Because the beaver isn't just an animal; it's an ecosystem!


Gosh would you look at that. Another serious problem caused by climate change that beavers can fix. What do you know?

The Silent Crisis: Why Biodiversity Loss May Be Our Biggest Climate Threat

Biodiversity is like the intricate threads of a woven tapestry, holding ecosystems together in a delicate balance. Each species, no matter how small, plays a critical role in maintaining this stability.

When a species is lost, it’s as if a thread is pulled from the tapestry, leading to possible unraveling. This disruption can break food chains, leaving predators without prey and plants without pollinators.

Such disturbances reduce an ecosystem’s resilience, making it more susceptible to climate-related events like floods, droughts, and extreme temperatures. Just as a single dropped stitch can ruin a sweater, the loss of a single species can ripple through an ecosystem, leading to unforeseen consequences.


I saw this headline and immediately thought it sounded like something I said. In fact I’m giving a talk next week and its one of my slides. This is from Vermont by Bev Soychak

Letter to the editor: It’s time to see beavers as a solution, not a problem

As one of two founders of the Vermont Beaver Association, I am proud to say we were created by Addison County residents, and we’ve had a fantastic year. In collaboration with organizations and educators across Vermont, we’ve had projects all over the state. Whether it’s working to educate communities, road crews or town selectboards on how to resolve beaver conflicts or educating the ecological and environmental benefits of having and keeping beavers in landscapes, our organization has it all covered. We are supported by experts in the fields of ecology, biology, conservation and hydrological water flow and beaver conflict resolutions. We have so many like-minded associates that it’s been overwhelming, and Vermont Beaver support is growing every day.

It’s not just advocates who face challenges; highly educated professionals in the beaver field are feeling the pressure as well as state officials and legislators. One thing is clear — beavers are either hated or loved.

Like coconut? (Another thing people tend to have strong feelings about). I don’t know. I guess it depends on where you are. I think in Martinez at the beginning beavers just weren’t on anyone’s radar. They were totally unexpected at first. And then terribly feared and misunderstood.

And then hated once public opinion seemed to protect them.

Beavers have long been misunderstood. Survival behaviors that cause conflicts consist mostly of dams and blocked culverts. These can be dealt with by using long-term, high-quality Beaver Deceivers and culvert fencing. Using science like this allows this keystone species to create and manage amazing wetlands that provide protections and habitats for so much flora and fauna. I’ve had the amazing opportunity several times to watch a wasted wetland come to life and turn into an absolutely stunning recreational opportunity, especially for those who want to enjoy wildlife. This is a direct benefit and result of allowing beavers to thrive. Learning to harness beavers’ superpowers is to our advantage on many levels.

 Good point. Taking the win when its offered to you seems to be something people have a hard time doing when it comes from beavers.

This past few weeks we’ve gotten a boost in support from Vermont legislators taking notice and asking questions and hearing testimony from professional organizations across Vermont. It’s time our state beaver program is brought current, to not only reflect special interest organizations, but environmental ones as well. Testimony was given clearly about the financial savings to keeping beavers in the landscapes vs. removing them for personal use. Watching so many environmental organizations and groups sprouting up all over our state gives me hope. Knowing they see the same benefits I do will help us to keep educating about benefits, especially in flooding mitigation, climate control and water quality.

At some point, these qualities and benefits are going to have to take precedence, and beavers will be left alone to serve a much-needed environmental purpose. Only then will their superpowers be able to help save the planet and help humans despite us almost eliminating them. This isn’t just a Vermont issue. Beaver benefits are being realized across our nation and the world. Beavers are not only on local legislators’ minds but government ones as well, and our organization is part of that national working group.

I go round and round about the superpower issue. Having a superpower technically means you can do something no one else can. And beaver powers are absolutely possessed by every  beaver. So not uncommon at all.

The only thing I see as a superpower is the rare ability to understand and appreciate them!

We are getting a second chance to do the right thing, to appreciate beavers and their benefits. Just remember last time we used them as a resource for man’s profit, we almost eliminated them. If beavers are gone, so are their benefits and the hope we have in them helping to save our planet.

Beavers’ environmental superpowers can’t be mstched by any other creature on the planet besides man, and they’re much less expensive. Vermont Beaver Association is 100% dedicated to non-lethal resolutions. If you’ve reached out to us, then you’ve made that choice on your own and we appreciate you choosing that path. We protect identities and locations as well, so you can feel secure when you participate with us. A pathway to non-lethal coexistence is a good thing. We will know where to send you, based on your issues and needed solutions.

That’s a pretty productive and amazing second chance and I think Beavers deserve better considerations and protections.

Bev Soychak

Monkton


March as usual brings its grim tidings. Although depredation permits are down overall and there are some new guidelines issued for solving the problem differently next time, Placer County is still number one which means we haven’t improved much at all.

There were 108 permits issued in 2024 allowing anywhere from 2-80 beavers to be killed. 20 of those were issued for Placer county which was more than anywhere else in the state.

The number of take  allowed was generally lower and no “unlimited” permits were issued this time. A total of 1412 beavers were authorized to extinquish beavers which is about half the amount we’ve seen in recent years.

This could mean fewer beavers were killed or possibly that permit numberss are less inflated than they used to be. We just don’t know. We also don’t know how many of these were successfully killed because no one ever has to report completion.

 


It’s a little dazzling to see the rush of good beaver news flooding the airwaves lately. I’m tempted to think it’s because everything’s coming up roses for them from now on but in my heart of hearts I suspects it’s more likely that folks are so sick of bad political news they welcome the chance to indulge in some beaver bright spots.

Take this Canadian Geographic article that dropped the same day as the tariffs. No need to glum over the price of steel when you can cheer yourself with natures engineers.

The dam, the myth, the legend: 50 years of the beaver 

It started, ironically, with an American. In January 1975, New York State senator Bernard Smith, a noted environmental champion, introduced a bill to officially recognize a new state animal: the beaver.

Prompted by a local newspaper columnist asking if Canada had a more deserving claim, Sean O’Sullivan, a 23-year-old Conservative member of Parliament from Hamilton sprang into action. O’Sullivan, the youngest-ever MP when first elected in 1972, drafted a one-sentence private member’s bill — “An Act to provide for the recognition of the Beaver (Castor canadensis) as a symbol of the sovereignty of the Dominion of Canada” — that had its first reading in Parliament that same month.

On the bill’s second reading, O’Sullivan spoke about why Canada needed to adopt the beaver as a national symbol. “There must be more to life than just financial facts and figures,” he told the House of Commons. “There must be things to touch one’s soul and heart and emotions, if we are to be complete persons and a whole nation. That is the importance of symbols.” His fellow MPs and colleagues in the Senate agreed. On March 24, 1975, the National Symbol of Canada Act received royal assent.

The article is framed by uniquely Canadian recent history but it gets into richer territory very quickly.

Part of the story stretches back even further. The beaver — amik to the Anishinaabe, amisk to the Cree — and beaver imagery, that of the ubiquitous, wise and resourceful landscape engineer have been part of Indigenous traditions and teachings on this continent for millennia. The beaver is the “one that brings the water,” as described by Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson in A Short History of the Blockade: Giant Beavers, Diplomacy, and Regeneration in Nishnaabewin. Indigenous Peoples in North America also invented the canoes that were adapted and exploited to become the main vehicles of the fur trade. And these two Canadian symbols, the beaver and the canoe, have been intimately linked since. 

“They’ll cut down the birch trees in your front yard, flood farmland, put water over the top of roads,” says Ojibway wildlife biologist and artist Rick Beaver, of the Alderville First Nation in Ontario. “Here on the west end of our reserve, there’s a nice, beautiful culvert that funnels Stoney Creek down into the marshland into Rice Lake. And every spring, the beavers have got that just plastered full of mud and logs. They keep the township and counties busy making sure that the water still flows.”

As a keystone species that protects groundwater and creates unique wetland and riparian forest habitat for everything from moose and deer to amphibians, insects and other furbearers, beavers “need to be here,” he says. “But that’s a hard thing to explain to a property owner who has lost road access or a farmer who has lost part of his acre-age to floods.”

Straight to the heart of the matter. They make things better and worse so what are you going to do about it?

In the decades that followed, Canada boomed. And so did our continued embrace of the beaver, in commerce, performance, even athletic competition (see sidebar). However, learning, or in some ways re-learning, how to live with the beaver has been a slower process. Yet it’s one area where some say greater urgency is needed — and with it, a new way of looking at the beaver and what it might symbolize — as impacts of climate change, particularly drought, more intense rainfall and warming of the Far North, grow more severe.

Consider drought and Simpson’s description of the beaver as “the one that brings the water.” Glynnis Hood came to see what this meant while doing PhD research in Alberta in 2002. “We had the worst drought on record. I happened to be doing field data collection, and I was like, ‘these ponds are disappearing.’ Then I started to notice that the ponds with beaver still had water in them.” Further study across the province revealed that ponds with beavers had nine times more open water than those without.

It was a fun coincidence to come across that speech they day that I had just posted it and worked to share it around. Amik is the one that brings the water. Yup.

At the other extreme, these same beaver-engineered landscapes also show a capacity to reduce severe flash floods caused by intense rainfall. In 2013, when Calgary suffered its worst flooding in over a century, Cherie Westbrook, an ecohydrology professor at the University of Saskatchewan who had been doing field work in the Kananaskis region, discovered it could have been even worse were it not for the beaver dams upriver from the city. Despite the deluge, roughly seven of every 10 of those dams upriver remained intact and were still holding back water after the storm. Today, Hood and Westbrook are doing joint research to learn more about this capacity. Hood says conventional wisdom still argues for beaver dam removal in the belief that they will all give way in storms, making flooding worse. “We’re trying to put a scientific evaluation on that, rather than just a rhetorical one,” she says.

Yes, We can reduce flooding and bring water where you need it. It’s a pretty rare combination.

For his part, Rick Beaver sees a solution to the broader question of coexistence with the beaver in Canada’s growing willingness to seek Indigenous cooperation and heed Indigenous traditional knowledge in dealings with the environment. “It’s a question of acknowledgment that we are part of the landscape, as are beavers.” 

“There is an Ojibwe word for the relationship of all things,” Beaver continues. “It’s Gidinawendimin. It means we are all related, that there’s this holistic identity that we are a part of. And as we consider solutions to current environmental issues, one of our objectives is to get back to that, to make people aware of their belongingness to all things. In that sense, I think it’s appropriate to think of the beaver as a national symbol which harkens back to our traditional teachings about who we are, and what we belong to and what belongs to us.”

Oh Canada. I really enjoyed this article which seemed to get to the troubles past of beavers and push right through to their more positive future. I would go read the whole thing because there are lots of great photos and clever detours to savor.


This is from the Manitoba museum “Introducing Amik” display.

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