“THE FUTURE WILL BE BEAVERY”

heidi08 Beavers and climate change March 27, 2024

Ooh I have been waiting for this, every time I read an article about beavers being worse than wildfire or cause giardia in the arctic I would fantasize about Ben Goldfarb come swooping in with his swashbuckling adjectives to rescue beavers. Well the day has finally come. In Audubon magazine.

In the Arctic, Beavers Are Climate Winners. Should We Let Them Take Over?

Time in the Alaskan Arctic moves slowly. Layers of permafrost inter the chilled remains of mammoths and early humans; dwarf birches and lichens grow at almost imperceptible clips; glaciers creep down mountains at annual rates measured in millimeters. Abrupt disturbance is rare: There are no hurricanes or tornadoes, and few floods and wildfires. Landscapes are static. Change, when it comes, is subtle and incremental. Besides the beavers.

Climate change has given the industrious mammals a foothold in Arctic Alaska, the vast tundra ecosystem in the northern reaches of the state. As the region has warmed, new willows have sprouted and invited beavers, who both eat the inner bark and harvest stems for dam-building material. Beavers have also benefited from more open water, as their ponds are less likely to freeze solid in balmier winters. Near the city of Kotzebue in western Alaska, beaver dam construction spiked 50-fold between 2002 and 2019. “Just about everywhere you go, you’re going to run into a beaver dam,” says Cyrus Harris, an Iñupiaq hunter and natural-resource advocate in Kotzebue.

Oh at last I feel like I can breathe and stop whacking things away with a racketball racket.

Plenty of animals, including moose and red foxes, are moving into the fast-warming Arctic. But beavers aren’t just taking advantage of environmental change; they’re accelerating it. The indefatigable architects’ dams transform streams into chains of ponds and wetlands so immense they’re visible from space. In its 2021 Arctic Report Card, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration called beavers a “new disturbance” transmogrifying the tundra “stream by stream and floodplain by floodplain.”

The Arctic isn’t the only place beavers are booming. Once nearly exterminated for their pelts, 10 to 15 million beavers inhabit North America; they thrive in ecosystems as diverse as boreal forests and southwestern deserts. Conservationists and scientists hail them as ecological champions whose ponds filter out heavy metals and other pollutants, slow wildfires, store water, and furnish habitat for birds including Hooded Mergansers and Trumpeter Swans. Today states like California, Colorado, and Washington are aggressively pursuing their restoration. “There’s been this great positive feedback loop of encouragement for working with beavers,” says Emily Fairfax, a University of Minnesota beaver researcher. “They’re a super-valuable ecosystem engineer.”

Whew. The entire article is worth reading twice. Click on the headline to go savor it yourself. I’ll just try to give you some favorite parts.

This was a different beaver story than I was accustomed to telling. In 2018 I published a book on the movement to re-beaver North America, and I’ve seen beavers work wonders: They’ve turned seasonal trickles into perennial streams, revived trout populations, and captured contaminants better than many wastewater treatment plants. They’re the ultimate keystone species, stout miracle workers that can address an array of environmental ills. Ken Tape, a University of Alaska Fairbanks biologist who studies the species, likewise seems more fascinated than perturbed by their Arctic takeover. “It’s becoming a more dynamic place,” he says, “and it’s hard not to be excited about that.”

Oh gosh an actual moment where I don’t feel like stuffing Ken Tape in a pillowcase and tying shut the opening.. That is rare. Ben is a good writer.

One morning I drove with Tape and his research team north from Nome along a potholed dirt highway. Although the town lies just below the Arctic Circle, the treeless, green-gray tundra gave off strong Arctic vibes. Low clouds clung to the mountains and musk ox browsed the roadside, lending the scene a Pleistocene cast. Telephone poles unmoored by thawing permafrost tilted at funhouse angles.

Tape and a colleague set to measuring the depth of the permafrost, the underground layers of soil, sand, and gravel bound together by long-frozen water. They walked roughly 200 feet from the pond and jabbed a long metal pole into the tundra. It sank about a foot, then thunked audibly against a rock-hard lens of permafrost. They moved closer and closer to the pond, shoving the probe into the ground as they went. The nearer they got to the water’s edge, the deeper the probe went. At the pond’s marshy fringe, the 10-foot probe disappeared into the earth without hitting ice at all. To the extent the researchers could measure, the permafrost had vanished.

This wasn’t surprising: As an Arctic adage goes, water is the death of permafrost, just as it’s death to the ice cubes in your glass. And beavers, by spreading water across the landscape and pooling it underground, are permafrost killers. As permafrost thaws, it releases carbon that has been stored for centuries within frozen plants, animals, and other organic matter. That, in turn, is devoured by methane-emitting microbes. In a 2023 study, Tape and others found that beaver ponds on the Arctic tundra cough out around 50 percent more methane, a greenhouse gas roughly 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide, than other waterbodies.

Ok. There it is the bad news. Somehow it is less horrifying when Ben delivers it. Keep reading.

Before we indict a humble rodent for the despoliation of the Arctic, some perspective is in order. While beavers are releasing methane in Alaska, elsewhere they sequester carbon by storing organic material in pond-bottom sediment. And compared to ongoing and proposed development—the Willow oil-drilling project in the National Petroleum Reserve, for example—beavers hardly register as a source of atmospheric carbon or a force of landscape-scale change. If anyone was responsible for damaging Alaska, it seemed to me, it was fossil fuel companies and drill-happy politicians. “It’s almost like they’ve become a scapegoat,” says Seth Kantner, a writer in Kotzebue.

Whatever beavers mean for the carbon cycle, there’s no ambiguity about their biodiversity benefits. In the Lower 48, they furnish breeding pools for frogs, rearing ponds for trout, and fishing grounds for otters. Few animals profit more from beavers than birds. Waders like Great Blue Herons stalk fish in their ponds; cavity nesters like Wood Ducks dwell in drowned trees; and warblers of all stripes perch and feed in coppiced willows. In Poland, researchers have found that overwintering birds are more diverse and abundant not only at beaver ponds themselves, but well into the surrounding forest—making beavers an aquatic rodent with massive terrestrial impact.

The scene suggested an idea that had been gnawing at me for days: Rather than agents of Arctic destruction, beavers may be agents of Arctic adaptation. Researchers estimate that climate change already has nearly half of the world’s species on the move. The Arctic is becoming a refuge for some of these immigrants: Salmon follow receding glaciers into northern rivers; moose browse on emergent willow; migratory birds arrive on their breeding grounds earlier and depart later. Elsewhere on the continent these creatures find succor in beaver ponds; they may in the Arctic, too.

Agents of adaption. Beavers are parachutes for the wildlife that is driven northwards by climate change.

For all of beavers’ virtues, however, few animals are more polarizing. In the Lower 48, they’re blamed for flooding roads, felling fruit trees, and damming irrigation ditches, offenses for which workers for Wildlife Services, the USDA’s branch tasked with managing problematic animals, kill more than 20,000 every year. We embrace beavers one day, execute them the next.

This paragraph made me especially happy

While most people considered it a given that beavers had recently arrived, I couldn’t help but wond0er whether they were truly colonizing the Arctic or recolonizing it after being wiped out by fur trappers decades earlier. It wouldn’t be the first time humans had purged beavers from a landscape and then claimed they’d never been there: The rodents were considered nonnative to much of California until the 2010s, when researchers assembled archaeological and linguistic evidence proving they’d lived in the state before being nearly extirpated in the 1800s. Arctic paleontologists have likewise found scattered beaver bones and teeth dating back 8,000 years, and place names like Beaver Creek, near Nome, hint at their possible presence. On the other hand, the paucity of beaver stories among Indigenous communities argues for their absence. “One of the questions we haven’t really been able to answer is where beavers were before the fur trade,” Tape says.

Oh my goodness. Ben is asking all the right questions.

They’re also conspicuous harbingers of a far more powerful force: climate change. The Arctic has warmed nearly four times faster than the global average since 1979, and for subsistence hunters like Harris, who describes the natural world as his “supermarket,” hotter temperatures have spelled chaos. Sea ice freezes later in fall and thaws earlier in spring, impairing the pursuit of marine mammals; storms batter the coast; novel species replace familiar ones. “We’re seeing lots of changes,” Harris says. “Everything is all together, all at once.” Arctic beavers confer their own distinct impacts, yes, but it occurred to me that they may be resented, in part, because they’re symbols—flesh-and-fur portents of a warming world.

During my week in the Arctic, signs of beaver ingenuity were everywhere. Although all beavers are skilled diggers, the submerged networks of tunnels and cavities they’d excavated with their paws here were much deeper than those I’d seen in more temperate climes—likely to prevent ponds from freezing solid during the unforgiving winter. The lodges, too, were gargantuan, up to 10 feet tall and 30 feet wide—swollen with insulating mud. The beavers themselves were unusually active, often emerging to slap their tails in irritation or grab a willow snack. Elsewhere beavers favor a nocturnal lifestyle; here they’d adjusted to a land without night.

Honestly the entire article is perfect]y written. And the photos will blow your mind. I can hardly do it justice.

What’s next for the Arctic’s beavers? Today Alaska’s North Slope, the coastal plain that plunges away from the Brooks Range and toward the Beaufort Sea, remains free of beavers. To reach the slope, the rodents would have to waddle over a mountain pass patrolled by wolves or disperse west along the coast from the Kongakut River—daunting but not impossible tasks. “It kind of looks like it’s a matter of time,” says Tape. Like humans, beavers will soon have few lands left to conquer.

Like us, too, they will continue to transform the places they already live. Flying back to Nome, we soared over myriad sun-flecked lakes and streams, a rolling expanse ribboned with open water and fringed with halos of new willow. Although we passed a few lakeshore lodges, I was struck not by how many beaver ponds we saw, but by how few—and how much prime habitat beckoned to future waves of colonists. The future, it seemed, would be beavery.

I hope everyone’s future is beavery too. Sorry. I just do.

AB 2196: CALIFORNIA’S BEAVER BILL

California’s Beaver Bill!

I have one job here at beaver central and I was feeling pretty horrified at myself for not doing it all these days until I realized that this has been publicized in exactly 2 capitol beat news collection five days ago. In other words I’m not doing too badly.

Did you catch that? So assembly man Connoly introduced a bill at the end of February to codify the focus of the CDFW beaver restoration team and to make it permanent regardless of who is governor at the moment. Protecting the new beaver policy in California for good. This is from the bills fact sheet:

ISSUE

Because the state’s Beaver Restoration Program was created through a budget proposal, the objectives of the CDFW program are not codified to ensure this important work remains a priority in the future, particularly beyond the current Administration, which has prioritized such projects and wildlife goals.

Not sure how he drew the short straw and got this job for the state, I assume because nearby Marin and their push for beavers, (My 95 year old uncle who calls me every time beavers are on the news lives in San Rafael but I don’t think he has anything to do with it?)

I’m sure you are not surprised that this is my favorite part:

Part of this important program, which was created through an Administration funding proposal in the FY2022-23 budget, includes CDFW issuing new policies to reduce lethal depredation of beavers and promote coexistence.

If this were around in 2008 Martinez would have been pretty dam lucky. But think of all the other cities that can benefit from our pilot program!

The bill ends with a list of co-signers including California Trout and Climate Reality and Project Coyote, Hmm it sorta seems like one important name is missing… You might think that such legislation would want the support of the one non profit that actually HAS coexisted with beavers for a decade and has been internationally famous for it.

Maybe cuz we have a swear?

FACT SHEET AB 2196 - Beaver Restoration

BEAVERS AND THE ARMS RACE

heidi08 Beavers and climate change March 25, 2024

I told you there was a glut of good beaver news lately. This was published last week by David Sassoon at Inside Climate News. I know you’ll appreciate it.

A Walk in the Woods With My Brain on Fire: The End of Winter

To settled humans, beavers seem single-mindedly destructive and worthy of eradication. It’s fairer and more accurate to regard them as benevolent builders of public housing, displaced from their ancestral homes. They don’t pollute and destroy ecosystems like humans do, they enlarge and diversify them. They turn small streams into water parks where insects and reptiles, migrating birds and other creatures of the forest come to drink and feed. As their ponds fill up with silt, beavers move upstream to build new dams, and so in time create fertile meadows and aggrade entire valleys, enrich soils and hydrate the surrounding earth and the aquifers below.

That’s a pretty nice overview of what beavers do. You are starting to make me want to read this closer.

Beavers learned their work of generous landscape design over more than 30 million years, the evolutionary record says. They are well-schooled old hands. All tooth and tail wrapped in soft fur and glandular scent, they are fat, slow and easy prey. Only they’re also intelligent. They build their lodges with entrances underwater. No castle ever had a better moat.

Looping around their pond, I came upon their lodge. Actually, there were two in close proximity. They were almost five feet tall, conical, sturdy domes of packed mud and cut sticks, impervious to assault. They carried evidence of a self-awareness that took my breath away.

I could hear the beavers at home. From inside came the rapid, repetitive sound of practiced gnawing on wood. It was approaching dusk, so perhaps they were having breakfast before the start of the night shift they all work. Soon enough one of them took to the water, the thin ice at the entrance suddenly undulating. The beaver surfaced about fifteen yards out, snout and fur-body in an easy glide atop the open water, tail submerged. Eventually the beaver swam over to a dam’s embankment and waddled out of the water.

Uh oh. Be very careful. Watching beavers is a dangerous pastime. You might get hooked. Trust me I know.

It was enormous! It looked to weigh seventy-five pounds—like a big dog or a small bear. No, it was a beaver. Likely one of the aging monogamous pair that anchor this colony. He or she—who can tell?—began gnawing the bark off a stick, paying me no mind, emanating serenity and belonging. I watched and listened for a long time, mouth agape. A beaver.

Sauntering toward the other lodge, I snapped a stick underfoot and heard a big splash. Damnation! I had spooked another beaver on the bank not ten feet away. He surfaced his snout at mid-pond out of a hole in the ice and regarded me with suspicion. He disappeared and surfaced, disappeared again and surfaced, and still finding me there despite the peek-a-boos, he plunged once more, gaining maximum leverage to smack his tail flat on the water, loud as a rifle shot. The sound reverberating across the valley gave warning: predator at large.

Nice, he went on to write about the fur trade and the thirst for furs that decimated them but he added this that I had never read before. Beavers were part of the original arms race.

The Haudenosaunee—the Iroquois nations—were the first to heavily arm themselves with guns, powder and shot obtained from the Dutch settlers of New Netherland. For a single weapon they were willing to offer as many as twenty beaver pelts, which when sold for cash in Europe returned the colonists a tenfold profit. The handsome gain let them overlook the danger of selling weapons to potential enemies; the Iroquois delivered as many pelts as they could. Armed with superior weaponry they soon gained supremacy over rival native nations.

The furs-for-firearms trade was a financial win-win. Beavers were the losers, but the bloody underside of the transaction came to stain all involved. The military success of the Iroquois ignited an arms race among native peoples that spread across the continent for the next two hundred years. Their cultures would be irrevocably transformed, as the frontier character of the American experiment simultaneously took shape around the gun.

Wow. That’s a pretty powerful persuasion. Dimly better than alcohol which trappers in the west did routinely. I don’t know, is it better to be drunk or murderous? You gotta pick one because all those beavers aren’t going to skin themselves.

The North American beaver was an early victim of an extractive process that would come to reach every corner of the globe. It twinned ruthless environmental destruction with warring in the name of free trade and prosperity—a process that continues today. Castor canadensis has bounced back from near extinction. They say 6 to 12 million individuals are now leading monogamous, home-building lives again. A handful of them are here.

I have often had a similar thought. If we knew then how devastating it would be for water and wildlife and wildfires and aquifers to wipe out the entire beaver population would we have stopped ourselves?

And I eventually answer myself “no of course not” It’s just like the race for fossil fuels. No matter who it hurts or how much it hurts when we chase the dragon.

Beavers were no exception. They just lucked out when silk hats got more popular.

THE BADGER STATE HONORS BEAVERS

heidi08 Beavers March 24, 2024

After a long slow dry spell spring has produced a glut of good beaver news so bountiful that I’ve been saving this to share on Sunday morning, when everyone has more time for coffee and a good read curled up on the couch.

This is from a place called Verona Wisconsin, just outside of Madison. And the best part is that No one I know knows her and she doesn’t work for any nonprofit I can find associated with water or beavers or conservation. She’s a total civilian writing an amazing letter to the editor.

Celebrate International Beaver Day, Sunday, April 7.

Give a shout out to these ecosystem engineers who do so much to help mitigate the effects of climate change.

This day began in 2008 to raise awareness and appreciation for beavers and the habitats they create, and to encourage protections for these keystone species. By modifying their environment, they create biologically rich wetland habitats for the 75% of Wisconsin’s wildlife species that spend time there during all, or part, of their life cycle, as well as increasing plant biodiversity by 33% in these areas.

I’m serious. No beaver defender in the state knows who she is. She is a total free square on our beaver bingo card.

Beaver created wetland habitats provide valuable, and free, ecosystem services for humans by:

• Holding water on the landscape for slow, gradual release, decreasing damage from floods, reducing bank erosion, mitigating effects of drought and replenishing aquifers.

• Preventing the spread of wildfires through natural fuel breaks and providing a safe haven for wildlife.

• Cleaning and purifying stream water, removing silt and contaminants, including road salt and nitrates.

• Providing recreational activities, from fishing to birdwatching.

• Absorbing and capturing greenhouse gasses.

I just love that this message is finally getting out there. So clearly that people are picking it up and writing the editor of their own accord. Don’t you?

The sensation of moving water triggers beavers to build dams, which can lead to some conflicts with humans. Beavers can cause damage to valuable trees, human infrastructure or cropland, but there are cost-effective, non-lethal measures that can easily be used to mitigate these problems. Beaver exclusion devices, such as wire tree wrap, flow devices to protect culverts, and pond levelers, can be used to effectively manage beaver activity. Thoughtful beaver conflict management allows us to co-exist and benefit from their valuable contributions to our ecosystem.

So remember April 7 as a day to give a dam for beaver!

Dianne Yeske

Who else wants to buy Dianne a beer or a tall glass of Chardonnay? I looked for hours on the internet and couldn’t find her. Your help will be appreciated if you know who she might be.

I think that woman deserves a t-shirt don’t you?

SLO DANCING WITH BEAVERS TODAY

heidi08 Beavers March 23, 2024

Our bold and brave beaver friends in San Luis Obispo are marching into their second beaver festival on a mostly cloudy day with 84% humidity. With any luck the rain will hold off until the afternoon. And who deserves luck more than beavers?

Calling all ‘weird rodent’ fans: Beaver Festival is returning to SLO this weekend

Calling all beaver fans — the San Luis Obispo County Beaver Brigade will host its second annual Beaver Festival at Mission Plaza on Saturday. The free festival includes live music, expert speakers and even a beaver trivia contest, according to the Beaver Brigade website.

The goal of the festival is to celebrate beavers and highlight their importance to the environment. Beaver dams offer numerous ecosystem services, such as slowing down water so it can sink into nearby aquifers while supporting the growth of wetlands. “These dams turn single thread streams into lush wetlands full of life, offering solutions to our most pressing problems including climate change, wildfires and droughts, and our oceans and bays inundated with pollutants, excess nutrients, trash and excess sediment,” a news release said.

I had pangs of sympathy for Audrey yesterday as they were making last minute preparations for the big do. When I saw the weather report they got pangier. Although we;ve been at John Muir Earth day when it showered and squalled. It was kind of fun and we got a beautiful rainbow for our troubles.

Beaver dams offer numerous ecosystem services, such as slowing down water so it can sink into nearby aquifers while supporting the growth of wetlands.

“These dams turn single thread streams into lush wetlands full of life, offering solutions to our most pressing problems including climate change, wildfires and droughts, and our oceans and bays inundated with pollutants, excess nutrients, trash and excess sediment,” a news release said.

Wow what a cooperative press they have. I could never hope to slip that paragraph into a beaver article unless maybe I got a famous person to read it naked. Good job!

What to expect from the Beaver Festival The Beaver Festival will take place from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Mission Plaza on Saturday. Local singer-songwriter Elliott Johnson will kick off the event at 10 a.m. with an acoustic

At noon, author Leila Philip will give a speech about her book: “Beaver Land, How One Weird Rodent Made America.” The book offers “a startling portrait of the secretive world of the contemporary fur trade, and an engrossing ecological and historical investigation of these heroic animals who, once trapped to the point of extinction, have returned to the landscape as one of the greatest conservation stories of the twentieth century,” the website said. T

hen, attendees can enjoy a trivia contest at 12:30 p.m., according to the event schedule. From 1 p.m. to 2:30, the Brigade will host a speaker series on “efforts to protect the environment and combat climate change.”

Speakers include Beaver Brigade river restorationist Cooper Lienhart, Los Padres California Conservation Corps native plant propagation specialist Ben van Hamersveld and San Luis Obispo city biologist Freddy Otte. Meanwhile, local high desert dance music band Cuyama Mama and the Hot Flashes will perform from 1 to 3 p.m.

The first Beaver Festival, held last April, had more than 1,000 attendees, according to the website. The event was sponsored by the city of San Luis Obispo’s Cultural Arts and Community Promotions, New Times, KCBX, Santa Barbara Permaculture Network, the Santa Barbara Beaver Brigade, Morro Bay Open Space Alliance, the Beaver Institute and Tetra Tech, according to the release.

Alright. You’ve got the got the plan. You’ve got the press. And you’ve got the speakers. Off you go now and celebrate beavers! We here at Worth A Dam are sending you our beaver best!