‘anything to read’ at the library!
OXFORD – As a retiree with a place on Cape Cod, Charles Tuite doesn’t normally spend much time in Oxford these days, but beavers are forcing the 75-year-old disabled property owner to regularly travel to town deal with a problem they are creating.
Beavers, using logs and branches fallen and dumped into Barbers Hollow Brook, built a 7-foot dam at a culvert that runs under Mr. Tuite’s property and Route 12 at 381 Main St. The flooding by the dam put septic systems upstream at risk, according to environmental consultant Glenn Krevosky. The brook passes several hundred feet from McKinstry Pond. Although the culvert is owned by the state Department of Transportation, the dam became Mr. Tuite’s problem because he owns the land where the beavers chose to build.
Mr. Tuite said he was offended by the letter threatening fines. He said he has been a property owner in town for 35 years and was never a problem. He said he would have been happy to talk with the health inspector and figure out a plan for dealing with the problem. The culvert runs under property where Gene Buckley operates Buckley Auto Center. Mr. Tuite said he he purchased much of the land nearby at the request of the town, which was concerned that a business next door did not have a safe parking area.
With the purchase, he ended up with the unexpected beaver problem. He said he was hoping the town could provide equipment to remove the dam or the beavers or both, but was told it was his responsibility. He went ahead and did what he could on his own. The task was not easy, he said.
“We had to pull a lot of logs out there by hand,” he said.
Mr. Tuite said he should not be doing the work himself because he is disabled, but was under threat of having the town fine him. In order to remove the dam, people had to climb down a steep 15-foot embankment and then haul the debris back up.
Mr. Tuite said four truckloads of debris were removed from the dam over the past several weeks, but the beavers are still at it. He said he was amazed at how large they are.
“They’re huge,” he said. “I hope they don’t attack us when we are removing the dam.”
Oh pulleeze! Beavers might attack you? I might attack you, does that count? Honestly, when people don’t know that there is a better way to solve a culvert problem than pulling at the logs and hoping the beavers give up, in FRIGGIN MASSACHUSETTS what is the world coming too.
I’m from a town in California that had to bring an expert 3000 miles to solve our beaver problem. You only have to pick up the phone. If you don’t know better by now its because you don’t want to know better, Just remember to keep the numbers of the health inspector and trapper handy, cause you’ll be doing this again next year or the year after that.
Good news please! I need something to clean my palate after that mouthful of stupid. Dr. Joe Wheaton from Utah just finished Ben’s book and is plugging it proudly on his website. Let’s hope its required reading on campus soon!
This is one of the most exhaustively researched, authoritative and compelling books on why we might want to turn to beaver as a restoration and conservation partner in existence. Even if you are a seasoned beaver researcher or restoration practitioner, you will learn a ton reading this and be pointed to all sorts of great references and research that Ben uncovered and synthesized. Perhaps more importantly, if you’ve never paid any attention to this rodent, Ben makes it easy to become interested in their plight and how our’s is so intertwined. Ben tells the parallel stories of beaver, North America’s complicated history with the rodent, and of the large cast of contemporary characters involved in trying to shape the future of trying to learn something from this amazing ecosystem engineer in about how we manage natural resources and coexist.
Excellent introduction Joe! I can feel the beaver believer tally rising as I type! I saw this photo yesterday on Ben’s instagram account and just had to share, You may recognize the mural behind him. He had just finished picking up his copies delivered to the house.
Tomorrow is publication day in Chicago. Fingers crossed!
The largest rodent in North America, the beaver is nothing if not a force of nature, a critter constantly at work and brilliantly adapted for its aquatic environment. With orange teeth, a flat, paddle-shaped tail and an insatiable desire for cutting trees and building dams, beavers are, as one biologist put it, equally fascinating and frustrating. An old saying: A beaver in the right place is an ideal conservationist; a beaver in the wrong place is a nuisance.
So begins a glossy new article in the Star Tribune which is in equal parts a review of Ben’s book and a review of beavers themselves. “You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll tear your hair” – kind of thing.
“Beavers are intimately intertwined with American history and most important historical events before the Civil War were motivated to secure more land to trap beavers. So we have the Fur Trade as this great historic event, and we also have this great ecological event that is still playing out today. How do we balance the enormous good beavers do environmentally with some of the problems they cause?”
I like this photo a lot, but they don’t give anyone credit so I can’t either
You can just tell the author of this article is bracing himself for all the nice things he has to say about beavers. Either it’s against his grain or he is worried it will be against the readers grain. Either way I’m sure there are definitely grains involved.
Steve Windels is a wildlife biologist at Voyageurs National Park, headquartered in International Falls. He is one of several scientists who have conducted beaver research at the 218,000-acre park. Roughly 50 research papers have been produced since research began there in 1983. Windels said the cumulative research shows Voyageurs might contain the highest density of beavers in the United States.
“They’re a keystone species … and their removal can result in a cascade of changes for other species in the system,” Windels said.
Indeed, Windels said beaver research at the park suggests that at least 124 bird species, mammals, reptiles and amphibians use “beaver-created wetlands,” — or about 38 percent of the park’s inhabitants.
Did you get that? 38% depend on beaver! And the other 62 percent just drink the water. Pay attention, here comes the money shot.
Beaver coexistence
Goldfarb said the federal government in 2017 killed 23,646 “problem” beavers. He said beavers are blamed for far too many problems and would like to see more nonlethal strategies for dealing with so-called nuisance beavers. “If I learned one thing from researching my book, it can be done,” he said. “Beavers don’t have a lot advocates, but they furnish us with numerous ecosystem services that support a vast menagerie. Do some beavers cause such problems that they need to be dealt with? Yes. But I think we’ve gone overboard.”
Well said Ben. It’s true that beavers don’t have a lot of advocates, but the ones they DO have are AWESOME. Coming soon to a book store near you.
Congratulations to our good beaver friends and favorite Canadians Jim and Judy Atkinson of Port Moody, B.C. Last night they received the 2018 environmental award at the Civic dinner for their tireless work to help beavers, birds and bears!
urgent and whimsical story of an unlikely cadre of activists – a biologist, a hydrologist, a botanist, an ecologist, a psychologist, and a hairdresser – who share a common vision: restoring the North American Beaver, that most industrious, ingenious, furry little engineer, to the watersheds of the American West. 
In his 2018 book, “
When beavers build their dams, they create ponds and wetlands; they help store water for farms and ranches; they help filter out water pollution, which improves water quality; they create habitat for many kinds of fish and wildlife that we care about; they slow down floods; and their ponds can act as fire breaks.
Mr. Tuite said he was offended by the letter threatening fines. He said he has been a property owner in town for 35 years and was never a problem. He said he would have been happy to talk with the health inspector and figure out a plan for dealing with the problem. The culvert runs under property where Gene Buckley operates Buckley Auto Center. Mr. Tuite said he he purchased much of the land nearby at the request of the town, which was concerned that a business next door did not have a safe parking area.
