Manmade beaver dams have just been installed along a creek in Atlanta’s Blue Heron Nature Preserve and could offer a time-tested, natural method to manage stormwater runoff.A
The effect of the manmade beaver dams is the same as natural beaver dams – water backs up behind the dam and forms a pond, where some water can soak into the earth and groundwater. Water that does seep through the dam flows downstream at pace slow enough to not erode creek banks.
Beaver dams are a modest method to clean streams, according to Ed Castro, president of ECL, the company that installed the dams at the nature preserve.
They’re so smart they even got the state to pay for the project with a clean water grant. You know it’s a pretty great day for beavers when a bunch of bureaurocrats write a check for the work they would do for free. Now if we could just get them to stop writing the other kind of checks. You know, the ones they pay to BMP or USDA to kill them.
Blue Heron’s system of dams was built with locust trees harvested from Castro’s tree farm in Newton County. They were nuisance trees and he was pleased to find a good way to repurpose them. The tree trunks became the upright poles in the dam, and branches and underbrush were woven in a horizontal fashion among poles that had been installed in pairs. Each dam runs 12 or so poles wide, depending on the width of the creek at a given point.
“The idea was to mimic a natural approach that a beaver might have,” Castro said. “We’d weave the poplar, the box elder – the biomass – in between the logs, mimicking beavers as they cut it down and start adding material, like a bird building a nest. They’re using a collection of natural resources and building it their way.”
Hey if you’re REALLY LUCKY some local beavers will move in and take over. Their funding stream is more reliable and consistent. And they stick around on the job and make repairs for free.
“The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco”
If that whirring noise bothered you yesterday we apologize. It was the sound of Mark Twain rolling over and over in his grave because San Francisco and the Bay Area was HOT yesterday. 110 in Martinez hot. Even though Mr. Train never actually wrote that, I’m sure he would have been shocked. I’m still shocked.
But hot days are good for sitting inside and planning. At our Kiwanis appearance yesterday Worth A Dam was given a donation and asked to do a presentation for the Boys and Girls Club in Martinez again. That’s a boisterous fun arena that usually requires a fairly short lesson followed by a very fun activity. When I was trying to imagine what we should do I thought of our old wildlife buttons from Mark Poulin. There’s no way to do the keystone activity but why not let every child pick ONE to keep and have them draw that animal?
Maybe the post card could say something about saving beavers…hmmm. Don’t kill the beavers is too heavy handed. How about just thanking them for saving them? Better yet, why not draw the animal on the button they selected on the back of an irresistably adorable postcard and deliver them to the mayor?
So yesterday I made the graphic and ordered a bunch of 5 x 7 postcards of these with funds from that donation. The hands in the corner are the emblem of the boys and girls club, and should work in our favor. We can also bring a poster and have kids sign their name over ‘their animal’ based on the button they drew. Then leave it with the facility but the postcards will be delivered to city council. Adorable kid drawn images on the back of beavers or the animals assist will help.
Fun fact. This photo was taken of children drawing beavers on our very first Earth Day event in 2008. We had no idea an activity like this would be so popular and just bought pens and paper on the way at the drug store. The two little red heads at the back are the daughters of one of our current council members. I was the daycare teacher of the sons of another. And that doesn’t even count Mark and Lara who saved our beavers the first time around.
There’s no such thing as a sure thing. But I feel that the odds are good it will be at least difficult to quickly dispatch these beavers.
More treats include this fine letter from Charlotte Burns in Palmer, Massachusetts, which clearly needs all the beaver defenders it can get.
It saddens me that residents of the Guelphwood Road area on the Charlton/Dudley line are so adamant about killing beavers that have flooded this road. They built their houses on the edge of a wetland but will not accept that wetlands are homes to critters like beavers.
Beavers play an important role in our environment, creating ponds, slowing sediments which provide food for other critters, and increasing biodiversity of flora and fauna. Their ponds improve local water quality by neutralizing acidic runoff and acting as a sink for pollutants. Dams improve the quality of water by filtering it. Modern Americans seem to prefer sterile, groomed, critter-less environments: chemlawns which kill butterflies and bees, and clean ponds with only stocked fish. They fear buggy, sloggy wetlands which are our greatest flood prevention. This neighborhood needs to get its priorities straight. Killing off nature is having disastrous consequences. Houston was built on swamps; Maine’s blueberries are not getting pollinated; and we’re creating daily crises with global warming. We need to work with nature, not destroy it. Change must start in our own backyards.
Charlotte Burns : Palmer
Beautifully written and well said, Charlotte! We need more writers like you in every state. And speaking of the wisdom to accept beavers, here’s the audio from the Blue Heron Nature Preserve on Altanta NPR yesterday.
Has there ever, in ALL of history, been a beaver day like August 31, 2017? There are literally 7 positive stories to cover about beavers today, each more wonderful than the last. You dream of a day like this, when you’re just starting out telling folks that beavers matter, but you never think it will happen to you! Obviously I can’t cover them all today, so I will focus on our friends, because if this website is nothing else, it’s an old boys beavers’ club. And beaver friends lives matter.
Let’s start with our good friends at the Blue Heron Nature Preserve in Atlanta Georgia. Founder Nancy Jones trekked to Martinez to visit our beavers and hear the story years ago, and even made it to the festival one year. New Executive Director Kevin Jones came out as well and brought us a beaver chew from Georgia! Nothing could make us happier than to start with this story from WABE in Atlanta. I’m told it was on the radio this morning, and a link the the audio is coming later.
When you think of the wildlife in a city, beavers may not be the first animal that comes to mind, but they’re all over the place in Atlanta. And while the big, goofy-toothed swimming rodents can be a nuisance, it appears beavers may also help our environment.
“What I see is just the potential for all kinds of biological processes to be happening,” says Sudduth. “Cleaning the water. The wetland hosts a huge diversity of bird life that you wouldn’t see otherwise.”
Amphibians and fish thrive in Emma Wetlands, too.
What Sudduth is especially interested in is water quality. She’s studying if this creek is cleaner because of the beavers. She’s not quite finished with that work yet, but it has been done in other places.
“There’s more and more research coming out about that,” says Greg Lewallen, a Ph.D. student at the University of Saskatchewan, who studies beavers. He co-wrote a handbook on using beavers in river restoration for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and recently wrote a new chapfocusing on urban beavers. [Eds. note: with a little help. Sheesh]
Lewallen says beaver dams trap pollutants, and wetland plants help clean the water. Out West, in states including Oregon, Idaho and Colorado, there have been some projects that actively try to attract beavers. That can save money on river restoration work that would otherwise require things like backhoes.
Beavers do it for free, with their teeth.
“They’re an incredible species,” says Lewallen. “We can relate to them in a lot of ways as humans in my opinion. They’re incredibly industrious and hard-working, and for a rodent species, they are extremely family-oriented.”
Lewallen says almost all major cities now have beaver populations. We don’t see them much because they’re nocturnal.
Hurray for Greg and BHNP. I am so happy to see urban beavers discussed on NPR, you can’t imagine. Kevin wrote me this morning and was really excited about the news. BHNP is a success story like no other, and I’m so proud of everything they achieved. I’m thrilled that this report included our chapter in the restoration handbook and talked to Greg too. If folks are going to see urban beavers differently success stories need to come from all around them. Congratulations Greg, Kevin and Nancy!
More great news about our beaver buddy in Napa, Rusty Cohn who’s fabulous photos appeared in an Essay on the beavers of Tulocay Creek. I’m not going to post every photo here, just a few favorites, but GO LOOK AT THE ARTICLE it’s well worth your time.
The Tulocay Creek beaver pond is located next to the Hawthorne Suites Hotel, 314 Soscol Ave., Napa. At the creek, you’ll find river otters, mink, muskrats and herons as well as beavers. Here are some photos of the critters taken by local photographer Rusty Cohn.
“Since Beavers are nocturnal, the heat doesn’t seem to bother them,” Cohn said. “They come out a little before sunset and are mainly in the water. During the day they are sleeping either in a bank den in the side of the creek bank under a fair amount of dirt, or inside a lodge which is made of mud and sticks mainly.”
P
Go look at the whole thing and I PROMISE you won’t regret it. Wonderful work Rusty, Napa beavers are so lucky to have you.
And wait, there’s more, this from the big glossy magazine of the center for biological diversity. Guess who finally got the memo that beaver help salmon?
Manmade “dam analogues” could help beavers recolonize former habitats — and help fish in the process.
In one project landowners and public-land managers have started building structures called “beaver dam analogues,” which are essentially starter kits designed help beavers recolonize rivers.
The premise is simple: Drive a row of narrow logs into a streambed and then weave the pilings together with cuttings sourced from nearby trees. The structure slows the pace of the water and traps sedimentation, allowing a small pond to form and creating favorable conditions for nearby beavers (Castor canadenis) to move in. Then the beavers can build their own homes and continue to modify streams to meet their needs.
Their use has spread. In California Brock Dolman and Kate Lundquist, co-directors of the WATER Institute at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, facilitate the effort to introduce beavers to watersheds. Because the animals provide ecosystem services, Dolman and Lundquist see them as underutilized allies in watershed recovery efforts. Their handiwork transforms the landscape, creating a mosaic of habitats. First, beaver dams modify streamflow, creating slow and fast-moving bodies of water. This leads to an increase in the types of streamside habitats available to a variety of wildlife, boosting biodiversity in the process.
Lundquist says the North American beaver is the continent’s original water manager, renowned for storing and caching water for future use. Since beaver dams are temporary and permeable, she explains, the structures allow water to flow, thereby reconnecting mountain streams with the floodplains below.
As California looks for ways to become more resilient in the face of climate change and the prospect of prolonged droughts, the construction of these dams may prove to be advantageous. They could even buy more time for stressed aquatic species such as oceangoing salmon and steelhead trout, which have been left high and dry by California’s prolonged droughts, deforestation and water-diversion projects meant to help farmers.
What remains unchanged is the beaver itself. “They are highly adaptable animals and able to persist,” Lundquist says. “What limits beaver are water and wood — period.” And that combination may be a damned good way to restore streams and solve water woes in California and other parched states.
Hurray for Brock and Kate and writer Enrique Gili[s for the wonderful article. It is great to see the benefits of beavers get discussed specifically in California. We all need to start having more serious conversations about water storage and beavers in our state, so I’m grateful for this push. It is great to have this issue noticed at the upper levels.
One thing that’s not clear in the article is that actual beaver relocation in California is still illegal. Unlike many other states who understand that value of sending in beaver to work their magic, our state still thinks of them as a pest and you aren’t allowed to relocate pests. Unless you’re on tribal lands, and then you can do anything you want. I’m happy the center for biological diversity came to the party, but wish they had clarified that one nagging detail! It’s hard to organize a campaign to change the law if the folk think the law already allows it!
Okay. Remember how I told you that the BBC article about farmers shooting pregnant beavers was going to get folks plenty upset? Well now they’re REALLY UPSET and it’s all over the news. I will spare you the outrage, but they’ve published the email correspondence with autopsy reports and I assure you that roar isn’t going to die down anytime soon. Hopefully by the time it does, beaver will be a protected species.
_____________________
In the meantime, let’s have some good news. Saturday was the sold out BEAVER SUMMIT in Georgia, a state whose beaver policies have made me cry on more than one occasion, and I thought I’d share a little from our friends about it. I think more updates will come, but for now let’s hear from Jane Kobres. Her husband Bob presented and yesterday she sent these remarks.
Things went really well yesterday. Bob was the first speaker and he mostly did historical background of beaver in N. America plus talking about how he got interested in beaver. They only allotted 15 minutes for each speaker, which was not enough. All but one of them needed more like 25 minutes, but they all ended up speaking at least 20 minutes except for one person. The attendance was good–about 40 people counting speakers. There were people from the City of Atlanta, Parks and Recreation, and some local environmental groups. Everyone seemed pretty engaged and glad to be learning about beaver. Importantly, the discussions at the end involved “what can we do” type questions.
And so it begins. Forty people in Georgia will think about responding differently the next time a pond appears in their creek. I want to call it the first informed dialogue about beavers in the state, but the inventor of the Clemson pond leveler was from Georgia so there must have been more folks who knew they were worth keeping once upon a time. I can’t believe how far BHNP has come in such a short time, and I’m SO happy to think we encouraged and informed them along the way!
Now we need a beaver summit in EVERY state! Who wants to go next?
Don’t you think Amelia Hansen should write me back and donate something to the auction? Yeah, I do too.
These were among the dead trees that had to be removed from Tulocay Creek because a beaver dam downstream created a pond in the channel. The trees were standing in three feet of water which was likely the cause of their death.
Protectors of a small colony of beavers on Tulocay Creek near Soscol Avenue became alarmed recently when flood control workers began cutting down dead trees in the middle of the beaver pond.
Ron Swim said he grew concerned when he saw trees being felled near the largest beaver mound, located adjacent to Hawthorne Suites. “I would like to see the wild beaver left alone to do what wild beavers do. They create ponds that will bring fish and ducks,” he said.
Until recently, Swim said he’d lived in Napa for 57 years and never seen a beaver. “It’s a nice addition to the community,” he said.
Rick Thomasser is the watershed and flood control operations manager with the Napa County Flood Control and Water Conservation District. It’s his job to keep creeks clear of possible flood hazards.
“The beaver habitat is great, but one of the downsides is they fell trees” for dam building, Thomasser said. This, in turn, causes a water back-up, which can drown tree roots and result in the death of the tree, he said.
That’s exactly what happened near the beaver dam just east of Soscol Avenue. Thomasser said the flood district had been monitoring a number of trees that had been engulfed by the new ponds.
A dead tree in the middle of a stream becomes a hazard and can collect debris. “We try to keep the center of the stream open to flows,” he said.
Proudly lowering the level of discourse, reporter Jennifer Huffman took the a phone call from concerned beaver friend Ron Swim who was worried Flood Control was chopping down the beavers’ trees and transformed it into a Beavers-are-Problematic article. She called Rusty several times for quotes and he mentioned keystone species, wildlife photographers, beavers saving water, etc. She was really only interested in the dog fight. Napa has been SO good about beavers up until now. I think she is hoping if she shakes the ants in the jar enough they’ll start fighting and make an exciting news story like we had in Martinez.
Rusty Cohn checks in on the animals five to six times a week. He hopes that as few trees as possible are removed near the beaver lodges.
“I think flood control is doing their best to take care of the beavers,” while at the same time preventing flooding, he said. “I don’t think what they’ve done so far is causing too much grief for the beavers,” he said.
“It’s a balancing act,” having beavers in an urban area, said Cohn.
Rusty is such an excellent beaver defender. I think he’s in that stage now where he can still recognize how bizarre it is to care about something this new this much, but is fascinated where the trail will lead. Obviously he’s reading everything he can get his hands on about the topic. And he’s struggling to alienate no one while he steadily builds education and support. I sometimes fondly remember those days. I actually remember standing at the Escobar bridge to film the beavers in the beginning, which is where I always used to watch them. I never went any farther or down to the primary, maybe because I could sense it would push me farther into the story. I filmed from there and it seemed like the distance down to the dam was this magical, inviting OTHER place. The beavers story, not mine.
Here’s a time capsule from those days, May 6, 2007. There is even a mislabeled nutria for you to spot. Ahh memories!
I have long since crossed the rubicon into the new world and there’s no going back for me. Maybe Rusty is tempted to go back while he still can? (We hope not!)
In the other direction, the South bay is equally interested in beavers. Here’s a video that Steve Holmes of friends of los Gatos Creeks, (A truly heroic creek-watch group that does unbelievable cleanups with massive public support) just sent.
One comment: Those beavers probably weren’t building a ‘leaf nest’. It’s probably a scent mound to mark their silicon valley territory. Other than that I’m always happy to see beavers making a splash! Thanks Steve!
One final update of some not-so-local beavers. On Sunday we had another visitor from the Blue Heron Nature Preserve in Atlanta, Georgia. This time the president, Kevin McCauley, who cycled from Bart to my house where he met Cheryl and I, had some lemonade and friendly developer-taming conversation and then went down to the creek where he was delighted to see three beavers courtesy of Martinez.
I’m thinking the beaver festival in Georgia can’t be far away.
Well, that’s the thing. When you’ve been around as long as we have, you get to watch the evolution of your friends. It was way back in 2014 that I was contacted by Nancy Jones the founder and then director of the Blue Heron Preserve in Atlanta Georgia, because they had some beavers in the area and they wanted to know what to do about them. Nancy came out for a visit and attended a festival in a separate trip, and when she was ready to bring on another director they sent Kevin McCauley out for a visit as well!
One final update of some not-so-local beavers. On Sunday we had another visitor from the 
