Three people I barely know wrote me about this article yesterday. So you know it’s making a splash. This is a great time to be a beaver, The syndicated ‘hits’ just keep on coming! It’s almost like some crafty publisher somewhere was cleverly rolling out an upcoming book to create a wave.
Beavers, rebooted
n 1836, an explorer named Stephen Meek wandered down the piney slopes of Northern California’s Klamath Mountains and ended up here, in the finest fur trapping ground he’d ever encountered. This swampy basin would ultimately become known as the Scott Valley, but Meek’s men named it Beaver Valley after its most salient resource: the rodents whose dams shaped its ponds, marshes, and meadows. Meek’s crew caught 1800 beavers here in 1850 alone, shipping their pelts to Europe to be felted into waterproof hats. More trappers followed, and in 1929 one killed and skinned the valley’s last known beaver.
The massacre spelled disaster not only for the beavers, but also for the Scott River’s salmon, which once sheltered in beaver-built ponds and channels. As old beaver dams collapsed and washed away, wetlands dried up and streams carved into their beds. Gold mining destroyed more habitat. Today, the Scott resembles a postindustrial sacrifice zone, its once lush floodplain buried under heaps of mine tailings. “This is what we call ‘completely hosed,’” sighed Charnna Gilmore, executive director of the Scott River Watershed Council in Etna, California, as she crunched over the rubble on a sweltering June morning last year.
Thus begins another excellent article by Ben Goldfarb talking about recovering some of that lost habitat by using beaver dam analogues. You have to go read the whole fine thing yourself, but it’s paragraphs like the one above that are the true gift of his upcoming book in my mind – describing the desecration of the terrain that followed the speedy and avaricious trapping of beaver in the fur trade.
Gilmore’s group is just one of many now deploying BDAs, perhaps the fastest-growing stream restoration technique in the U.S. West. Federal agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service, nonprofits such as The Nature Conservancy, and even private ranchers have installed the structures to return life to deeply eroded streams and, in some cases, to help re-establish beavers in long-abandoned territories. In Wyoming, BDAs are creating wet meadows for a vulnerable bird. In Oregon, they’re rebuilding salmon streams. In Utah, they’re helping irrigate pastures for cattle.
Part of the allure is that BDAs are cheap compared with other restoration techniques. “Instead of spending $1 million per stream mile, maybe you spend $10,000,” says Joe Wheaton, a geomorphologist at Utah State University (USU) in Logan who’s among the leading proponents of beaver-based restoration. “Relying on the labor of a rodent helps a ton.”
The article goes on to talk about folks using BDAs in California, Washington and Idaho, and the differences they see when the man-made repairs encourage actual beavers to move in and take over the operation themselves. But my favorite parts are the recurring ode to how different beavers made America, and how different it looks without them.
FROM OUR 21ST CENTURY vantage, it’s hard to conceive how profoundly beavers shaped the landscape. Indeed, North America might better be termed Beaverland. Surveying the Missouri River Basin in 1805, the explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark encountered beaver dams “extending as far up those streams as [we] could discover them.” Scientists calculate that up to 250 million beaver ponds once puddled the continent—impounding enough water to submerge Washington, Oregon, and California. Castor canadensis even paved the way for agriculture: By trapping sediment in their ponds, beavers “produced the rich farm land … of the northern half of North America,” paleontologist Rudolf Ruedemann wrote in Science in 1938.
But Beaverland could not withstand the fur trappers who arrived in New England in the 17th century and quickly spread west. By 1843, naturalist John James Audubon found the Missouri Basin “quite destitute.” At the outset of the 20th century, researchers estimate, just 100,000 beavers survived—less than 1% of historic numbers.
The slaughter transfigured North America’s waterways. In a healthy, beaver-rich creek, dams slow water flows, capture sediment, and counteract erosion. But after beavers and their speed bumps disappeared, streams eroded into their beds, cutting deep gullies in a process called incision. These steep-sided, straitjacketed streams lost the ability to spill onto their floodplains and recharge aquifers. Some groundwater-fed streams dried up altogether.
How lucky are we to live in the very time where this book is being published and have the author at our festival no less!
Even here, however, the rodent revolution is gaining allies. Last year, state officials showed signs of warming to BDAs after the council invited them to a workshop. And once-suspicious local ranchers have shifted their views, persuaded in part by water tables that have risen by as much as a meter, helping improve water supplies and reduce irrigation costs.
Even 5 years ago, says Gilmore, her colleagues “were like closet beaver people,” so fearful of antibeaver sentiment that they wouldn’t so much as wear T-shirts decorated with the rodent’s portrait. Her group even dubbed BDAs “post-assisted wood structures” to avoid associations with the controversial animal. Today? “We have a lot of landowners that would love for us to put [BDAs] up,” she says. “Now, people see me in town and they’re like: ‘Oh, you’re the beaver gal!’”
I love the line about “Closet beaver people”. (It makes me smile to think how far out of the closet we have been.) The hour might very well be upon us where the tide will shift dramatically and keep shifting in favor of beavers. I’ve said before that this may not be the beginning of the end – but it’s definitely the end of the beginning.
Just in time for the finest beaver festival ever.
Final2018brochure
