Tag: Beaver Benefits

Stop saying “OR”, already!

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Environmental, Who's saving beavers now? November 16, 2017

I’m sure you’ve noticed, like I have, that people are compulsively titling their beaver talks or columns with catchy philosophical labels like “Beaver: Eco-savior OR rodent pest” “Beaver: Boon or Bastard?” “Beaver: Helps or Harasses?” I’m putting the world on notice to say RIGHT now that it needs to STOP. Every single one of those titles and the millions more out there are misleading and false. They all contain a single word that is as untrue as anything you can read. And for this reason they should be stopped.

You know what wickedly misleading word, right I’m talking about, right?

Obviously a beaver is a nuisance AND a friend, a boon AND a bastard, a worry AND a wonder. They can be both, (and really can’t we all?) Even though our impulse is to reduce things to simple single quality and ignore all the other information, the only way we can TRULY understand beavers is to see that they are honestly both. They make the habitat enormously better and screw up your culvert or your farm at the same time. Just as the mature man recognizes their is good and evil within every person, we have to deal head-on with the beaver’s duality and start from there. The difference of course is that, unlike man, with beavers it’s the very same action they take that is both burdensome and beneficial. I was reminded of this by this article yesterday from the Elk River Alliance in British Columbia.

Beavers: friend or foe?

Beavers are more than Canada’s national symbol and our first national currency trading their pelts. They are also wetland engineers. Just look upstream of the north-Fernie bridge, along the Elk River and you will see an incredible dam built this summer. Although cute industrious critters, are beavers actually friend or foe to Canadians?

While these busy rodents amaze many people, others are less impressed and more annoyed by their activity. Beavers fell trees and their dams can, in some instances, flood property that people might prefer to keep dry. So what good are they to us anyway?

The beaver is a semi-aquatic herbivore that cuts down trees to eat the branches and chew off the bark. They also use this material to build dams and lodges, modifying their environment like us, making them a very unique species. Beavers build dams in order to back up water creating a deep pool of water surrounding their home, especially the entrance. This is important, even during times of low water, as exposure poses a security threat to their den. If water levels are low and the entrance exposed, there is a greater risk of predation to the beaver family.

Rising water levels behind dams may be a nuisance to us but have you considered that this water also creates rich and vibrant wetlands, home to an array of different species, increasing the biodiversity and productivity of our watershed. For free, wetland plants filter out toxins and unwanted chemicals, as well as sediment before water flows back into the Elk River, improving water quality.

Beaver dams also increase water storage capacity in our watershed, both above and below ground. They store increased surface water and are capable of raising the ground water table, important in mitigating the effects of drought. Furthermore, beaver dams help reduce the speed and power of moving water, limiting its erosive capacity and allowing more storage, thus buffering flood damage.

These key functions benefit both the watershed and Canada’s largest rodent. This is why community members, local government, small businesses, and Elk River Alliance joined forces to mitigate the potential damaging affects of beavers in Fernie. Together they installed two large, pond-leveling devices to reduce negative effects of increased surface water: one in the West Fernie wetland and the second one at the McDougal Wetland north of Maiden Lake.

Thank goodness the article is better than the title, because it goes on to describe how the Elk River Alliance learned how to install two flow devices and taught these skills to some other players in Canada. Because the smart answer is that beavers are BOTH a friend and a foe,. Our job, if we want to get the ‘friend’ benefits, is to solve the ‘foe’ challenges correctly!

I received lots of notices about this article yesterday so I know it’s getting it’s attention. I also got a response from Nathaniel at Parks Canada who thanked me for the information I sent on a real beaver deceiver and said they were considering their options. Maybe this article even crossed his desk too? Let’s hope beavers keep moving in the right direction with fewer false dichotomies!

Must it all be either less or more,
Either plain or grand?
Is it always ‘or’?
Is it never ‘and’?

Stephen Sondheim

Approved!

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Beavers and Birds, Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Forests, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and Ice, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Who's saving beavers now? June 21, 2017

Beaver Festival 10 was officially approved by the Parks, Recreation, Marina and Cultural Commission last night, including the waving of park fees for the event. Michael Chandler assured me they were implementing the proposal to extend wifi to the park and Daniel Radke the chair thanked me for my generous 10 years of service. There were no challenges or questions, just an easy fast approval.

Some things have indeed changed in a decade.

Then I found out from Frances that her ‘idea city’ presentation had gone very well over the weekend and was currently available to watch. It’s a delightful 17 minutes that packs a huge punch showing why beavers matter, although I wish she had squeezed in a little information on how to live with them. You should really watch it from start to finish. Even if you have been in the beaver business longer than I have, it will surprise you.

Frances Backhouse – The Mighty Beaver

Beaver friends with benefits

heidi08 Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Environmental, Friends of Martinez Beavers, Who's blaming beavers now?, Who's saving beavers now? June 3, 2017

This has been a fairly auspicious week for beavers. Their benefits have been touted in the CA wine country, Illinois and now the UK. I hope all this good press doesn’t go to their heads. This fine offering is from science writer Roger Harrabin

Beaver return ‘benefits environment’

Beavers should be re-introduced to England to improve water supplies, prevent floods and tackle soil loss, a researcher says. New results from a trial in Devon show muddy water entering a beaver wetland is three times cleaner when it leaves.

The farmers’ union, NFU, warns that beavers brought back to Scotland have damaged fields and forestry. But Prof Richard Brazier, who runs the Devon trial, says farmers should thank beavers for cleaning up farm pollution.

Unpublished preliminary results from his tests for Exeter University showed that a pair of beavers introduced six years ago have created 13 ponds on 183m of a stream. The ponds trapped a total of 16 tonnes of carbon and one tonne of nitrogen – a fertiliser that in large quantities harms water supplies.

During heavy rains, water monitored entering the site has been thick with run-off soil from farm fields – but the soil and fertilisers have been filtered out of the water by the network of dams.

“We see quite a lot of soil erosion from agricultural land round here (near Okehampton),” he told BBC News.

“Our trial has shown that the beavers are able to dam our streams in a way that keeps soil in the headwaters of our catchment so it doesn’t clog up rivers downstream and pollute our drinking and bathing waters. “Farmers should be happy that beavers are solving some of the problems that intensive farming creates.

“If we bring beavers back it’s just one tool we need to solve Britain’s crisis of soil loss and diffuse agricultural pollution of waterways, but it’s a useful tool.”

16 tons of carbon and 1 ton of nitrogen! That’s pretty impressive, even if they do spell it with an E. It refers to the metric ton, which is actually bigger than ours. So that small trial beaver population is making a HUGE difference. It’s startling that they’re maintaining 13 dams, because that’s so much work. I assume the idea is diffusing the water force over many dams makes the threat to any single one less, and the repairs needed smaller. I wonder what our beavers would have done if they were given the run of the place and endless supplies of trees. The most we ever had was 5, but I’m sure if they had been allowed to flood out escobar street they might have advanced.

Of course it’s a ‘both sides’ article so it interviews Dr. Negative Nellie from pain in the arse university, too.

Another soil expert, Professor Jane Rickson from Cranfield University, is yet to be convinced about the multiple benefits of these hard-working, continental night workers.

She told BBC News any beaver dams must be “leaky” – so they don’t hold back large volumes of water that might be released all at once in an extreme flood event.

She agreed that in some places the UK was suffering a crisis of soil loss, and said new policies were urgently needed.

But, she said, beavers might reduce the river channel, increasing the risk of flooding – or, in areas of poor cover, they might remove vegetation, expose soil and thus increase erosion.

A spokesperson from the Environment Agency was also lukewarm about beavers, saying: “Natural and hard flood defences both have an important role in keeping communities safe – though introducing beavers does not form part of our approach.”

The authorities are wary of mass beaver re-colonisation of England, following the controversy over beaver re-introduction in Scotland – where they are now protected species after a trial by the Scottish government.

In Tayside, some land owners have angrily complained about beaver damage to commercial forests and fields, and others objected to the £2m cost of the trial.

Yes yes, beaver dams are leaky. It’s one of their great benefits since the water that passes through them comes out cleaner on the other side. And you are doing a very good job as the “might” patrol; thinking of all the harm that beavers might cause. There’s a really fun video on the site that I don’t think I can share here, although I’m still trying. Go watch it because it’s that good and short.

And of course a photo of a nutria/coypu instead of a beaver because hey, why the hell not?

Meanwhile we received word that we got our grants from both Kiwanis and the Martinez Community Foundation yesterday, so thank you both so very much and we are looking prepared for beaver festival 10. Planning meeting tomorrow and all is right on schedule!

Beaver Music to our Ears

heidi08 Beaver News, Beavers, Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Forests, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and Ice, Beavers and Insects, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental March 1, 2017

Regular readers of this blog know I don’t pull out the ‘Star Wars award ceremony’ for just any beaver article. I did it when the New York Times finally decided to read the memo and report that beavers matter (even if the author did first write that beaver live in the dam). And I do it for this – I’m pretty sure this is better. I’m tearing up so often it’s hard to be sure. This is the kind of glorious article you need to GO READ FOR YOUR SELF in its entirety. But I will serve up some highlights to whet your appetite.

Better with Beavers

by Rob Rich

Beavers seem to know that healthy waters need wood – big wood to scour deep pools, dead wood to fertilize them, racked-up wood to complicate the flow. The intricacies of their dams, lodges, and mazing canals surpass all belief, in spite of – or rather, because of – the ways they are riven with a wild porosity, in need of constant maintenance. With all this industry and adaptive efficacy, beavers are deserving “ecosystem engineers,” even as they compel more expansive definitions for this very term. We typically engineer ecosystems by neatening and bleakening them with inert structures, often at the expense of other species. But the organic approach of Castor canadensis actually increases biodiversity, including direct contributions to over 25 percent of herbaceous plant species along forested rivers and streams.

In this respect, beavers are also “keystone species” that have disproportionately large impacts on their neighbors, including us….The discerning eye can look at maps of the Pacific Northwest and pick out lands where beavers came before. Some remain fertile wetlands, others are now pastures with “good” groundwater, still more are wet floral meadows tucked away in the woods. Our most livable and lovable landscapes are often ancient beaver ponds, first cleared, composted, and irrigated by beavers long ago. For the many happy bovines we see amid the longest-green grass, we can thank a beaver. For the homes that are flood-buffered or firewise with nearby ponds, we also can thank a beaver. And if you drink water in Bellingham, Washington, it’s been stored and filtered by wetlands upstream. At least for this, we can surely thank a beaver.

Sniff. I love everything about this article. But the bold sentence I love especially. If you love the way your pastures or farmlands look, thank a beaver. If you love that your home is above the flood plane, thank a beaver. The only thing this article needs is better photos. That scruffy muskrat-looking kit is no way to tell a story. Rob needs to talk with Suzi and have this article properly illustrated.

Yet as trials and errors teach us time and again that no one person can achieve restoration alone, the promise of partnership has taken a new turn. The return of beavers to their former haunts is showing us that even our species – the great Homo sapiens – can’t achieve restoration alone. While the Pacific Northwest remains collectively committed to the ongoing work of restoration, there is the growing awareness that our former salmon abundance was made possible with the beavers’ work. The last five centuries aside, beavers were one of the greatest earth-shapers on the continent, creating the very conditions in which our beloved salmon evolved. However much it jabs at our hubris, we are realizing that our aspirations to restore landscapes may be a kind of beaver mimicry. ELJs are, after all, what beavers do. Near my home, in the Stillaguamish River watershed, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration even estimates that, after the fur trade, winter habitats producing young salmon were reduced by 86 percent without the beavers’ presence.

It’s no wonder that beaver-based restoration partnerships are forming all around the region, eager to dispatch the rodents like mercenaries to the frontlines of damaged watersheds. And where direct reintroductions are not possible or practical, we are learning to welcome the rodents who naturally return.

Sometime you just need to get that second cup of coffee and settle in for a good long read. As wonderful as the article is, it’s even sweeter because the author was at the beaver conference, wrote me a LOVELY compliment about my presentation, and said he agreed with me that Lorne Fitch’s presentation was amazing. He also loved meeting his hero Kent in person.

US Forest Service biologist Kent Woodruff knows that many landowners consider beavers problematic, but his leadership on the project has shown them how these animals can aid us in timely, cost-effective ways. Woodruff can talk about beavers one minute as though they are venerable elders; in another, they might be an Allen wrench, just the right size; in the next, he might be on his knees, pointing out to some visiting schoolkid what makes one beaver’s tail unlike all the others. It’s no wonder that Woodruff has been dubbed a “beaver whisperer.” Since 2008, the project has relocated over 300 beavers around the Methow Valley watershed, most to headwater streams on public land.

Shhh, here comes my favorite sentence:

Glamorous as these intensive restorations are, sometimes the simplest tactic is just to let the beavers come home. But this can also be the most challenging approach – while still the most necessary – because it requires a coexistence that conquers our perceptions of beavers as pests.

You knew it was going to be something like that, right? Let the beavers relocate themselves and if you have to change anything, spend the effort changing the people. That should be on my tombstone. There’s a very nice passage about Tricia Otto who allowed beavers to reawaken her property. Something tells me we’d be great friends.

Thankfully, there are growing numbers of people who welcome these nomads. Over the past two years, I have worked weekly as a land steward with Tricia Otto, a retired doctor and avid conservationist who had long sought to restore native biodiversity on a wounded piece of land. In 1989, when Tricia bought her hundred-acre parcel of weed-sprung woods outside Bellingham, she never thought beavers would enter the scene. But soon after her arrival, the beavers followed. First they clogged an old culvert, which backed up the little-trickle-of-a-blackberry-strangled-creek, which ultimately drowned her driveway. After a few winters of driving through standing water, she realized the beavers were doing other things: As silent teeth sawed through the nights and wet roots went to rot, trees fell. And in the felling, even-aged woods became a multigenerational community. Light hit the land again, and sometimes the land became water. Without even asking, the beavers were helping Tricia achieve her conservation goals.

Tricia! You are a girl after my own heart. I love your pragmatic appreciation of the work beavers do. Go Read the article. Why aren’t you going to read the article?

In the past several decades, Portland, with its progressive urban growth boundary to constrict sprawl and keep the city green, has become a destination of the eco-friendly. And ever since officials from nearby Tigard, Oregon rashly breached a beaver dam, locals have started to speak up for their state animal. Greater Portland’s urban parks have become oases touted for “beaver watching” opportunities, and wherever possible, beavers are allowed to do what beavers do. The sheer curiosity these rodents provoke has shown that our natural aesthetics are wildly adaptable. Where the beavers draw too close for comfort, there are options. People are learning to foil the fellers from taking down cherished trees with hardy fences, or by coating the trunks with an abrasive paint-sand mixture.

And where beavers are truly threatening safety, public infrastructure, or private homes, people are turning to the rapidly evolving realm of non-lethal fences and flow devices aimed at beaver-proofing culverts and stream channels where flooding could be an issue. These relatively inexpensive devices include the Beaver Deceiver – a fence that prevents the beaver from coming too close to a culvert, and the Castor Master – which keeps a pond’s water level from rising above a certain height. These remarkable tools have worked for thousands across the continent, and in Europe, where Eurasian beaver (Castor fiber) numbers are on the rise.

Is there any beloved topic that this article doesn’t cover? Beavers help streams and biodiversity – check. Beavers can be relocated to areas to do good work – check. It’s even better when we allow beaver to relocate themselves – check. And when beavers cause problems flow devices can solve them. – CHECK. That’s it. That’s the beaver gospel. Chapter and verse. He didn’t miss anything.

We can’t restore ecosystems alone. We have great resources out there, like the Beaver Restoration Guidebook, an infinitely practical, inspiring tome of case studies and how-tos from leading practitioners. And yet there is many a night when I put my head down, afraid I have not yet done enough, known enough, or tried enough to steward this place. In such times I take heart in how beavers recall the words of ecologist Frank Egler, who said, “Nature is not only more complex than we think; it is more complex than we can think.” I take heart in the ways we increasingly see our fellow animals not as objects to save, but as allies with common cause. The beaver is a model, measure, and motivation for this work, and I trust that we have much to live for, together. When my workday is done, I trust that somewhere, on a dark and fast-dripping stream, a beaver’s shift begins.

PERFECT. PERFECT. PERFECT. This is the very best article I could ever have hoped for. Thank you SO much for your excellent work, Rob. It could only have been slightly more perfect if it mentioned in passing how a certain California city south of Whatcom had decided to live with beavers a decade ago with excellent results including a beaver festival. But, hey. Gift horses and mouths, you know the saying.

How much do you wanna bet that after reading this the execs at Earth Island are kicking themselves that they aren’t Worth A Dam’s sponsor and let ISI get to beavers first?

Bonafide Beaver Benefits

heidi08 Beavers June 8, 2016

There’s a fair bit of good news for beavers this morning, first this report from Calgary;

‘He’s quite shy’: Beaver sightings on the rise in Calgary

You notice that despite the city’s goal of ‘coexistence’ they still managed to find a few folk who call beavers pests for the interview. Journalism! Then there was this lovely article from Oregon yesterday. When it was published it had the photo listed as ‘courtesy’, I wrote the managing editor that we weren’t feeling particularly ‘courteous’ and he needed to change the credit immediately. All better now enjoy.

Nature’s engineers

While some see the beaver, officially a semiaquatic rodent, as destructive, beavers are “woefully misunderstood,” says Esther Lev, the executive director of The Wetlands Conservancy, a statewide group based in Portland.

Beavers got more than their usual share of attention in May, during the 24th annual celebration of American Wetlands Month. The beaver was a headliner this year.

The North American beaver (Castor canadensis) — Oregon’s official state animal — possesses an instinctual work ethic that is closely connected to the way it builds its habitat. Beavers create stick-and-branch structures with underwater entrances for protection from predators, and in the process expend an enormous amount of energy gnawing and gathering wood. If their lodge gets destroyed, they’ll rebuild twice as fast and twice as sturdy.

Lev, a widely respected expert in wetlands education and conservation with more than 30 years of experience, says beavers make a multitude of important contributions to our ecosystem. “Beavers not only create wetlands, but also create spawning and rearing habitat for salmon and steelhead,” she says. “Their ponds help filter water and moderate fluctuations in water flow downstream.” They also provide habitat for a wide array of insects, birds and amphibians.

While research shows that beavers make ecosystems more complex, they’ve long been incorrectly blamed for flooding, Lev says.

She calls them “nature’s hydrologists.”

Streams and rivers where beaver dams are present show high clarity and low pollution levels. As beavers build their dams across waterways — with their lodge at the center of it — a pond is created. As the water flows and filters through the dam, water quality improves and nutrient-rich sediment collects in the bottom of the pond, creating a food source for bottom feeders. Eventually, the beavers move on, their dam breaks down, and the pond slowly percolates into the surrounding terrain, leaving behind a lush meadow composed of nutrient-rich soil.

Studies suggest that there are a number of species whose survival is dependent on beavers’ “engineering” their environment. Typically, when beavers fell a tree, more light gets to the forest floor, which, in turn, helps remaining trees grow and thrive. Better light also encourages a diversity of plant life. And as the remaining stump grows new shoots, that serves as food for moose and elk.

Research shows there’s a greater abundance of birds, reptiles and plant life in areas inhabited by beavers. Migratory birds prefer the safety of landing on beaver-created ponds to open bodies of water.

Fantastic article! And following nicely on the heels of the Portland talk. Lev is the woman who was grateful my talk ‘ wasn’t delivered by a biologist’. So I know she received excellent reminders of beaver value in the landscape fairly recently if she needed them. I’m so old I can remember when talking about beaver benefits raised many an eyebrow, now we get two examples on the same day! What will tomorrow bring?

But the very best part of yesterday had to be this, which almost brought me to tears when I opened the door. That beaver and I have been through a lot together.