A Charming Development!

A beaver carries twigs to its lodge along Taylor Creek near Lake Tahoe on Thursday, October 4, 2012. The state Dept. of Forestry has been tearing down beaver dams in the Lake Tahoe area to ease passage for coho salmon. Beavers use such dams to store food for winter, so their destruction puts the beavers' future in peril.

Sure we might have worked two solid years researching the nativity of beavers in the sierras, and sure Rick bought every historical volume from Aubrey to Zeiner but even though the papers were published with almost no challenges, and even through the editors at fish and game thanked us personally for our hard work, they might easily have gone unnoticed by everyone in the scientific community who isn’t a regular reader of this website. No one might have known. If a beaver-chewed tree falls in the forest and no one hears it – well, you know how it goes.

What we needed was some massive regional event, pitting beaver nativity against a large scale federal agency. Highlighting in stark profile the issue that beavers were once native in all the places where they’re now routinely killed. We needed a local advocate, some fantastic spokeswoman to sound sincere but intelligent, a white-hat who knows better. We needed a vocal non-believer, and maybe someone salt-of-the-earthy like a farmer or a trout fisherman. But where are we going to get a money shot like that? What are the odds that such a tempest in a tea pot will boil over just when we need it? Sure we could hire actors to stage this whole drama hope some news crews picked it up, but that takes cash and production value. And where are we possibly going to find actors to play the crazy federal nay-sayers, to say that beavers aren’t native over 1000 feet? No one could pull that line off believably.

Sometimes all your prayers are answered.

LAKE TAHOE – To Sherry Guzzi, the beaver dam on Taylor Creek was more than a watery jungle of sticks and branches. In that snarl of debris, she saw hope for a species long regarded as non-native in the Sierra but which new research claims has occupied the range for centuries and is key to ecosystem health. Late last month, her hope was extinguished when the U.S. Forest Service tore down the dam to protect a tourist facility celebrating a non-native species: kokanee salmon.

“They are doing all this to showcase an introduced species,” said Guzzi, co-founder of the Sierra Wildlife Coalition, a local environmental group. “It’s a little nuts, isn’t it?” The Forest Service, which is holding its 23rd Kokanee Salmon Festival this weekend, defended the action. But spokeswoman Cheva Heck said the agency hopes to make its facilities and festival more beaver-friendly in the future.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the best setup for announcing beaver research that you will ever have. To remind you, Sherry Guzzi and Mary Long are the women who were trying to save the beavers in Kings Beach a few years back. Worth A Dam gave them a scholarship and they founded the Sierra Wildlife Coalition and have been working installing flowdevices all over the sierras. Now the stage is set, bring in the scientist.

What’s happening here is more than a flap over a furry, flat-tailed rodent with a penchant for gnawing down trees and damming up streams. It is part of a wider controversy over the role of beaver in nature and their provenance – native, non-native or both? – in the Sierra Nevada.

“A beaver can go 10 kilometers by land or 50 kilometers by water in a day. What would keep them out of the Sierra?” said Richard Lanman, a historical ecologist from Los Altos and co-author of two new studies concluding beaver occupied the range long before settlers arrived.

“Every mountain range from northern Mexico to the Arctic tundra, from the Atlantic to the Pacific” had beaver, Lanman said. “And they were supposedly never native to the Sierra? This makes no sense.”Lanman and his colleagues also write that beavers help “fish abundance and diversity in the Sierra Nevada” and their dams “reduce (the) discharge of nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment loads into fragile w” ater bodies such as Lake Tahoe.”“!

Rick Lanman historical ecologist! Sometimes referred to on this website as our friend “Wikipedia Rick”. He became interested in the nativity issue for the very local reason that he purchased his home from an 80 year-old gentleman who said that he used to be able to ‘fly-fish’ in the stream behind his house all year round. Of course that stream was now ephemeral and Rick wondered if beavers might have something to do with it, but was of course assured by the authorities that they ‘weren’t native there’.

Rick wrote me years ago and we got chatting about beavers and where they belonged. I met a USFS hydrologist at the Flyway Festival who was interested in proving beavers were native in the sierras because they were useful for meadow creation. He introduced me to Chuck James the archeologist who had carbon tested the dam in Plumas county, and a cluster of us started work on the research.

“They have a right to be here,” said Heidi Perryman, founder of Worth A Dam, a beaver conservation group in Martinez. “There is a way to manage their difficult behavior. And there is a reason why you should bother to do it.”

“Killing them is an extreme response to managing their behavior,” she added. “It’s like shooting all the cars that speed. It would work, but at what cost?”

Perryman is one of the researchers whose articles in California Fish and Game, a peer-reviewed scientific journal, challenge the long-held view that beaver did not inhabit the Sierra above 1,000 feet on the west slope.

Some of the most persuasive evidence in the articles comes from a beaver dam found buried along a creek in Plumas County. Samples sent to a laboratory for radio-carbon dating showed the structure was built at the dawn of the Middle Ages, around A.D. 580, and used and reused until around 1850.

Did anyone else just hear a crescendo? What a delicious lead-in to a scientific paper that would otherwise only be dustily published in a journal nobody ever heard of! Fantastic writing by Knudson, who wrote the USDA articles published earlier. If Galileo had just had a good reporter working on his side, maybe that whole helio-centrism thing might have gone better for him.

In recent days, the Taylor Creek beavers have been busy with matters of their own – gnawing down more aspen and willows to repair the dam the Forest Service tore down. By Thursday, the dam had been rebuilt. But when Guzzi returned to the site Friday, she said it had been destroyed again.

“On some level, (the Forest Service) must realize how ludicrous a situation this is,” said Guzzi. “It’s so counterproductive. They are wasting tax dollars and harassing an animal that is good for the lake and its clarity.”

And that is as good as a button as you are ever going to get out of a beaver article in the northern hemisphere. Great work Sherry! And great work Rick! Great work Thomas Knudson for seeing the forest for the beaver-chewed trees and working the recent publication into your story! It was January 24, 2010 (‘‘Don’t cause a Nativity Scene“) when I first posted about this issue and just the next month met the hydrologist from USFS at the Flyway Festival, tracked down Chuck’s phone number, and had a thrilling phone call that became a ride on the tail of a leaping dragon from there. Not a bad result for two years of effort.

: A Beaver Who’s who from out meeting this year at the Occidental Arts and Exology Center: Sherry Guzzi second row second from the left, Rick Lanman, tallest man in baseball cap on the right, to his right Chuck James the archeologist who carbon tested the dam. back row left – me!

Also in that picture (and not in the article but hugely important to the process) are Brock Dolman (center) Mary Long (beside Sherry) Lisa Owens Viani (beside Mary) and Eli Asarian (one ‘s’) who did the watershed figure for the article. Every other person not mentioned you can be sure you’re hear about soon.

All in all a great delivery for a pretty timely message. Go, team California, go!

And late breaking news: the California Department of Fish and Game will soon be called the California Department of Fish and Wildlife! That calls for a celebration!

The Reno Gazette-Journal is reporting that the hardworking volunteer group that cleans the Truckee River and wraps chicken wire around trees is running out of funding and needs another grant. If something isn’t done soon, they say, the non-native beavers will destroy the trees and ruin the creek. No, I’m not kidding.

On Wednesday morning, Aaron Keller, a state wildlife educator, pointed out the damage from the night before at Oxbow Nature Study area. Along a section of riverbank restored last fall, beavers had eaten one cottonwood sapling and chewed off the bottom half of another sapling, leaving the top half dangling in the air. Bark chips still floated on the water inside the chicken wire cage. With the river running fast and scouring away dirt from the bank, the beavers swam under the cage to grab a bite. Vetter said the trouble is beavers have no natural enemies and breed too fast. A female can produce two litters a year and some of the kits can become pregnant before leaving the lodge, Keller said.

Of course I wrote everyone involved that indeed if they have truly discovered the beavers of Truckee breeding twice a year they most certainly should get a grant, since this contradicts generations of beaver research on three continents. (Four if you count Tierra del Fuego.) In fact, with a gestation period of 107 days, and the kits we know about born in May-June, that means the mysterious second delivery would be planted in August, gestated in the fall, and delivered sometime in the middle of winter when the truckee is sometimes frozen and covered with snow. Gosh, I wonder how they found out about this ground breaking discovery?

Allow me to add a little science to this slumber party chat about beaver sluts.

Beaver – Natural history of a wetlands Engineer: Dietland Muller-Swarze & Lixing Sun

That’s 12-24 hours ONCE A YEAR. They get a few more chances if they don’t get fertilized. It’s why beavers mate for life because from a purely practical standpoing 12-24 hours of fertility doesn’t give you much time to find Mr. Right or even Mr. Right Now. I guess this information is pretty esoteric, I mean Aaron is a wildlife educator and all and his paycheck is based on him telling adults and children information about actual wildlife, but he’d have to look in a book to find this out. Let’s assume that book was checked out that week or that he confused beavers with nutrias and not blame him for this error. But no natural predators? These men live in Washoe County and they don’t think beavers have NATURAL predators? At the risk of paraphrasing Scrooge, are there no mountain lions, bears, coyotes, or wolverines in all of Nevada?. Not even one VERY FAMOUS ONE who gets a whole division to research it? I hear beaver is its favorite food!

When Mr. Vetter wrote back and explained who told him they mated twice a year, he helpfully clarified that beavers weren’t NATIVE TO the Truckee River and were introduced in the 1930’s. They don’t belong in the region and that’s why they are so destructive to it.

Sigh.

Here’s what no one has ever explained to me. I know that Tappe’s 1942 paper claimed that Fish & Game introduced beavers all over, including the Sierras and even though he had specifically heard rumors about beavers on the Truckee (read the footnotes) he really, really believed that they were never there before hand. I get that. Help me understand, though, why an animal that survives from Anchorage to the Rio Grand, crossed the Rockies and the Tetons, and lives happily on both sides of the grand canyon, why this hardy animal would suddenly glance at the Sierras and say, “No, that’s it! I just can’t take one more step”? Shouldn’t the burden of proof be on the people who say they were never there to tell us why they’re so sure?

Here’s what Rick Lanman, MD of the Historical Ecology center wrote to a regional biologist on this topic:

Here I will argue that the burden of proof should be on those that are skeptical of beaver’s historic range. I apologize in advance for being long-winded. Peter Skene Ogden was complaining about Americans on the lower Humboldt in 1829 – 80 Americans to his 28 man fur brigade. Those early American trappers were likely not literature diary-keepers, instead they were lugging around beaver traps, pelts and guns. I think Americans were tramping all about the eastern Sierra and not writing any notes or records. Stephen Meek was on the Truckee, Carson and Walker Rivers in 1833 and setting traps. He does not tell his story until he is an old man. His brother Joe Meek gave his story to a newspaper in 1837, corroborating his brother’s later story. Ogden with the HBC regarded the Humboldt as the richest beaver river ANYWHERE. From these locations, the Mono Basin is a hop-skip and a jump for beaver who can travel dozens of miles overland in a day.

Beaver were ubiquitous from the arctic to northern Mexico, from Atlantic to Pacific, in every mountain range. Until Grinnell wrote in 1937 that there never were beaver in the Sierra Nevada, no other mountain range in the US or Canada had proved to be impassable to beaver. Grinnell relied on contemporary trappers’ accounts, despite him being an esteemed naturalist. His argument has never made sense, why would an animal as ubiquitous as the beaver find the Sierra so impenetrable? Versus the Rockies? Versus the Santa Catalina Mountains in southern Arizona (the San Pedro River used to be called the Beaver River)? So my simplest argument is, what kind of fiendish natural barrier would have kept them out of the Mono Basin? It makes sense they would not have lived in Mono Lake as they do not build lodges in saltwater (although they do in brackish Puget Sound in the Skagit River Delta).

With beaver so nearby historically in the Carson (which of course connects to the Humboldt River in wet years) as supported by trapper oral histories, Powers account of beaver fur strips in the hair of the Paiute, and a pre-European word for beaver in Washo, it is difficult to believe that an animal that can move dozens of miles in a day overland would not have found Lee Vining Creek. The beavers arriving there now likely found it the same way the historic beavers did, moving in from watersheds north or west in the Sierra, into the Mono Basin. Unless we think someone recently plopped them into Lee Vining Creek, isn’t the most parsimonious explanation simply that beaver have naturally RETURNED to their historic territory, as no real physical barrier was ever there to stop them?

Suitable habitat, ethnographic records, oral histories, trapper records, and the known ability of beaver to move from one watershed to the next, in my mind shifts the burden of proof to those that argue that beaver were never there. The argument that a lack of archaeological or historical records proves that beaver were not there historically is not a proof, it is just conjecture. For example, a look at FaunMap would lead you to conclude that there were never sea otter in Central Coastal California.

The presence of flat meadows with deeply incised, eroded channels suggests that some agent constructed the meadows. Repairing these with earth moving equipment doing pond and plug or major road building in meadows has lead to the recent discoveries of remnant beaver dam wood in the high Sierra. If similar efforts dig up some wood in the Mono Basin then, I agree, let’s get it to UN-Reno’s dendrochronology lab or radiocarbon date it!

And like every email Rick sends, its signature reads

“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom.”

– Thomas Paine

The Truckee River folks are very committed to their eroding belief that beavers don’t belong in their neck of the woods. Even after we convince them that their dams can be humanely controlled, that culverts can be protected, that deeper pools cool streams and increase fish population, that a raised water table will improve their treeline and coppicing will increase bird count, even that beavers won’t eat their pets – they still object. After every argument we give they erect the rickety nativity scaffolding, cling to it and hope we’ll just go away. Of course, for many it will be the same when the first paper is published documenting their historical range. And the second. It takes a long, long, time to change minds this cemented.

Mark your calendars, though, because yesterday was a start.