Sure ODFW want beavers. kind of. But they are not willing to actually read about it or put in a few BDAs to make it easier for them to stay.
Can beavers save the Klamath Marsh?
The Klamath Marsh National Wildlife Refuge looks very different today than it did 35 years ago.
Alex Gonyaw, senior fisheries biologist for the Klamath Tribes, said these are the impacts of man-made calamities on the marsh that span more than 200 years.
After settlement, the view of wetlands was to drain and convert them to something useful, even though they were perfectly useful to the people who’d lived here for 15,000 years,” Gonyaw said of activities like farming and ranching that diverted water from the area to larger swaths of arable and grazing land.
This water diversion has shortened the wet season in the marsh, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
All of a sudden, “What began as a complex, emergent wetland and open water system was converted to a couple puddles,” Gonyaw said.
That worsened with six years of drought in the last decade, and ground waters in the marsh this year dropping to their lowest levels on record.
The hope is that this watershed will expand again with the arrival of beavers and their dams. The expectation is that the aquatic rodents will create canals and ponds to expand their habitat.
Derek Broman, beaver expert at the state Department of Fish and Wildlife said, “beavers like to make a sort of pool-side bar, where they have access to vegetation that they don’t have to venture out of water to get.”
They create barriers that back up water and channels so they can move through the water and away from land predators. But, Browman said, it’s hard for man to induce beavers to build the dams in the first place.
Despite the growing popularity of using beavers to restore habitats, and even to create aquatic environments that can serve as buffers against wildfire, the Fish and Wildlife Department hasn’t seen a successful significant beaver repopulation in the last decade, according to Broman.
He recalled a project by Oregon State University researchers where just 50% of the beavers survived, fewer stayed where they were placed and even fewer built dams.
Across the state, only about one out of three beavers build dams, Broman said.
“It is not a Disney movie,” he said. “Fish hatcheries, you move so many animals, you can see a pretty high mortality rate. To them 50% is totally normal. For these animals, that is way too high to be acceptable.”
What a thoughtful, informed man. It indeed is not a Disney movie. Beavers are not coasters. They do not always stay where you put them. And they do not always choose to build dams if the conditions aren’t right. That’s why people who really really want beavers to keep up the neighborhood build BDA’s to get them started. Maybe you should save some of your grant money for a pizza party to get 30 environmental majors from the nearest campus and put them to work for an afternoon?
But one state success story was the introduction of beavers to another of the wildlife refuges north of Klamath Marsh. A small population has re-established itself and the Department of Fish and Wildlife recommended expanding the project across wetland and riparian habitats in the basin.
Gonyaw and employees at the Klamath Marsh are hopeful.
To create an inviting environment for beavers, they will plant the area around Little Wocus Bay in native geyer willow — building material for beaver dams.
They hope to get $20,000 in funding from the Oregon Conservation and Recreation Fund to hire tribal youth for that work. They’ll propagate the willows in a greenhouse before planting them in the marsh next fall. They’ll also begin constructing a manmade beaver dam using geyer willow to be a sort of first home for the first beaver family to be transplanted. That will keep them safe while they begin foraging for materials and building their own.
“We need to provide the tool box before we give them a job to do,” Gonyaw said.
“We’ll cobble together a man-made beaver lodge for them to start with, plant thousands of willows and hopefully something will trigger them to stay, to say, ‘I need to keep doing what I was doing 200 years ago.’” Gonyaw said.
Well sure, I guess it’s worth a shot. But first make sure that trapping isn’t legal in the refuge because ODFW is a littler unpredictable in that department. And then make sure that the beavers you relocate are a family unit and not just a bunch of stay socks left over from someones dryer.
Then read the restoration guidebook all the way through.
