Sometimes news stories just make me jealous. So many people doing so many smart things to benefit beavers because they realize the good things that beavers bring – it just makes me wish and wish that California had the same qualities of smart stewardship. At least they put it in the paper so everyone can learn from it, That’s something, right?
SEASIDE — Thompson Creek and Stanley Marsh Habitat Reserve in Seaside is one of the North Coast Land Conservancy’s most visible success stories, with coho salmon migrating up Thompson Creek to spawn every winter and beavers returning to create more salmon habitat.
You can help the Conservancy keep that success going by joining a willow-planting stewardship day at Thompson Creek 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday, March 10.
Willow planting is one of the conservancy’s easiest and most popular stewardship activities. Willows provide food and building materials to beavers. The dams those beavers build result in broader wetlands, enhancing habitat for a wide variety of wildlife, from salmon to waterfowl.
HURRAY for people who realize that planting willow for beavers is a good way to help fish and birds. Hurray for the North Coast Land Trust who helps these things happen year after year. Hurray for the lucky beavers that will find their way to these tender shoots and make their start of with new dam.
Loaded
And then there’s Martinez.
Where volunteers work with the frickin’ waterboard, conservation core and city engineer to plant willow for beavers and city staff pulls them up anyway.
Cheryl sent out our announcement for the beaver festival to exhibitors last night. We immediately had two confirmations! One from JoEllen Arnold of Nor-Cal bats, and the other from Alana Dill of face painting by Alana. Off to a good start, that always makes me happier.
(Plus a good start with actual beavers! Did you see the footage yesterday? Scroll down to view our new mascots.)
With all the commotion, I’ve been waiting for a space to talk about Rick Marsi’s latest column which ran as part of USA Today, intriguingly titled:
So much for the State of the Union address. It is time for the State of the Swamp.
Loyal readers may remember I gave a State of the Swamp address some 15 years ago. The big news back then was beavers. They were everywhere, building dams, cutting trees, flooding roads, reproducing like crazy.
Much debate as to their worth ensued. Bipartisan rancor ran rampant. Pro-beaver forces saw good overshadowing evil. Our region’s influx of beavers had created countless new wetlands, they said. These wetlands, in turn, had created nesting habitat for mallards, wood ducks and other waterfowl.
Flooded trees had succumbed. Downy, hairy and pileated woodpeckers were chiseling nest holes from their decaying wood. Herons had benefited from all the new water created by beaver dams. Frog and dragonfly numbers had spiked, supporters insisted.
“Wetland, schmetland!” the other side shouted. All those beavers were cutting down trees in their yards, killing timber stands, clogging road culvert pipes with their clutter.
It was quite a debate. I stand here to report that it still rages in some quarters. While it does, beavers are holding their ground. Because of their presence, the state of the swamp remains good.
Pro-beaver forces! I like the way that sounds! A noisy debate over whether beavers are of value or a nuisance. That sounds like every day since this website first breathed it’s life 10+ years ago. I’m always interested in how the argument ends.
Waterfowl numbers have reached the highest levels in recent memory. Great blue herons appear everywhere. The trilling of toads provides deafening noise every spring. More wetlands also have created additional rainwater impoundments.
During thunderstorms, runoff can do one of two things. It can rush unimpeded to rivers and streams, depositing in them potentially damaging sediment. Or, it can flow into a wetland, deposit much of its sediment there and run on toward the river much cleaner.
The latter is clearly the scenario of choice. I am pleased to report local wetlands continue to help keep our waterways clean.
After praising beaver wetlands he goes on to mention the less wonderful “crafted wetlands” installed by developers who need to restore some nature after their big creation. He says they’re nice enough, but nature (BEAVERS) do it best. He ends the column with:
Go forth strong of purpose and always remember: A swamp is a wetland, and we all know a wetland is good.
As if the week could get any better for beavers! This morning a wonderful podcast appeared about beavers that brilliantly covered my two FAVORITE talking points about them. How and Why we should coexist!
It’s Saturday morning.What ever your plans MAKE TIME to listen to this.
Almost wiped out centuries ago by fur trappers, beavers have made a comeback in North America, including the Mid-Atlantic and the Chesapeake Region. While many see them as a nuisance — slayers of trees, builders of dams that flood roads and farm land — biologists and natural resource managers see good in the beaver comeback. Their dams create rich habitat for other mammals and fish while filtering sediment and damaging nutrients from waters that flow to the Chesapeake Bay.
You know the idea that’s been building in my mine, is wouldn’t it be GREAT if we could incentivize keeping beavers on the landscape by rewarding land-owners with some kind of payment for letting them perform their ecosystem services. PES we could call it?
Apparently this Forbes was thinking the exact same thing.
Idaho rancher Jerry Hoagland likes working under the open sky. He’s seen all kinds of wildlife, from elk and coyotes to eagles and mountain lions. But he had never heard of the endangered Columbia spotted frog before it was discovered on his ranch.
This wasn’t exactly welcome news, since it brought up fears that an environmental lawsuit might derail his ranch operations. “It was the worry a lot of us had at one point, that you didn’t have any control over your own property,” he said.
Enter Idaho’s division of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Hoagland learned that the wildlife agency was willing to split the cost of creating ponds and wetlands on private ranches to support the spotted frog and other endangered species. With shallow edges for spawning and deeper water for hiding, the ponds would serve as virtual incubators for biodiversity.
Did you get that? If you create a man-made pond on your land Idaho Fish and Game will give you $$$ for improving biodiversity. And that’s if you do it yourself, which takes time and money. I’m thinking of a little animal that would do that for free.
You see what I mean? If I can just get people to stop killing beavers, they will make their own arguments all by themselves.
“I wanted to create the [wet] meadow habitat because water is so scarce in the West, and water is critical to life,” says rancher Chris Black of Owyhee County, who created a series of ponds on his property. “If I can create a meadow habitat, I can create a place for sage grouse to come in, pronghorn to come in, all wildlife to use, plus my cows have a habitat they can use. It’s good for everything in the system.”
Cattle ranching is a historic way of life in the West, but it’s under siege, threatened by development, drought, wildfires, a shrinking number of cattle buyers and razor-thin profit margins. But land trusts, conservation easements and payments for ecosystem services (such as wetlands) offer hope that rangelands and their wildlife can survive and even flourish.
How does this work? Some conservation agencies, like Idaho’s, offer cost-sharing with ranchers, while other Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) cover all the costs or pay ranchers directly for wildlife programs. Ranchers who set land aside in permanent conservation easements receive estate benefits and federal tax savings for up to 15 years. And some land trusts, such as the Ranchland Trust of Kansas, allow ranchers to specify that their grassland legacy continue to be ranched.
Okay, I agree. There are all kinds of problems with this cattle-worshiping article. Ranching depletes water and Mary Obrien wrote that “This piece contains a lot of inaccuracies about ranching — never mind that there is no pound of meat that requires more water; uses and degrades more arid and semi-arid public land; and emits more methane than cattle.”
BUT, laying aside the problems, and considering the fact that Fish and Game already use the policy and funding is already in place, they have the paperwork, and already work with the system my point is that it wouldn’t take TOO much work to broaden it to include having beaver ponds on your land. Right? I mean of course a rancher can’t promise they’ll be there for 15 years but you can promise not to trap them and report the number of dams on your land.
And the very IDEA of paying for ecosystem services should be repeated over and over. Why not let any land owner do the same, or a university, or even a city who keeps beaver on its urban creek receive PES?
This whole article has me thinking. Plus it gives me an excuse to post my very favorite video of 2017 again, and I never, NEVER tire of beaver Moses.
Two fine articles appeared yesterday in defense of our favorite hero. The first is from the World Wildlife Federation’s Blog post. It has one of my top favorite photos that isn’t ours. The second is from a group called EPIC in Arcata that I hadn’t heard of until last week when Eli Asarian of Riverbend Sciences sent them my way regarding depredation permits. They were considering the impact of beavers on salmon and wondering whether depredation permits took that into account. I don’t know if I was helpful, but I think you’ll agree that something about the article suggests I made a lasting impression of sorts.
Engineering for nature comes naturally to beavers. Though they can sometimes pose real challenges for the people who share their space, their dams and the resulting ponds can help restore vegetation, combat climate change, rebuild fish habitat, reduce pollution by capturing sediment, and build resilience against floods and droughts by storing water and slowing the pace of racing streams and rivers. Without beavers at work, most of the biodiversity we associate with wetland habitats – the fish, birds and bugs – would all disappear.
Heather Diamond
Throughout Alberta, there’s a growing demand to find solutions to human-wildlife conflict. And in the North Saskatchewan Watershed (Alberta), where the threats from habitat loss and fragmentation and pollution are ranked “high” to “very high,” beavers are damn important. With some help from WWF-Canada’s Loblaw Water Fund, the Alberta Riparian Habitat Management Society, also known as “Cows and Fish,” is working to repair the beaver’s reputation, and, by doing so, the freshwater ecosystems it calls home.
Cows and Fish is repairing this rodent’s rep, and reducing human-wildlife conflict, by raising awareness about the important role beavers play in riparian health in their “Living with Beavers” workshops, like this one on Dec. 7.
While the beleaguered beaver may never be welcomed as an ecosystem saver, Cows and Fish is offering communities practical solutions for coexistence so that beavers and their dams – along with the core role they play in wetland health – don’t have to be removed.
Hurray for Cows and Fish! For my money they are the most persuasive unsung beaver advocates on the planet. Not appearing in any PBS documentary or publishing a coffee table book but making a real difference by talking to one farmer at a time, over coffee, in meeting, and putting out excellent resources that make sense to the average viewer.
Beavers are a keystone species, playing a critical role in biodiversity and providing direct benefits to surrounding ecosystems as well as fish, wildlife and people. Dams created by beavers create wetlands that help decrease the effects of damaging floods, recharge drinking water aquifers, protect watersheds from droughts, decrease erosion, stabilize stream banks, remove toxic pollutants from surface and ground water and many threatened and endangered species rely on the wetland habitat c
reated by beavers. They also produce food for fish and other animals, increase
habitat and cold water pools that benefit salmon, repair damaged stream channels and watersheds, preserve open space, and maintain stable stream flows.
Consequently, incised stream channels, altered streamflow regimes, and degraded riparian vegetation limit the potential for beaver re-establishment. For these reasons, preventing further habitat degradation and restoring degraded habitats are key to protecting and restoring beaver populations.
It’s a great article, with excellent science to back it up. It even has links to the FOIA data from Wildlife Services obtained by Executive Director Tom Wheeler which is what I was asked about last week. It ends with a wonderful plea on behalf of beavers.
Beavers Need Help
While the North Coast Region has a beaver deficit, every year hundreds of beavers are killed in California’s Central Valley by Wildlife Services, a federal agency tasked with (lethal) “removal” of “problem” or “nuisance” animals because landowners view them as a pest. The Department of Fish and Wildlife also issues depredation permits for landowners to trap and kill nuisance beavers on their property.
Instead of trapping and killing beavers that are unwanted in other regions, it is imperative that a relocation program is created, so that beavers can be relocated to North Coast rivers and other places to help restore streams and wetlands. Beaver reintroduction is a sustainable cost-effective strategy, but we need to work with stakeholders to navigate the political, regulatory and biological frameworks to safely restore their populations.
Well, I don’t disagree with that sentiment. Our review of depredation permits has never seen one from Humbolt county in three years, which implies they mostly aren’t there. Eli did tell me about a few sites that have beavers along the Klamath, so fingers crossed they’ll flourish eventually. But you know me, I’m never as happy about moving beavers as I am about working to let them stay right where they are.
And about that headline, I’m not saying my brain is the only brain this has ever occurred. And I’m not saying folks don’t get subliminal influences that just stick in their heads but they don’t realize they saw it somewhere else first. I’m just saying the timing is eye-popping. Eli introduced us on 12-08, and I wrote Tom about our depredation permit review that same day and sent this summary graphic. He replied a couple days later, saying it was a great design and that he had been planning to do the same.
Sometimes news stories just make me jealous. So many people doing so many smart things to benefit beavers because they realize the good things that beavers bring – it just makes me wish and wish that California had the same qualities of smart stewardship. At least they put it in the paper so everyone can learn from it, That’s something, right?
SEASIDE — Thompson Creek and Stanley Marsh Habitat Reserve in Seaside is one of the North Coast Land Conservancy’s most visible success stories, with coho salmon migrating up Thompson Creek to spawn every winter and beavers returning to create more salmon habitat.
Apparently this Forbes was thinking the exact same thing.
This wasn’t exactly welcome news, since it brought up fears that an environmental lawsuit might derail his ranch operations. “It was the worry a lot of us had at one point, that you didn’t have any control over your own property,” he said.
Now onto the story from EPIC, which stands for Environmental Protection Information Center. See if you can spot possibly my subtle influence.
