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.

“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.

Wisdom from the ages

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Environmental, Why We Care December 8, 2012

beaver_1[1] — The focus of North America’s first natural resource stampede, beaver pelts attracted legions of traders (Photo: C.W. Mather, Ernest Brown and Boone & May/C-001229/Library and Archives Canada)

Rethinking the beaver

Has there ever been a national symbol more loathed or misunderstood? Has there ever been a more important time for the beaver to flourish?

By Frances Backhouse

The beaver revival is, indeed, one of the continent’s great conservation success stories; beavers are thriving throughout their traditional territory in North America. But as beavers continue to multiply, not everyone is cheering them on. Each year, the average adult beaver cuts approximately one metric tonne of wood — about 215 trees — for food and building materials. Not only do we complain when they compete with us for timber or meddle with the scenery, we also object when their dams flood highways, farm fields and waterfront real estate. In 2010, one even killed a husky in a suburban park in Red Deer, Alta.

Yet a growing body of research suggests that we need more beavers not fewer, that beavers perform a vital service to the riparian world that will be particularly needed in the drought years ahead. It may be an argument Canadians don’t want to hear.

Be still my heart! What an unexpected treasure! Frances article appears in the December issue of the Canadian Geographic (who knew there even was such a thing?) and rewards us with two pages of history and smart ecology surrounding this keystone species. You really must go read the whole thing, but I’ll give you some highlights to get you started. A big thanks to our Ottawa friend Donna Du Breuile for passing it my direction when a friend sent it her way. I don’t know how I missed it before!

In the 1930s, Grey Owl and Jelly Roll, his pet beaver (above), led the conservation charge. Beavers now can be seen throughout their traditional territory. (Photo: William J. Oliver/PA-15000/Library and Archives Canada)

Grey Owl’s death in 1938 spared him from seeing how quickly his beloved beavers fell into disfavour once they became plentiful. The first systematic survey of Prince Albert National Park, conducted in 1935, pegged the resident beaver population at approximately 500. By the 1940s, park officials were live trapping “surplus” beavers and relocating them to other public lands in a futile attempt to curb their numbers. In 1952, with the population nearing 15,000, they switched to lethal traps and killed thousands of beavers before moving to a more benevolent management approach a few years later.

I love that the article includes Grey Owl, but if I were Frances’ editor I’d make sure she launched straight into a discussion of flow devices and how the very real problems beavers cause can be successfully managed. People need to know two things about beavers: certainly that they’re useful and good, which Frances really promotes beautifully – but also that the problems that they cause can be easily solved.

Let’s face it, we humans won’t do much that’s not easy.

Like Westbrook, Glynnis Hood, an associate professor of environmental studies at the University of Alberta, is working on addressing our ecological amnesia and determining what beavers mean to North America. Fittingly, Hood works in the Beaver Hills, just east of Edmonton.

Pocked with shallow sloughs and pothole lakes, this rolling, hillocky landscape lost its namesake in the mid-1800s and remained without beavers until 1941, when a few individuals were reintroduced to Elk Island National Park. When Hood and her co-investigator Suzanne Bayley analyzed park beaver census figures, climate data and aerial photographs for the period between 1948 and 2002, they discovered that wetlands with active beaver colonies had nine times more open water than those without, regardless of the amount of precipitation. In 2002, which was drier than the notorious Dust Bowl era of the 1930s, the beaverless wetlands were visibly more parched than the occupied sites; some were even reduced to mud flats.

“Our results,” wrote Hood and Bayley in a journal article published in 2008, “confirmed that beaver have an overwhelming influence on wetland creation and maintenance and can mitigate the effects of drought.” Citing climatechange models that predict increasingly frequent and persistent droughts, they recommended that we make more of an effort to coexist with beavers — by installing perforated pipes to regulate flow, for example, instead of removing problem dams — and even recruit them to help with wetland rehabilitation projects. While the language may be academic, the message is clear: we need to rethink our relationship with beavers and learn to appreciate them as stewards of our most precious resource.

Go Glynnis and Cherie! Smart minds using smarter research to stem the tide of beaver-stupid that is storming the land. Go read the entire article and think for a moment about the number of fronts this battle has to be fought on. Small scale wars in communities like Martinez, tribal and regional efforts focused on certain species like salmon, legislative efforts like the hard-won relocation bill in Washington state last year, and pragmatic neighbor-to-neighbor conversations like wrapping instead of trapping. It’s a mammoth, leviathan battle of epic proportions.

I see the wake first, then the wedge-shaped head and a sliver of back. The beaver’s blunt nose creases the water, but not even a ripple betrays the hidden kicks that power its smooth, forward momentum. Suddenly, the tail flicks up and smacks the surface with a gunshot crack. As the beaver corkscrews out of sight in a blur of brown, sunlit droplets explode like fireworks. Gone, but not gone for good. Smiling, I watch the expanding circle of wavelets vanish into the cattails.

But its worth it. Go read the whole thing and leave a comment about how people and beavers can coexist. I did.