Everyone has seen and celebrated Emily Fairfax’s stop motion film showing how beavers slow the spread of forest fires. Well it inspired another lesson on how beavers affect flooding as well.
This was made by Virginia advocate of the beaver coexistence fund Alison Zak. Enjoy and share if you can.
Thank Goodness! The dry spell is over and we finally have good beaver news to report, This time from West Virginia!
Donning rain boots and gloves, volunteers trudged across a Charles Town wetland Tuesday to prepare the habitat for a pair of unexpected residents.
Jefferson County’s Cool Spring Preserve is currently home to at least two beavers, possibly mates, according to local conservationists. If trail camera photos did not offer proof enough, their presence is made clear through bite marks on trees and a growing number of dams in Bullskin Run, the local stream.
Beavers are native to wetlands across North America, including those in West Virginia. But they were hunted to near-extinction during the 18th century fur trade. With fewer people hunting them for their pelts, beavers are growing in population across the continent. According to many conservationists, that’s a good thing.
Alison Zak serves as founder and executive director of the Human-Beaver Coexistence Fund. The group develops nonlethal strategies to manage beaver populations across the mid-Atlantic.
Zak said that beavers play a key role in bolstering biodiversity, storing groundwater and filtering pollutants in wetland ecosystems. But they also bring what she describes as “beaver problems,” which fall into two main categories: flooding and tree damage.
When beavers build dams, they can redirect the flow of water and prompt flooding. This can disturb roadways and personal property, so conservationists often fence off culverts so beavers cannot disrupt the flow of water with their dams.
Hurray for the Human Coexistence fund. I can’t believe Joe Manchin’s state is wrapping trees for beavers. That tickles my nose like champagne.
Beavers can also chew trees that protect rivers from erosion, as well as saplings planted as part of reforestation efforts. In response, conservationists build wire fences around the bases of trees that need to be protected from local beavers.
That is what brought a team of volunteers onto the preserve Tuesday: to help build fences that ensure trees and beavers can coexist in West Virginia and to strengthen wetland ecosystems.
“A lot of people aren’t aware beavers are around unless, all of a sudden, they come across very obvious signs of beavers, maybe even causing problems on their property,” Zak said. “But also, we’re seeing an increase in tolerance toward beavers, and people wanting to use nonlethal management and wanting to coexist.”
Tuesday’s volunteers placed new wire frames around the bases of trees with overly tight fences or no fences at all. They took particular care to cover saplings, and to give trees enough space to grow freely.
KC Walters, associate director of conservation at Potomac Valley Audubon Society, organized Tuesday’s event. She said that coexistence strategies like these help people come together to solve environmental problems.
“It’s not just conservation, and not just about the relationship with wildlife,” she said. “It’s also about the relationships of the human organizations that exist in keeping us all working together for a common goal.”
Zak said she hopes volunteers left Tuesday’s event with a better understanding of how conservation works.
“I hope they got a little taste of how complex it can be, but how also doable it is,” she said.
Getting audubon involved is smart work. They want those trees for nesting grounds and are motivated to learn about anything that increases the bird population. Good work Alison!
I tagged this a week ago but there was too much beaver news to squeeze it in. It deserves sharing, because good beaver news from Virginia? It’s been a while!
Coexisting with nature in Rappahannock sometimes produces struggles for county residents. Take, for instance, the sometimes embroiled relationship between the landowner and the local beaver.
Although beaver behavior is seemingly destructive, it provides many environmental benefits. “What they’re doing is important for water quality,” says Claire Catlett, Rappahannock Field Representative for the Piedmont Environmental Council. “When they build a dam, they are essentially slowing water down but they’re also spreading water out.”
The redistribution of water allows for the growth of new trees, which in turn provides new food and lumber for the beavers. The new trees act as a natural water purifier, filtering toxins from the water. “Trees play an important part in ecosystems,” Catlett says. “Especially along streams, they filter pollution with their roots.”
Good job Claire! We like anyone who tells the truth about beavers. Especially a field representative from the environmental council!
Beaver dams also create wetland habitats that are vital to a variety of animals and plant life. In addition to allowing hundreds of plant and animal species to thrive, wetlands offer flood and erosion control and remove pollutants from surface water runoff. Because they slow runoff and protect surface water, dams have also proven to recharge aquifers deep underground.
Bill Fletcher is one Rappahannock landowner who has witnessed the positive influence of beavers returning to his property over the past year. “I’ve had a number of springs come back on the farm,” says Fletcher, who had the idea of implementing a government-funded program to install Beaver Dam Analogues (BDA) in the streams of Virginia farms.
Ooh we like Bill even better than Claire if that’s possible. A farmer who has appreciated what beavers are doing for his landscape; How exciting!
“It would revolutionize the ecology of the area,” Fletcher says. “And it would allow us to retain more water in the aquifers. It would help every individual farmer and it would also help the Chesapeake Bay and the Rappahannock River.”
Fletcher has been reaching out to various state conservation foundations in hopes of bringing his project to fruition. BDAs have been shown to work successfully in other areas to raise groundwater levels, create healthier downstream ecosystems and even turn some intermittent streams into perennial streams.
That’s it! Go preach the beaver gospel far and wee because god knows they need to hear it. Someones folk listen with different ears when farmers speak.
Still, sometimes the benefits of beavers aren’t enough to convince landowners to let them stay. But there are many programs designed to help resolve human-wildlife conflicts. The Clifton Institute in Warrenton is a nonprofit organization with a mission of conservation and restoration of natural habitat of plants and animals, and provides one such service. The institute also provides environmental education and performs ecological research in the Piedmont area.
Alison Zak, an education associate for the Clifton Institute, says there are two main categories of human-beaver conflicts. “One is tree chewing,” she says, “and the other is flooding, which is usually when beavers are clogging up a culvert.”
“If the landowner has a nice spot, killing one pair of beavers is just creating an opportunity for a new pair looking for habitat,” she explains. “There’s almost always a way to address a problem without killing the beavers.”
WOW! I’m not sure the last time I read an article from Virginia that hit EVERY beaver point. Maybe never? It even had a section about wrapping trees to prevent chewing. Pretty incredible. There aren’t even any good points they left out. I think I have to look up the Piedmont Environmental Council.
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