I want you to pay very very close attention to how this happens, the way it starts and the way it spreads and permeates. I want you to use it as a model for what should be happening in every county in every state from one coast to the other and all the middle bits in between.
James Michner is famous for saying in one of his sprawling misogynistic historic novels
Chesapeake Bay is like a beautiful woman. There’s no humiliation from which she cannot recover.
I could say a lot about that outrageously self-serving observation but I’ll just point out that the Chesapeake has had far more than her fair share of humiliation than she deserves. There is now is a vast diverse and powerful interest in promoting her recovery So that’s part of how this happens. But it’s really just the beginning.
Articles like this from Tom Horton after 2020’s beaverCon helped.
The Beavers Are Back!
Before the mid-1700s, when they were virtually trapped out, millions of beavers and their dams and ponds were key to a Chesapeake that was clean and clear almost beyond imagining. Scientific analyses of deep Bay sediments deposited through the centuries have provided us with insights into that astounding ecosystem.
Beavers are coming back, even to the inimical conurbation that is most of northern Anne Arundel County. Michelsen, acting deputy director of the county’s Bureau of Watershed Protection and Restoration, is my guide to what is no less than a demonstration project, with beavers themselves doing much of the construction.
Eric Michelsen isacting deputy director of the county’s Bureau of Watershed Protection and Restoration,We’ve scarcely begun to plumb the potential of beavers to restore water’s rightful way throughout Bay landscapes. But Michelsen has high hopes. “I am convinced that, even in a highly urban watershed, they can do wonders,” he said, “if we just allow them to work.”
Which brings us to AA County. Anne Arundel County is doing something remarkable. And I say that as a woman who has been reporting about beaver news around the country every day for fifteen years. I don’t use the word remarkable lightly or with sarcasm.
This is on their Public Works website. PUBLIC WORKS! Someone get Dave Scola a fainting couch.
Living With Beavers
Meet your neighbor, the beaver!
When Europeans first began to settle North America, beavers (Castor canadensis) were plentiful, but the high demand for beaver pelts to supply the European fur trade in the 1800’s nearly caused their extinction. With the help of reintroduction and protection efforts they have made a successful comeback. Today the biggest threat to beaver populations comes from human conflicts and habitat destruction.
Beavers help to protect water quality by slowing stream flows. By creating low dams in streams, flows entering beaver ponds slow down, enhancing natural processes that tend to mediate nitrogen and sediment levels in watersheds where they occur, helping clean the Chesapeake Bay.
Each of those tabs drops down to a careful answer that was lovingly put together by the remarkable Sally Allbright, the education and outreach coordinator of the Anne Arundel County Bureau of Watershed Protection and Restoration. She also credits her coworkers at BWPR, Christopher Victoria (Water Quality Compliance Specialist) and Douglas Griffith (Planner). I’m still scratching my head and trying to understand why such a bureau or position even exists. But thank the very Gods that it does.
Examples of Living with Beavers in Anne Arundel County
Best recommended practices for working in concert with native beavers will vary on a case-by-case basis, and often requires the implementation of creative and innovative methods. The projects listed below offer examples of how Anne Arundel County has worked with local communities to enhance the relationship between humans and beavers in a neighboring floodplain.
So Sally is in the National Beaver Education working group with me as part of the beaver institute. And yesterday when we met she shared the site she put together and her efforts, describing how the county hired Scott McGill of Ecotone to come install a flow device in a very public area, She also explained that she had developed a post card they could mail to folks who wondered about it.
Honestly, as a woman who literally tried to arm wrestle public works for two years while at the same time inviting them and the entire city council to a tea party every morning and biting through her own lip more often than not to keep from saying the wrong thing, this just BLOWS ME AWAY. To know that this exists, that this is possible, that good people made this happen and still have their jobs, this is beyond what I hoped for.
And there is one more thing,
At the end of the meeting Sally talked about wanting to use her program as a model for other counties and suggested they could reach out to all 23 counties in Maryland to make it happen.
