Beaver Farming – Worth A Dam

An English farmer sets out to restore the country’s wetlands, with help from nature’s most experienced engineers.

Wetlands are one of the world’s most valuable ecosystems; as well as providing a rich habitat for plants and animals, they also store carbon and help reduce floods by soaking up excess rain. But around the world, vast swathes of them are being destroyed, and in England alone, 90 percent of wetlands have disappeared in the last 400 years.

Now English farmer Derek Gow has a novel plan to restore these precious habitats – bring back beavers, the massive semi-aquatic rodents that once played a crucial role in shaping the British countryside. Using their sharp teeth, beavers chop down small trees and branches to build dams across streams, creating a large network of pools and channels to live in, which form a brand new wetland.

Sylvia Rowley travels to Devon, UK, to see what nature’s construction workers can do, and to help release a pair of beavers into their new home on Derek’s farm.

I hope this particular episode is available on the web once it airs, because this is definately news we can use. I’ll be excited to see it in person. You will remember that Derek is the farmer in Devon (Southwest England) that has been pretty outspoken for beavers. I found out he and Duncan Ramsay (Free beavers on the Tay in Scotland) are old friends so we are working the country from both ends, (so to speak). I can’t wait to see this particular work from the beaver lobby and am excited to see this making the rounds.

And just to show you I’m a trustworthy source, here’s some feedback about yesterday’s Clemson Calamity:

Mike Callahan Heidi is right on about the historic importance of the Clemson Pond Leveler and that it rightfully has been relegated to the proverbial shelf as had her original personal computer or the Model T. Flexible Pond Levelers and Castor Masters work so much better, last longer, and are much cheaper and easier to install. Coincidentally today I am going back to the Norwottuck Rail Trail, the site of my first and only Clemson Pond Leveler installation in 1998 to adjust a Flexible Pond Leveler pipe that successfully replaced that CPL.

In proving foresight may be vain;

The best-laid schemes o’ mice beavers an ‘men

Gang aft agley,

An’lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,

For promis’d joy!

Robert Burns 1785

Beaver friend Brock Dolman is getting ready for an address to the Wild Farm Alliance, and he wants to include information about how truly useful beavers can be to water and soil management, so he went surfing through the annals of history and look what he found!

That’s right, straight from the USDA a recommendation to start beaver farms along the Canadian border. That’s the father of APHIS who eliminated about 30, 000 beavers last year from California alone, not to mention all the ducks they shot at airports and woodpeckers they kidnapped from Rossmoor. Why on earth, you ask, would they recommend beaver farms? Let’s let the once-evident knowledge of USDA answer that question for us.

through storing water in the reservoirs along mountain streams, they would do much good by helping prevent floods and extensive erosion, by increasing the stream flow in dry weather, and by improving the fishing resources of streams and lakes.

Ahhh the former wisdom of the ages. Sniff. How we miss you. Don’t worry. It gets better worse. Nice to know they weren’t THAT smart about beavers….otherwise I’d get all depressed and wistful. Let’s let them keep talking. I’m sure we’ll get to something familiar eventually.

Beavers, the Survey has found, can be kept readily in a fully controlled if not a fully domesticated state. Because the animals are comparatively clumsy and slow walkers, they rarely go more than 20 or 30 rods from their home stream.To confine them to a narrow strip along a certain stream, therefore, it is only necessary to fence across the stream a short distance above and below their colony, running the fences at right angles to the stream about 30 rods on each side.

Now that I recognize! Expedient ignorance posing as research to reinforce the already foregone conclusion! Some things never change! “Don’t worry potential farmers! Beavers never wander! There’s no wind in the desert and we have pages of science to prove it.” I have to wonder what the a fore mentioned “survey” consisted of. Do you suppose it involved a researcher with a clipboard?

“On a scale of 1-5 how likely are you to walk overland away from your home stream? Choose 1 for Very Likely, 2 for Moderately likely, 3 Not Sure, 4 Moderately Unlikely and 5 Very Unlikely.”

Whoa. I’m having a Test Construction flashback. Give me a minute until the Likert dust resettles. Whew, that was close. Okay, let’s leave the cobwebbed shelves of graduate school and visit the halls of beaver research. First of all what’s a rod anyway? It’s an archaic measurement of distance that equals 16.5 feet. So 20-30 Rods would be about 300-400 feet. Hmm. That’s not very far. I thought beavers could go farther than that. What do beaver experts say?

or beaver can cross watersheds by overland travel of up to several kilometers. In a study of 46 dispersing beaver in New York, 74% initiated dispersal downstream, 35% moved to neighboring colonies, and females moved farther than males (Sun et al. 2000).

Baker, B. W., and E. P. Hill. 2003. Beaver (Castor canadensis). Pages 288-310 in G. A. Feldhamer,B. C. Thompson, and J. A. Chapman, editors. Wild Mammals of North America: Biology, Management,and Conservation. Second Edition. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.

Several kilometers, a bit imprecise but lets say that means between 5-7. That translates to about 4 miles. Or 21,120 feet. As opposed to 350 feet. Which makes USDA wrong by a power of 60.

That seems about right.

Anyway thanks for the delightful read, Brock and good luck taming the wild farmers! And btw if you’re having a hard time choosing that special gift for the beaver lover on your list, check out these adorable pillows. The knitted snugglers sold on Etsy in 2009 but there must be more out there.