If it’s February, it’s time for dispersers! This story is from Burien Washington.

Meet ‘Valentino,’ a Beaver rescued at Three Tree Point on Valentine’s Day

One local resident quipped, “It takes a village to heal a beaver.” For several hours on Valentine’s Day afternoon, nearby neighbors gathered around a large beaver that was beached, likely injured, at one of the public access points just north of Three Tree Point.

 Big questions circulated:

-How did this fresh water-inhabiting mammal end up on the salt water shoreline?

-Where did it come from?

-Was it sick, injured, in shock, in pain?

-Would it survive?

 Some imagined that it had been a stowaway on a barge and somehow got dumped into the Sound. Others thought it had been washed down one of the local streams. No one remembered having ever seen a beaver in this area.

We know the answers to those questions, right? That beavers disperse at this time of year to find their own habitat, and that these fresh water animals often use salt water passages to get around. Three tree point is an easy 1 mile  swim across Puget sound to or from Vashon island. And there’s a lake and stream nearby as well. I’m sure he was fairly docile to pick up. Beavers usually are. (Unless you’re from Belarus.)

Two great ‘finally’s this morning, the first some new research out of Australia examining the fact that wetlands actually sequester carbon. (I believe the word your looking for here in response is “Duh!”) And the second a story I’ve been waiting for since Maria Finn contacted me way back in October. Apparently it’s been so long in the making that all sign of Worth A Dam’s contribution has been eroded from the story but trust me, we’re in there!

Leave it to Beavers

Once considered a pesky rodent, the animals are busy saving California’s salmon populations.

In an unexpected twist to California’s drought saga, it turns out that beavers, once reviled as a nuisance, could help ease the water woes that sometimes pit the state’s environmentalists and fishermen against its farmers.

 In California, where commercial and recreational salmon fishing brings in $1.5 billion a year, and agriculture earns $42.6 billion annually, farmers and fishermen have long warred over freshwater from the Klamath and Sacramento rivers. Dams built for reservoirs on these rivers have cut off many salmon from their breeding areas, which has severely depleted the populations. Typically, up to 80 percent of the diverted water is used by agriculture, much of it sent to the arid Central Valley region where moisture-demanding crops like almonds are now being intensively farmed.

Beavers, which were almost hunted to extinction in California during the 1800s, can help restore this watery habitat, especially in drought conditions. Fishery experts once believed the animals’ dams blocked salmon from returning to their streams, so it was common practice to rip them out. But, consistent with previous studies, research led by Michael M. Pollock, an ecosystems analyst with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, shows the opposite: Wild salmon are adept at crossing the beavers’ blockages.

In addition, the dams often reduce the downstream transport of egg-suffocating silt to the gravel where salmon spawn, and create deeper, cooler water for juvenile fish and adult salmon and steelhead. The resulting wetlands also attract more insects for salmon to eat. In ongoing research that covered six years, Pollock and his colleagues showed that river restoration projects that featured beaver dams more than doubled their production of salmon.

 Can the animals help bring back the Coho salmon? “Absolutely,” Pollock says. “They may be the only thing that can.”

Hurray for Pollock! And hurray for beavers! Now let’s get this story picked up in more places and keep repeating the message until even Trout Unlimited stops ripping out dams! Maria said her original article was intended for the Guardian, but I guess there was beaver saturation with all the reporting in Devon so they never wanted to follow through. Of course SATURATION is the point. Ahem. And the point that California should care about.

But don’t worry, there are still the usual nay-sayers.

But California Department of Fish and Wildlife environmental scientist

Matthew Meshriy says North America’s largest rodent is still often unwelcome in the state’s agricultural areas, particularly the Central Valley, where their dams can interfere with the complicated water infrastructure vital to farms. “If we had a more natural system and grew things appropriate to the land and at an intensity level that was sustainable for the long term,” says Meshriy, ”then a beaver could be a powerful part of it. But that’s not the case here.”

 Despite such resistance, beavers are enjoying a comeback in California, even building dams in downtown San Jose, Martinez, and Napa. And interest is increasing elsewhere: Pollock has been hosting standing-room-only workshops on the benefits of beavers in salmon watersheds all along the West Coast.

 “Fishermen welcome beaver dams much more than the human-built dams on salmon streams,” says Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations. “If beavers are allowed to do their jobs, they’ll help the fishermen keep salmon on the plates.”

It would be wonderful if more fishermen in California knew enough to thank beavers. When we’re done with the pacific conversion, and the midwest conversion, then we can start working on the atlantic. Those anglers have a LONG way to go!