How did you enjoy your two-day beaver lull? I got to catch you up on all the minutia while there was nothing much to talk about. Well I hope you appreciated the break in beaver news. Because it’s over, Gone with the wind. Whooosh!

Wood chips fly at Elwha River as beavers make a comeback

The intertwined lives of beaver and salmon emerging here is one more sign that the ecosystem-scale restoration of the Elwha, with the world’s largest-ever dam removal project, begun in 2011 and completed in 2014, is taking hold.

While salmon have always been the marquee species of this recovery, as the river from the mountains to the sea returns to a more natural state, all sorts of other animals also are benefiting, including beavers.

Not just creatures of fresh water, beavers also have an important place in the newly emerging habitat at the mouth of the Elwha and its tidally influenced floodplain, and juicy marshes and swamps, bristling with native cattails and sedge.

Don’t you just love a good story about a place that is happy to see beavers back? There just aren’t enough of them though, because we’ve read about the Elwha before.

Thought to be only freshwater animals, Greg Hood discovered beavers were using the tidal shrub zone. These wetlands were among the first to be diked, drained and filled nearly out of existence in Puget Sound country as the region developed. But a place that is just terrific habitat for tidal beavers. Not a new species, but rather beavers making their living in a place where people did not expect them.

In the Skagit, just as in the Elwha, the beavers were making dams that created pools that nurtured salmon — and kept predators at bay. Herons that prey on baby salmon can’t navigate a landing in the pools. And the pools create a nurturing, food-rich environment for the fish.

He learned densities of young salmon were five times greater in the pools than areas of the estuary without them. What emerged from his work was a new understanding of a relationship between rivers, salmon and beavers that had been entirely forgotten, in a kind of “ecological amnesia” — his beautiful phrase.

Well. now we wouldn’t exactly say Greg discovered tidal beavers, because they were living right here in Martinez all along, but it’s really good to bring the kind of data that will make people believe it happens. And salmon is the magic want when it comes to accepting beavers, I can tell you!

I’m especially glad when newspapers are forced to spend their time making an amazing beaver graphic. Aren’t you?

There’s more on relocating beaver for the tulalip tribes again, but we’ll catch up on that tomorrow. I thought I’d just end by sharing this amazing artwork I found from someone calling themselves mammalmadness.