Somedays I straggle to the computer half awake and blearily look at the beaver headlines and feel so glum about the future. And some days are glorious beyond my imagining. This is a GLORIOUS day, Get ready to be gloried.

Can beavers help build a better Chesapeake Bay?

Scott McGill was standing beside a stream that, to many people, wouldn’t look like a stream at all. But if an explorer had been plopped down here four centuries ago, in what is now Baltimore County, MD, this is the way a stream might have looked, he said.

This section of Long Green Creek is a sprawling ponded area of 7 or 8 acres, surrounded by shrubs and trees and flanked by marshy soil that sank with each step. Muddy, vegetated mounds occasionally pierced the surface.

Wildlife, especially waterfowl, like it that way. “We have flocks of black ducks and woodies,” said McGill, who heads Ecotone, an ecological restoration company that has been working on this stretch of stream for years. “We’ve even had pintails, which typically aren’t common around here.”

Yet he wasn’t taking credit for the results. If he had done the work, McGill said, “it would have cost millions, and it wouldn’t have been as good.”

Are you excited yet? You know what’s coming don’t you. This is the kind of article you will have to go read every single word of yourself by clicking on the link in the title. And then you’ll need to share it with five people who can’t understand your obsession with beavers.

Now, McGill and a small group of “beaver believers” are hoping to transform the way the Chesapeake Bay region thinks about its waterways — and the role that North America’s largest rodent should play in restoring their health.

Allowing those furry engineers to replumb the stream systems, they contend, can sharply reduce Bay pollution at a fraction of anticipated costs. The revitalized streams would also increase the diversity and productivity of streams for frogs, birds and fish, including some rare species.

Stream systems that include beaver-engineered ponds, they say, will also buffer the impacts of climate change by reducing downstream flooding, mitigating drought and recharging groundwater.

And there’s a new film that’s apparently been out for two months. How did I miss it? Where was I two months ago:? Oh that’s right. In the hospital with sepsis. I’m so sorry. I let you down. Let me make it up to you now.

[wonderplugin_video iframe=”https://youtu.be/9STjoQM7ee0″ lightbox=0 lightboxsize=1 lightboxwidth=960 lightboxheight=540 autoopen=0 autoopendelay=0 autoclose=0 lightboxtitle=”” lightboxgroup=”” lightboxshownavigation=0 showimage=”” lightboxoptions=”” videowidth=600 videoheight=400 keepaspectratio=1 autoplay=0 loop=0 videocss=”position:relative;display:block;background-color:#000;overflow:hidden;max-width:100%;margin:0 auto;” playbutton=”https://www.martinezbeavers.org/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/wonderplugin-video-embed/engine/playvideo-64-64-0.png”]

Ecosystem amnesia

Not far from the beaver pond, McGill stood on a dry bank above a narrow water channel running through a 2-foot-deep ditch. This is pretty much what people in the mid-Atlantic have come to think of as a “natural” waterway, McGill said, “[but] you should not be able to walk here in sneakers without getting your feet wet.”

That people see such degraded streams as natural while considering beaver ponds out-of-place nuisances is a symptom of what some call “ecological amnesia.”

“Most of our understanding of this continent came after beavers were already removed from the landscape,” said Frances Backhouse, author of a recent book on beavers, Once They Were Hats, at BeaverCon. “And that really skewed our perception of what natural ecosystems look like and how they function. It also delayed our scientific study of this animal because they simply weren’t there to study.”

Oh I am so excited about this amount of coverage for BeaverCon and so sorry that stupid Omicron moved it back to June. There definitely is an East Coast Ivy-league prejudice towards change. Maybe beavers needed to be boosted in the East to get a foothold too.

Incentivizing beaver recovery

The demise of beavers more than a century ago gradually gave way to efforts to return them to once-lost habitats.

Pennsylvania began reintroductions in 1901, and Virginia began a few decades later. The most innovative restoration was by Idaho, which in the 1940s returned beavers to remote habitats through parachute drops.

Though far below historic levels, populations have rebounded. But their restoration potential remains huge, if people can learn to live with them. To incentivize that, McGill and others are working on a proposal that would give local governments and landowners nutrient reduction credits toward Bay cleanup goals for having beaver dams on their property.

WHOOOHOOO! I believe you first read about that idea HERE on this website under the title “incent-a-beaver”. Because catchy names like Worth A Dam which this article also copies is what we do best here at beaver central.

Michelsen said that nutrient reduction credits would help local governments and others to put a price on beaver benefits.That could lead local governments to make land use decisions with beavers in mind. They might, for instance, provide additional protection for low-lying areas already susceptible to flooding in anticipation that beavers will eventually arrive and spur an effective floodplain. Land conservation programs might target those areas as well.

David Wood of the nonprofit Stormwater Network coordinates the state-federal Bay Program’s stormwater workgroup. He said crediting beaver ponds was an “interesting concept,” especially as evidence of ecosystem benefits accumulates, but that, “as with anything, I think the devil is in the details when it comes to crediting potential.”

Nonetheless, with the region far off track toward meeting its 2025 Bay cleanup goals, people are seeking new ways to get the job done — and it’s not the first time the idea of enlisting beavers has surfaced. In the early 2000s, Rebecca Hanmer, then director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Chesapeake Bay Program office, was visited by a scientist from who talked about beavers benefits.

Ohhh my goodness. Be still my heart. I’m five kinds of fluttered. The film alone has overwhelmed me. The idea of paying landowners for beaver dams is sooooooo past due. And sooo a fantasy in my little brain that seeing it in the news is like dreaming something that comes true. I feel like Dorothy waking up in Kansas with a wet cloth on her head saying “But it wasn’t a dream… it was a place…and you were there…and you and you and you…”