Put down that champagne and stop dancing. We’re not celebrating yet. Just because I posted a great article about beavers and trout yesterday, it doesn’t mean that our battle is won.
Recently, I spent a few minutes watching the salmon again but to my dismay there was a beaver dam limiting the travels of the spawning fish.
This is the first time I have ever seen a beaver in this stream in all my years.
Herein lies the problem.
1) Fish can’t get up stream to lay their eggs
2) Ecosystem is being thrown out of kilter and the fish are dying without laying their eggs as they have not reached their own place of birth.
3) Trees are being destroyed.
4)The water is expanding above the dam and flooding is starting to occur in the low-lying areas. Hidden Valley is a low-lying area already.
5) What to do with the beaver? The more you destroy the dam the more trees the beaver will cut down to stop the water flow.
6) The only way to ensure that the fish spawn where they were born themselves before dying, and to continue the fish run that has been going on for years and years, is to relocate the beaver.
For those of you that have the power to make this happen, please do so and give more people a chance to experience this part of nature and the circle of life.
Don’t you just HATE it when beavers interfere with the circle of life? Enriching all those streams with sediment and organic material and distracting those hardworking salmon with something to eat on their way home? Of course the temperature in Halton is 32 degrees today and partly cloudy so I’m guessing that those conditions are going to change very soon. Remember we used to have millions more beavers and coincidentally millions more salmon and trout.
Where was Mr. Bailey’s thoughtful plea then?
Why not remove the dam (and the beavers) so that those salmon can get home more easily? Well assuming they are going to manage with the first rainfall anyway, those little eggs need a safe place to grow up to healthy smolt. And when that stream freezes solid there won’t be a lot of deep pools for them to fatten up over the winter except those beaver ponds which you want folks to destroy. Here’s a graphic for you, Scott showing comparing the numbers of salmon in beaver ponds to the number of salmon in ponds restored with large woody debris (LWD). Notice anything?
Here endeth the lesson.
Now here’s some good cheer for a much needed change of pace:
