Is the capture of OAEC’s new beaver shirt worn by Brock and Kate at the conference. If you want to know what an incised stream looks like, go to Alhambra Creek anywhere above Brown Street and look down. This paper from Michael Pollock et al on the topic of beaver restoration in such cases was just published in the journal of BioScience. Here’s the take away:
Beaver dams and riparian vegetation create flow obstructions that reduce stream power and flow velocity. These reductions, in turn, allow sediment to accumulate on the stream bed and floodplain while also reducing bank erosion.Restoration strategies that incorporate how features such as beaver dams, live vegetation, and dead wood interact dynamically with fluvial geomorphic processes are more likely to be successful.
The only question remaining of course is where should the mayor send his thank you note to the beavers for helping fix the creek his many predecessors helped ruin?
This is from their visit last night. Cheryl is kindly mocking my reluctance to call this beaver a yearling and saying I want them to be babies forever. I of course would like that very much, but I just can’t believe he was born before April 1st last year, since he was SO small when we saw him May 5th. After this week, I’ll relent. But for a few days more, this is a kit.
The good news is that IF he’s a yearling already it means we probably have new kits on site!
