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I’m sure you feel it too. That lightness and sense of freedom. The feeling that you get when after a long climb you just eased the sweaty backpack off your shoulders and suddenly feel like you might float directly upwards. The dreadful suspense of the last four years where at any moment you would read that hibernating bears could be shot in their caves with their young. or that wolves could be shot from helicopters, or that coal mine tailings could be dumped into drinking water is all suddenly gone. And replaced by responsibility an competence.
And stories like these. Posted the day Biden was inaugurated.
Human-made beaver dams likely save natural wetland from extinction
A natural wetland in southeast Oregon was likely saved from extinction thanks to four years of collaboration and some human-made beaver dams.
In the Oregon high desert, about seven miles northeast of the town of Crane, Alder Creek bubbles to the surface surrounded by sagebrush and juniper trees.
“It’s really the only source of water out in a long way,” he said.
“Really it was 99 percent about preventing the loss of the wetland,” said Lindsay Davies, the BLM fisheries biologist who helped manage the project.
You know what I’m thinking right? If the new head of the Bureau of Land Management understands that human made beaver dams save essential wetlands then they know that beav
“It’s amazing how green everything is and how much wetland – it’s a bigger wetland than we had originally anticipated,” said Davies.
BLM wildlife biologist Travis Miller thinks beavers will have a better chance of escaping predation in the deeper water and have the potential for long-term habitat.
“It would be really good to see those populations rebound and establish in these systems,” said Miller.
Full list of project partners: Malheur County Watershed Council; Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board; Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation; Grant County Soil & Water Conservation District; U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Headquarters; Burns Paiute Tribe; The Nature Conservancy; Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife; adjacent private landowners; and grazing allotment permittees.
Whoo hoo! We’re still operating under an “acting director” but it’s wayyyy better than it used to be. And it’s not just BLM. The same thing is going on at FWS too.
Former FWP Director Appointed To U.S. Fish And Wildlife Service
Former Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Director Martha Williams was appointed on Wednesday as second-in-command at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the Biden Administration. William’s replacement within Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte’s cabinet was also named today.
As principal deputy director of FWS, Williams will oversee a federal agency tasked with managing wildlife and habitat across the country, and in charge of more than 150 million acres of land in the National Wildlife Refuge System. The agency also administers the Endangered Species Act.
Here’s the inside scoup from Sarah Bates at NWF
Named this week as Biden’s choice for principal deputy director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, Williams is serving as temporary FWS director under a secretarial order (E&E News PM, Jan. 21
Martha Williams, the Biden administration’s current head of the Fish and Wildlife Service, knows the Endangered Species Act both as a law school scholar and as a courtroom combatant who once fought environmentalists over the gray wolf.
Now the former director of the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks is getting a bigger bite at the ESA, including the law’s application to the long-litigated gray wolf.
Named this week as Biden’s choice for principal deputy director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, Williams is serving as temporary FWS director under a secretarial order (E&E News PM, Jan. 21)
She also recommended we be more interested in species recovery than simple “Delisting” and appears to believe that habitat is crucial in this effort. So I’m feeling hopeful that she will be interested in beavers. Aren’t you?
And of course it falls under this exciting umbrella appointment of Native American hero and congresswoman Deb Haaland as the secretary of the Interior. Just as soon as the GOP stops sitting on its hands and appoints her.
If you want to play an exciting American version of power rangers, go look at the line up of his cabinet. Every single choice is game changing.
