Milton Massachusetts is an affluent suburb south of Boston. It’s a fair bet that its residents are more educated than most and their city leaders tend to respect that. The area hit the climate sweet spot with terrible winters, hot humid summers and the most wind of literally anywhere in the country.
So if folks are going to walk around a beaver pond every day in that city you know they’re committed.
Leave it to the beavers
Although it sounded dire for a while when an emergency order about them appeared on the Board of Health’s agenda, it turned out to be a good day in the end for the Turner’s Pond beavers.
A pair of elusive beavers who have built a lodge around a bend at Turner’s Pond have apparently won over the hearts of many of Milton residents who make a circle around the pond part of their daily walk.
When the Board of Health’s March 19 agenda listed that the emergency order which could have led to the pair’s removal was posted, many on social media sprang to their defense, while most said they had never seen them, only the occasional gnawed tree.
Springing to beaver defense on social media! I like the way that sounds. Remember that in Massachusetts the board of health has the final say on whether beavers can be killed. And lethal trapping is only allowed when special circumstances have met.
Of course the list of exceptions is as long as your tallest brothers arm and people routinely live trap beavers and then shoot or gas because relocation is illegal. But hey, they tried to be humane., Turns out its really hard.,
A handful of residents showed up for the hearing with copies of the state regulations and ready to testify that the beavers were not causing any public health emergency and should be left alone, at least for now.
But just prior to the meeting, Health Director Caroline Kinsella said she and other town officials had visited the site and separately determined that since there was no dam causing flooding, sewage backup or other issue, the rodents were not a problem.
The item, which is a new one for the board, would have been withdrawn for the meeting if there had been time to do so, Kinsella said.
Oh we didn’t mean anything by it. We were just kidding. No need for alarm. Put the cameras down and back away slowly. Can’t you tell when a man is joking?
Neighbors Nick and Buffy Gray said they have definitely seen two beavers several times in their walks around the pond every day, particularly at dawn or dusk.
Nick Gray said that while there was flooding in the area recently from heavy rains it was generalized and had nothing to do with the beaver lodge.
“I just want the beavers left alone, Nick Gray said.
Buffy Gray agreed. “It’s fascinating. It’s a wonderful thing to watch.”
I like these people. Something tells me we would get along really well.
Brendan McLaughlin of Milton, who is on the board of the Neponset River Watershed Association, said the growing number of beavers in Eastern Massachusetts is a sign that the waters here are getting healthier.
Um. Good try Brendan and we’re always glad when river folk like beavers. but no. Beavers aren’t drawn
to healthier water. They MAKE it healthier.. They can move into skanky toxic water. Like Chernobyl and Mt St Helens where they were some of the first species back,. And their dams start to clean the water for everyone ELSE. They are do gooders.
But your hearts in the right place. I’ll give you that. Keep an eye on these beavers.
Oh and happy Easter!
I didn’t know there was a Christian Canadian Newspaper. I guess why not. But this article caught my attention. Perfect for Easter weekend. Only true believers need apply.
Salmon vs beaver?
Restoring beavers and coho to a mutually beneficial relationship.
On one of my first days out looking for adult coho salmon on the Upper Bulkley River near Houston, B.C., I was taught how to notch a beaver dam. We carefully pulled sticks out of the dam to create a one-metre-wide opening so that salmon could migrate upstream, leaving the beaver habitat relatively unaffected. Some people view this as unnecessary. After all, haven’t beavers and salmon lived together for generations? Unfortunately, human development and action have put beavers and salmon in conflict in the Upper Bulkley.
The river itself has changed. In some sections of the Upper Bulkley River we get a taste of what the river may have looked like historically. There are complex “braided” sections – islands dividing multiple channels, and side channels inundated during high flows. But most of the river and the creeks feeding into it flow in a single channel. On Google Maps satellite imagery, it’s easy to see the straightening of the river where it has been constricted to the edge of its floodplain by the railway. The railway has been elevated on large levees. And so instead of meandering through its floodplain during freshet (snow melt), the river shoots through these straightened sections. Even when it reaches a less constricted area, it has so much momentum that it can’t switch to slow meandering. With only one channel, there’s only one place for both beavers and fish.
Hmm. I guess one of them has to change their ways and everybody likes salmon. Hardly anyone likes beavers.
Adult Pacific Salmon migrate from the ocean to the freshwater stream where they were born in order to spawn, laying their eggs. Coho salmon spawners reach the Upper Bulkley in September when the river level is still low and the beavers have already been busy building dams. A coho is a patient fish, typically waiting for pulses of fall rain to swell the system and aid their migration as the river rises up and around beaver dams. But the numbers of coho currently coming back to this river are in the hundreds, where historically it would’ve been thousands, and we want to give them the best chance to reach their spawning grounds in time. There can be up to 20 beaver dams restricting the coho’s migration on this river. With that many dams, we have found dead coho who tried and failed to get overtop. And so, with minimal disturbance to the beavers, we notch beaver dams.
I’m pretty sure all them coho are dead upriver. Right? I guess you mean they tragically died before they could mate. I guess that’s a problem. And problems can only be solved by ripping beaver dams. AmIrite?
Other areas of Canada are desperate for beavers and are re-introducing them to increase water storage. This might seem like mixed messaging, but the message is actually quite similar: poor ecosystem stewardship. Problems arise in beaver-deficient ecosystems as well as in beaver-abundant ecosystems impacted by human development. So in the Upper Bulkley River, we’ll keep notching – until a method of communication opens with the beavers on incorporating fish passage into their dam construction blueprints, or until we’re able to achieve some habitat restoration to reconnect the river with its historic floodplain and restore beavers and coho to their mutually beneficial relationship.
Okay…I guess beavers are good for drought and saving water and that sort of stuff. And I guess that people and cows and salmon and birds all need water. Okay. And burning up in wildfires is bad for everything.
But some of the salmon died before they could mate. That means we need to rip holes in beaver dams.
Here;s the problem as I see it. Those little holes you so carefully rip let the powerful water through and because of that don’t stay little for very long. The force of the water drains the pond which is okay for the beavers but is just rotten for all those little baby salmon. So next year instead of three hundred coming back you get two hundred. Then fifty. Then ten.
And every time you assume it’s because of those dams and make more notches or then blow them up entirely. and pretty soon you have zero beaver dams and zero salmon.
Funny how that works.
The Good News about beavers has made it way across most of the united states. But the very last place I expected to hear it was probably South Dakota. I don’t know why I ever doubted that day would come.
How humans & beavers build hydro-infrastructure
We shine a spotlight on nature’s best architect. Meet the humble beaver and the humans working to better manage South Dakota’s beaver population and land.
Ben and Emily do an awesome job. The entire show is worth your time but for my money the real star is the cattle rancher who used to trap beavers and now thinks their one of God’s greatest gifts.
No I’m not kidding. If you only have time for 6 magical minutes listen to him. The world really is changing.
One stick at a time.
They say a picture is worth 10,000 words, and that may be true. I would argue that aerial drone footage is worth a whole lot more than that. Emily’s shot of a beaver meadow in a burn scar outside Tahoe is more convincing than the mountain of positive words that follow it.
Yes, beavers can help stop wildfires. And more places in California are embracing them
A vast burn scar unfolds in drone footage of a landscape seared by massive wildfires north of Lake Tahoe. But amid the expanses of torched trees and gray soil, an unburnt island of lush green emerges.
But it wasn’t a team of firefighters or conservationists who performed this work. It was a crew of semiaquatic rodents whose wetland-building skills have seen them gain popularity as a natural way to mitigate wildfires.
A movement is afoot to restore beavers to the state’s waterways, many of which have suffered from their absence.
“Beavers belong in California, and they should be part of our fire management plan,” said Emily Fairfax, assistant professor of geography at the University of Minnesota, who shot the drone footage of a series of beaver ponds along Little Last Chance Creek that remained green in the wake of the 2021 Beckwourth Complex fire.
This is a great article. A tour de force for the LA Times which has struggled to find out why beavers matter in the past. It even talks about the tools of coexistence and how CDFW has made funding available for landowners that can help with that.
It’s only missing two things as far as I can tell. First some kind of contact with some landowner that actually used those coexistence tools successfully for a decade and knows how they work.
But, honestly. where could they ever find someone like that?
And a discussion of the fact that AFTER fires beaver dams are going to slow down and filter the toxic runoff that ash and retardant flood thru the streams. Because after the fire can be more hazardous to more people in the long run.
I’ll give you one more money quote and then you can go read the rest of the article yourself. It’s weirdly not paywalled at the moment.
Karen Pope’s latest research, conducted in the Sierra and Plumas national forests, focuses on how people can rewet meadows in both burned and unburned areas by doing things like building beaver dam analogues. Preliminary results, which have not yet been published, are positive — after these structures were installed, some depleted meadows began storing groundwater pretty much immediately, she said.
The goals of these interventions are twofold: restore the wetlands, and entice beavers to move in and maintain them, Pope said.
“The ultimate endpoint is to have the beavers come back in and say, ‘We like what you did,’” she said.
Yup. That’s right. If you had 1000 acres of grazing land in the sierras wouldn’t you want there to be a patche of that green oasis in the middle of them?
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