Beavertopia!

heidi08 Beaver Chewing, Beavers, Beavers and Birds, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions, Environmental, Who's saving beavers now? May 8, 2015

Great new article from the North Coast Land Conservancy in Oregon. Check it out for yourself:

Beavers, and beaver believers, transform Stanley Marsh

The waterway formerly known as Ditch Creek, trickling into Stanley Marsh on the east side of Seaside, is undergoing an incredible transformation—or perhaps incredible is the wrong word. In fact, it is exactly what you would expect to see after you take a few simple steps to invite beavers into the landscape.

It was suggested to the developer that he consider compensating for the loss of the wetlands at his place of business by enhancing the wetland at Stanley Marsh. Doug Ray of Carex Consulting is a former board member and big fan of NCLC; he was able to create a plan for his client that matched NCLC’s vision of stewardship for the property: rather than bringing in lots of heavy equipment to reshape the land according to a human’s idea of restoration, take simple steps to create the conditions that would encourage nature’s own wetland engineers—beavers—to do it.

For their part, the beavers are just taking care of themselves, creating and growing ponds that allow them to travel by water and avoid terrestrial predators. In that process, they’re also creating refuges for juvenile salmon, shorebirds such as snipes, songbirds such as bluebirds that use the hummocks in the marsh—all those species and many more have been spotted in the newly inundated marsh this spring. “This diversity of life—it can’t be there without what beavers do,” Doug says. “They’re a keystone species.”

It’s definitely not a ‘ditch creek’ anymore. It’s like Beavertopia.”

Fantastic work and an excellent new word from Doug Ray! This is smart beaver-assisted restoration which will quickly make the beaver rounds I’m sure. I must confess that my favorite part is when they put in the ‘starter dam’ to attract the beavers, but the beavers decided to build their own from scratch 3 feet upstream! Nobody knows creeks better than beavers.

The article has the misfortune to start out with this photo described as a beaver. Ahem.

This is probably a relative of the beavers currently working Stanley Marsh; Neal Maine caught this beaver in action at Thompson Creek a couple of years ago.

I don’t blame Neal. It looks exactly like this photo of a “beaver” from the famous High Country News Article.

There’s a reason they look alike. And it’s because neither of them are beavers. They’re both muskrats as we know too well here at beaver central. I wrote HCN ages ago to change this, but they decided in their infinite wisdom to ignore me. So let’s see if NCLT is more responsive.

Never mind. It’s a great article. And if more people follow its advice they will all end up seeing the real thing more often and being able to tell the difference for themselves!

If you hadn’t figured it out already, all involved (including staff at the land management agencies) are thrilled with the outcome; the project’s success has exceed all expectations. “It’s just this miracle that results from letting the beavers do their work,” as Doug puts it.

“I kept my faith in the beavers.”

As should we all, Doug. Nicely put.

There’s some nice new research from Cherie Westbrook in Alberta, who might want to re-estabilsh her beaver cred after her silly ‘beaver cause global warming’ research last year. This is much better, and is featured today in science news.

Flood planners should not forget beavers

MONTREAL — Busy beavers can curtail rising floodwaters, new research shows. The work suggests that beaver dams can provide natural flood protection and that officials should consider encouraging beaver construction projects as part of flood prevention plans, the researchers say.

As 19 centimeters of rain soaked Alberta, Canada, over three days in June 2013, Westbrook, of the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, and colleagues monitored beaver dams along a stream. Water levels behind the dams rose 10 to 50 centimeters during the storm, postponing and reducing the peak surge of water flowing down the stream.

During the rainstorm, a 10-meter-wide breach burst open in one of the dams, causing a torrent of water to gush downstream. Surprisingly, despite the large rupture, the damaged dam still held back 15 centimeters of water as the storm progressed.

Excellent! It must be great to be a beaver researcher looking into benefits. Because you never run out of material. I’m sure as the climate changes they’ll be contrasting poles of interest all across the world. Beaver dams help flooding. Beaver dams help drought.

Don’t you sometimes get the feeling that no matter what science finds people will ignore it and kill them anyway? I mean we’re already ignoring their impact on salmon, trout, frogs, drought, flooding. I suppose tomorrow they might report that beaver dams reduce Alzheimer’s and we will still keep right on trapping them.

Water, Water, everywhere

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Environmental December 12, 2014

Our beavers got three and a half inches of rain yesterday, but the flow device was still standing and there was a wet bump under the water indicating at least the mud part of the dam was still in place. I received an email from Robin in Napa which got much more rain than we did. She was heart broken by her visit to the beloved dam that was no longer visible under flooding. I of course said the usual things I say to console myself when these things happen. Beavers rebuild. The dam is probably partly still there underwater. Beavers have faced much harder things than this, have faith in them. And even in the hard flow their lodge was still standing, which was encouraging. Rusty went down a little later and could still see the outline of the dam underneath. (There art thou happy.) But beavers have hard jobs, there’s no denying it. There’s a reason they’re so busy. Our lazy lives are much easier by comparison. Imagine being the breadwinner, the contractor the engineer, the flood control, and the public works department all at once.
Recognize that familiar bump? It’s what we see every year after a washout, and it means things aren’t as lost as you thought. I’m just thrilled that there are other souls in the world watching beaver dams in rain storms.

Jon just trotted down to look at our wet “bump” this morning, which he says is still visible. The level is too high to see if the filters in place, but he thinks it is. Jean took this movie just now with her phone. IMG_0628. From now on we can assume our beavers will be doing lots and lots of this.

Now if you have time before all the Christmas parties and you happen to be anywhere near Cape Cod you should really plan on attending this tonight.

College Students to Present Environmental Science Research Results

The public is invited to attend a symposium featuring the research results of 21 undergraduate students who are participating in the Marine Biological Laboratory’s Semester in Environmental Sciences (SES) program. The symposium will be held from 8:20 AM to 3:30 PM on Friday, December 12, in the MBL’s Lillie Auditorium, 7 MBL Street, Woods Hole.

Sounds amazing. There’s a day worth of 15 minute presentations, but the last three look particularly interesting:

2:45-3:00 – Delaney Gibbs, EARLHAM COLLEGE

The effect of beaver ponds on the nutrient concentrations in the Cart Creek/Parker River Ecosystem within the Plum Island Estuary watershed

3:00-3:15 – Julia McMahon, DICKINSON COLLEGE

Influence of beavers on benthic community trophic structure in Cart Creek within the Plum Island Estuary watershed

3:15-3:30 -Jessie Moravek, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

The effects of beaver dams on nitrogen-mineralization and community structure in a forest ecosystem

Oh, to be in Massachusetts now that beavers are the hot topic! I have written the presenters all individually and asked them to share their findings, hopefully we can find out soon. In the meantime keep an eye out for wet bumps in creeks near you!

“It’s an ugly creature. But it may kiss my ring if it likes”

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions April 12, 2014

Alberta and Saskatchewan have at least two of the smartest beaver researchers in the world, massive collective beaver intelligence, and easily the most beaver-dissertations generated anywhere. Still they hate beavers with a fiery passion. I’m not sure why. Maybe there was a nasty voyageur incident in their past. But Dr. Hood can prove that beavers dams are the only areas that have water during drought, Dr. Westbrook can prove that beaver dams are the only areas that don’t flood in heavy storms, and a student can film beavers tap dancing to the hallelujah chorus, and it doesn’t matter. Alberta and Saskatchewan still hate beavers.

Look to the beaver for flood prevention

When the rain hit Kananaskis Country, Alta., last June, unleashing a torrent of water and flooding dozens of communities, it washed out a large beaver dam being monitored down in the valley.

But several others remained intact and even stored water.

“For the majority of the event, we actually had a lot of storage in the system,” said Cherie Westbrook, an associate professor in wetland ecohydrology at the University of Saskatchewan who’s been studying beavers in the Sibbald area of Kananaskis since 2006. “There was actually quite a lot of ability to retain the flood waters and slow them down as they were moving down the valley bottom.”

Her team, including some university students, ended up getting trapped in the field when the deluge hit. But they learned a lot about how beavers could help in a flood.

“Beaver ponds were pretty empty prior to the event happening,” Westbrook said. “The larger one, the one most downstream, became overwhelmed with water and it ended up blowing a 10-metre section of it out so we had some flooding, but not massive flooding.” Flooding was much worse in other southern Alberta areas, making the 2013 event the worst natural disaster in Canadian history.

Oh my goodness, the area has been the site of research that proves beavers mitigate flooding AND drought. Hmm, the two things that we know will happen as our climate changes. I wonder if they’ll start to look at beaver differently – this multipurpose solution with paws. Will there be “Come to beavers” meeting soon?

Don’t hold your breath.

As the Alberta government looks at ways to mitigate against future floods, focusing on infrastructure such as diversion canals and dry dams, scientists suggest the province should also consider nature’s top engineer: the beaver.

But Nikki Booth, a spokeswoman for Alberta Environment, says the province isn’t considering any natural solutions.

“We’ve been focused on flood mitigation through infrastructure,” she said. “The nature piece and beavers specifically have not come up.”

No No No, says the minister of the environment. We don’t need beavers. We need bigger drains! Wider gutters! More concrete! Beavers are icky.

I’m starting to think we don’t need any more scientists or research to prove that beavers are good for water or salmon or birds. It’s been done. Well done. Stick-a-fork-in-it done. What we need is more ‘convincers’. People who can change minds one argument at a time, neighbor by neighbor by neighbor, fisherman by fisherman, one service club after another.

What we need is a million Worth A Dams.