HE STARTED IT!

heidi08 Beavers and climate change December 21, 2017

This is what irresponsible reporting does in high places. It spawns a flurry of copycats that send tendrils around the panicked planet. I saw three such headlines this morning. How many will there be tomorrow?

You have an awful lot to be sorry for, New York Times.

Hordes of Beavers Are Invading Alaska’s Tundra

Research shown at last week’s American Geophysical Union meeting revealed that everyone’s favorite rodent has been using sticks to build dams on the Alaska’s treeless tundra. The colonization is reshaping the geography of the north and could allow other animals to follow beavers into the brave new warming world.

It also comes with a downside, though. The dams create ponds that help keep beavers wet, but those ponds also contribute to melting permafrost. That releases methane and carbon dioxide, speeding us toward a hotter future. While it’s not like beavers are going to overtake humans anytime soon as the dominant drivers of climate change, the findings are another unmistakable sign of unexpected changes overtaking our planet.

Turns out beavers are getting busy everywhere. Of the 83 sites researchers identified as potential beaver hot spots, 60 were being impacted by beaver activity. In some cases, they could see beaver dams be built, fail, and be rebuilt again.

Why the beavers are moving into the tundra is an open question. Climate change may play a role, but it’s highly speculative at this point. Ken Tape, a University of Alaska, Fairbanks researcher working on the project, said it’s difficult to know if trappers hunted beavers off the tundra prior to the start of the aerial photography.

“The beavers are very well adapted to working with what they have,” Jones said.

HORDES OF BEAVERS!

RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!

HIDE YOUR WIVES AND CHILDREN!

Good Lord, how many times can a reasonable woman be expected to slap her forehead in one morning! Now in addition to the many trappers, farmers and oil drillers against beavers, this post in on EARTHER means there will be some greenie liberal types that hate them as well.

Beavers are such big meanies hurrying climate change!

You know, the word “hordes” has two definitions. The first is of course deragatory and means lots of massing individuals. But the second comes to us from anthropology, and is defined as

“a loosely knit small social group typically consisting of about five families.”

There now, that doesn’t sound so bad, does it?

Good cheer for all!

heidi08 Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Environmental, Who's saving beavers now? December 22, 2015

More goodies from the Bay Journal. This one with a familiar ring to it.

Critter Number 5 — The Beaver

Shall the year of the buck-toothed beaver be upon us soon?

Beavers in this country happen to have their own fan club. I’ve heard from a few of its members this past week after my story about beavers was posted online.

“We were so happy to see it here in Martinez, CA,” Heidi Perryman, president and founder of an organization called Worth a Dam, wrote in an email. In her town, “we worked to coexist with beavers nearly 10 years ago by installing a flow device to control flooding. Now because of our safe, beaver-tended wetlands we regularly see otter, steelhead, wood duck and mink in our urban stream! And celebrate every year with an annual beaver festival.”

That’s right, folks, an annual beaver festival.

What’s unusual about that I ask? It’s always weird to discover my own words on someone else’s web page, but I’m really happy I wrote Whitney after her Urban beaver article last week. She wrote back that she had come across information from our website but felt it was too far away to be relevant to her article.

I guess we just got relevant.

Perhaps we are entering into a new age, the age of the interminable beaver. These buck-toothed, fluffy (when dry), flat-tailed tumblers of trees and engineers of our ecosystems are beginning to get a little more recognition rather than sheer derision in neighborhoods where they were once considered a nuisance.

When I told our editor Karl Blankenship that I wanted to write this story about beavers — spurred by a study out of the Northeast that looked at the nitrogen removal attributes of their dams — he sent me a trove of notes he’d collected about the critters. We’ve been watching beavers for a while, waiting for the pendulum to swing back in their favor, I suppose. Other comments on the story indicate the Year of Beaver might not be far away for our Bay area as well:

“Let’s hear a cheer for the eager beavers and clean water!” writes one commenter.

I like everything about this, but I disagree with Whitney and Karl in one respect. We can’t wait for the pendulum to “swing back”.We have to push it there.

Here’s just on reason why:

Climate models forecast significant changes in California’s temperature and precipitation patterns. Those changes are likely to affect fluvial and riparian habitat. Across the American West several researchers and civil society groups promote increased beaver (Castor canadensis) presence as a means to moderate such changes. Where beaver dams are persistent, they may sequester sediment and create wet meadows that can moderate floods, augment early summer baseflows, sequester carbon in soils and standing biomass, decrease ecological problems posed by earlier spring stream recession, and potentially help cool early summer and post-wildfire stream temperatures.

Go read the entire article here. Like any good researcher he spends a long time explaining why its true, then says it might not be true in other areas and more research is still needed. He also ends with the gloomy paragraph that beaver damage to infrastructure might be too expensive for most areas to manage. Hrmph. But I like any article that clutters the journal of fish and wildlife with more beavers, and Jeff’s a good beaver friend. So maybe they made him add that last paragraph.

Finally, a lovely 5 minutes from our friend Peter Smith of the Wildwood Trust.

World Wildlife Federation promotes Beavers

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers and Birds, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental, Who's saving beavers now? May 22, 2015

Sara Moore is a Sonoma-based climate writer and blogs for the WWF climate report. Guess what she decided to talk about in this issue?

California: The Rebeavering

The California case for beaver reintroduction is picking up steam.

Specifically, the case is being made for the benefits of beaver dams and their ponds to California’s high Sierra, where a disappearing snowpack is threatening the state’s summer water supply—and overall economy.

California faces peculiar beaver-reintroduction barriers not faced by other western states where people are starting to think of beaver ponds as a landscape restoration and surface water retention tool, like Arizona, Colorado, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. And drought-plagued California might gain particular benefit from a new surface water retention tool.

Sara goes on to do a fairly deft recap of the beaver nativity issue and the research we did to prove it, and then even makes room for one particular city that decided to live with beavers.

Although individual cases of conflict can be solved (as they did famously in Martinez, CA, now the home of an annual Beaver Festival), there is a lack of information in favor of beavers as a way to solve problems.

Thanks for the mention, but I think you’re wrong about missing information. We have tons of research on beaver benefits to salmon and riparian and carbon. What we’re missing is broadcasting and persuasion. There was a time I thought that more information would change peoples thinking, but now I realize that when people say ‘more research is needed’ they’re usually just stalling or looking for funding. There are about 20 people in the entire state whose minds could be changed by research about beavers. The rest are going to learn by watching, seeing, or getting public pressure. Come to Martinez and see for yourself.

The article ends on a cheery note:

So, the CDFW is cautiously showing interest in what the beaver believers have to say. There appears to be momentum behind locating and evaluating populations for possible increased protection. Sierra mountain meadows and their far-downstream neighbors, thirsty ranches and farms, may eventually see the benefits.

Hurray for beavers! Hooray for Brock and hurray for WWF. We need folks all over to be seriously thinking about this issue, at this starts the conversation nicely. If people want to learn more Sara has a great list of references at the end for further information and this introduces folks to the issues very well. When you beaver photo gets into the WWF calendar I’ll consider it a real victory!

Can I complain now?

(I spoke with Sara back in April and our conversation was kind of unsettling. Of course I referred her to all the sources named in the article, and gave her background about all the states that allowed relocation. To tell the truth though, I’m surprised Martinez made it in at all, because she really wasn’t interested in solving beaver problems. She was interested in Relocation and couldn’t understand why I didn’t think it was the best idea EVER. As you can see, Worth A Dam, or my actual name appear nowhere in the piece, even when she refers to the papers we wrote on which I was second author (grr) – I guess I should be happy to get a link, and several links to articles on this website, an information source apparently so useful it isn’t even mentioned.)

This is me shaking it off. (Video of grooming beaver from Rusty Cohn at Tulocay beaver pond in Napa.)

Climate conversations

heidi08 Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Who's saving beavers now? February 12, 2015

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

Tag: Beavers and climate change