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

Tag: Amanda Parrish


Check out Amanda Parrish giving testimony at the state house about HB2349. Here’s a little taste

BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF WASHINGTON:

5 NEW SECTION. Sec. 1. The legislature finds that beavers have

6 historically played a significant role in maintaining the health of

7 watersheds in the Pacific Northwest and act as key agents in riparian

8 ecology. The live trapping and relocating of beavers has long been

9 recognized as a beneficial wildlife management practice, and has been

10 successfully utilized to restore and maintain stream ecosystems for

11 over fifty years. The benefits of active beaver populations include

12 reduced stream sedimentation, stream temperature moderation, higher

13 dissolved oxygen levels, overall improved water quality, increased

14 natural water storage capabilities within watersheds, and reduced

15 stream velocities. These benefits improve and create habitat for many

16 other species, including endangered salmon, river otters, sandhill

17 cranes, trumpeter swans, and other riparian and aquatic species.

18 Relocating beavers into their historic habitat provides a natural

1 mechanism for improving the environmental conditions in Washington’s

2 riparian ecosystems without having to resort to governmental regulation

3 or expensive publically funded engineering projects.

In case you ever wondered, this is why Washington makes California look like beaver-barbarians. Amanda does an excellent job and even fields a very annoying question about fecal colliform from a senator that says he used to swim where beavers ‘did their business’ and knows its an issue. Here’s a picture of the ‘issue’.

Oh, and Jon ran into a channel 2 van filming the primary dam at 5:30 this am who apparently wanted to know if “We were worried about the lack of water in the creek”.

Now news cameras are coming to film the lack of water behind the dams?


Finally the article featuring last wednesday’s Worth A Dam visitors is featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. What a treat! First watch the video all the way through to see what Joe and Amanda do for a living, and then go read about it here.

“We can spend $200,000 putting wood into a stream, cabling down logs. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t,” she says. “Put in a colony of beavers and it always works.”

The believers’ beavers come from places like Tumtum, Wash., where Amanda Parrish checked beaver traps one morning early this month by the Spokane River.

What a fantastic article! Thanks so much Amanda and Joe, and everybody else for the work that you do!  Now if we can just get folks to see the forest for the trees, so to speak, and realize the good that beavers do everywhere, not just on ranches!



Meet Joe Cannon & Amanda Parrish from the Lands Council in Washington. Amanda is the Director of the Beaver Project and Joe is its Senior Ecologist. They came to the Lands Council as Americorp volunteers and now are golden employees running a prestigious program that California needs to copy. Together they run an all expense paid relocation resort program for beavers in Washington. I met them in Oregon at the State of the Beaver Conference where they presented on their community outreach programs and work with the public. (Amanda likes making candy dams with children which is a delicious way to learn ecology!) They had planned to come down for the beaver festival, but missed it by ten days. Instead they will come tonight for a meet and greet and get to sit in on the Worth A Dam post-mortem of the event.


These are beavers in Hancock (live) traps



Amanda & Joe with two beavers in transport cages ready for their new home.



This is what the back of Joe's car looks like when he's working...



Welcome to your new home little beavers! Good Luck!


Tonights conversation should be fascinating! No word yet from Brock on how yesterday’s capital Coho meeting went, I’ll keep you posted.

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