Great article today from Arizona and the San Pedro River. I just love articles where people are trying to find beavers in their area because of all those great ecosystem services they provide. Obviously Ben’s book sales have gone up in the area.
Where are all the beavers on Arizona’s San Pedro River? Volunteers go looking for them
SAN PEDRO RIVER — On a cloudy December Saturday, a group of wildlife enthusiasts met on a dirt pull-off in southern Arizona to embark on a mission. Wide-eyed and unified, the cadre of researchers, advocates, professors and students had volunteered to spend the day collecting data for conservation.
At the helm was Lisa Shipek, the executive director and founder of Watershed Management Group, a Tucson-based non-profit that organizes ecology-based community events. She had convened the group near the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area with a single goal: finding Castor canadensis, the North American beaver, or at the very least spotting signs they’re in the area.
Beavers once thrived in this part of southeastern Arizona. Centuries of trapping led to a local extinction by the late 19th century. In their absence, the ecosystem services they provided vanished, too. Their penchant for building dams slowed stream flows, enhanced riparian habitat and even restored aquifers when flood plains overflowed.
This is what is needed to prevent shifting baseline syndrome! When old Rudy at the gas station stays carelessly “beavers? There ent never been beavers in the Pedro!” And everyone comes to believe it instead of realizing that there was an atrocity committed in their presence.
“They were a keystone species in our creeks and rivers,” Shipek told The Republic. “And then they were wiped out by trappers. And that really caused an unraveling of a lot of these creek and river systems and almost to the extent where the creeks and rivers and wetlands were unrecognizable from what they would have been with beavers.
“So we, in a lot of ways, don’t actually know what our creeks, rivers and wetlands should look like,” she said, “because we’ve only really seen them without beavers.”
I believe that is a direct paraphrase of Mr. Goldfarb’s book. Nice.
With the return of beavers, groups like WMG are hoping some of those essential services would be restored. That could offer a glimpse into a world that beavers once helped create.
Yet modern challenges have in recent years stunted the recovery conservationists initially hoped for. To understand why, Shipek and her team of volunteers are counting beavers one survey at a time to find out where they’re going and maybe even what’s causing their disappearance. Collectively, the volunteers are a part of a growing assemblage of citizen scientists who are reshaping the way people collect data and learn about the natural world.
