Did you open your new issue of Bay Nature? It’s got an eye popping article about Beavers by Erica Gies the author of “Water always wins.” Finally some good news about beavers from the magazine that is as slow to the beaver party as it could possibly be. The only problems with this article is that its got too much beaver relocation and not enough flow devices,. not enough good photos and lists Rick Lanman as an afterthought in the beaver historic papers instead of the reason they got published at all. In fact poor Chuck James whose original brilliant inspiration to rcarbon test the paleo dam in the first place and made the papers possibledoesn’t get mentioned at all.
Still it’s 100% better than the no beaver article the magazine has been publishing up until now. Go find a copy.
A weekend of wonders this father’s day, Here’s beaver news from about the maidu consortium, whose leader spoke at the beaver summit, SF Estuary magazine. Written by our friend Lisa Owens Viani.
Last fall, the Maidu Summit Consortium, a nonprofit composed of nine Mountain Maidu tribal member groups, installed 73 BDAs—beaver dam analogs—in Yellow Creek, a tributary to the North Fork Feather River and a state-listed heritage trout stream. Swift Water Design and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service designed the structures, and Mountain Maidu tribal youth worked with Swift Water to build them. The idea behind the structures, which mimic beaver dams, is to slow erosion, catch sediment, and build up the river bottom to reverse the incised channel—without importing soil and other materials or emitting carbon from heavy, diesel-powered equipment.
BDA’s to the rescue. Let’s learn all about the work that beaver do for free!
In 2019, the 2,300-acre Humbug Valley, known as Tásmam Koyóm to the Maidu, was returned to the tribe as part of PG&E’s land divestiture resulting from their bankruptcy settlement. The tribe has been working to restore meadow and riparian ecosystems ever since. “We want to see more fish diversity, a more diverse ecosystem,” says Cunningham. “We miss the beaver, porcupine, and other animals that are important to the ecosystem. Compared to pond and plug, if you have beaver doing the work they can restore meadow systems, catch sediment, address head cuts, and stop incision just as good if not better than equipment.”
Much better, any stream will tell you. No diesel fumes and hazardous soil replacement. Only careful hand excavation any archeologist would prefer.
Kevin Swift, founder of Swift Water Design, led the team installing the BDAs in the first of what will be several phases. “It’s process-based restoration rather than using diesel and rock and insisting on imposing a form on the river,” he says. “Instead, we use the power the stream brings us and introduce materials that give the stream something to work with. Those structures drive channel evolution and add roughness and complexity—with a small bit of human nudging you can begin to correct structurally starved streams.”
You know Kevin was also a speaker at the California Beaver Summit. It’s almost like all the best people were gathered in one place by some unseen force.
Although the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) will not allow people to bring beavers back to the site, the BDAs could attract the furry, long-toothed engineers, say Swift and other consortium members, who would love to see them return: there are beaver present in nearby tributaries, and cattle grazing has been discontinued since the Maidu took over land management, so there is now plenty of willow and other vegetation for beaver.
No of course they don’t. That would just be too damn logical. Much better to keep with the killing. Something they do understand,
Kate Lundquist, WATER Institute director with the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center (OAEC), who got involved in the BDA work through a grant from CDFW and developed a planning strategy for recruiting beaver, says, “We need to keep the ‘B’ in ‘BDAs.’ We want people to be doing instream structures, but we want to make sure people don’t forget the beaver. If you are building them in areas where you have beaver, they will manage and maintain the structures. Instead of being on the hook for maintenance, let the beavers do the work.”
Great point Kate. I couldn’t agree more. Although I personally might not have even said the B word. I might just have said, sure, if you know some other team of affordable engineers that live on site and make repairs every single day go ahead and use them.
If only the article had stopped there then there wouldn’t have been time for this.
Lundquist says that while some state officials have expressed doubt that beaver were native to the Sierra, she and OAEC co-director Brock Dolman have combed through historic accounts and found plenty of evidence of their presence, including a remnant dam carbon-dated to 1,270 years ago and an account from an older resident of the area who remembers a giant beaver dam and the best fishing of his life on a Yellow Creek tributary. “Tásmam Koyóm is ripe for beaver again,” says Lundquist.
Well. It is true Kate combed through accounts to find historic evidence. For the coastal paper which came later. Kate and Brock didn’t find a remnant beaver dam carbon dated 1300 years ago. That would be BLM archeolgist Chuck James. Kate isn’t listed as an author on either paper because we didn’t even meet her until the paper had already been submitted for publication. She was instrumental to the coastal paper which followed, In fact we might never have crossed paths with Dr. James if it weren’t for Barry Hill from the forest service hydrologist whom Cheryl met at the Flyway Festival in Vallejo who persuaded him to eventually give his original paper to Rick Lanman to rework. The rest is, as they say, is corrected beaver history,
Beaver failure is an orphan they say. But success has many parents. But it’s father’s day and to paraphrase Farley Mowat there are no orphans in beaver world. So enjoy this reminder.
A valley in the Forest of Dean will echo to the sound of herbivorous munching next spring when a family of beavers are released into a fenced enclosure to stop a village from flooding, in the first ever such scheme funded by the government.
Chris McFarling, a cabinet member of Forest of Dean district council, said: “Beavers are the most natural water engineers we could ask for. They’re inexpensive, environmentally friendly and contribute to sustainable water and flood management.
“They slow the release of storm water with their semi-porous dams, decreasing the flooding potential downstream. Water quality is improved as a result of their activities. They also allow water to flow during drought conditions. Financially they are so much more cost-effective than traditional flood defence works so it makes sense to use this great value-for-money opportunity.”
The plan for the village of Lydbrook, Gloucestershire, may soon be joined by other schemes. The environment secretary, Michael Gove, has indicated that the government may support other schemes to restore the beaver four centuries after it was driven to extinction in England and Wales.
Well, how about that for re-branding! Instead of whining that beavers can cause flooding get an entire country to broadcast that they actually can prevent flooding. And some great data to back up that claim. We are all thrilled to see the excitement accompanying this new release. The value of beavers is being shouted from the the rooftops and you know that always makes me happy.
The Forestry Commission will monitor the impact on wildlife – shown to be hugely beneficial – as well as recording the water flow in the brook. “The beaver has a special place in English heritage and the Forest of Dean proposal is a fantastic opportunity to help bring this iconic species back to the countryside,” said Gove. “The community of Lydbrook has shown tremendous support for this proposal and the beavers are widely believed to be a welcome addition to local wildlife.”
Ahhh that’s so wonderful. I’m almost jealous thinking what it would be like to start here, with the science behind you, the papers and public support, and almost everyone on your side. Can you imagine what a wonderful beaver festival they could pull off? Folks all over the country could come, there could be deals with the local B&B’s. With tours that teach proper beaver watching – maybe you could earn a badge that says your a qualified beaver observer – and everywhere wildlife education, music, beaver games. Maybe include local crafts, beer and sausage rolls? Jon would be in heaven.
Closer to home, our own beaver research has changed at least ONE mind in the Sierras. Thanks to Sherry Guzzi who sent this article yesterday that I somehow missed. The article mostly talks about how beavers make their way in the winter, but as you can see,it starts by covering the sierra nativity of everyone’s favorite topic.
The beaver has long been thought to be non-native to the Sierra, but new evidence proves otherwise. As winter approaches, we will be working right alongside this “native” resident as it too gets ready for the cold, hard season.
ARE THEY, OR AREN’T THEY?!
First, let’s get the controversy out of the way. Despite the claim that the beaver is non-native to the Sierra, 2012 research proves otherwise.
“The beaver was trapped out a long, long time ago, which lead to early naturalists erroneously assuming that beavers weren’t native to the Sierra,” said Will Richardson, co-founder and executive director of Tahoe Institute for Natural Science. “This got passed down as dogma among agency personnel.”
However, in a California Fish and Game article authors Richard Lanman and Charles D. James debate the assumption that beavers are not native with evidence from 1988 when several beaver dams were re-exposed at Red Clover Creek, approximately 60 miles north of Truckee.
“Radiocarbon dates from the different portions of the remnant beaver dam were AD 580, first construction; AD 1730, dam was reused; and AD 1850, repair of a significant breach occurred,” Lanman and James reported. “After 1850, the dam was abandoned and buried beneath sediment. In 2011, another beaver dam was exposed in Red Clover Creek; its radiocarbon analysis dating at AD 182.”
Sherry Guzzi of the Sierra Wildlife Coalition summarizes the results of the study: “This is not to say that today’s Tahoe beaver is from the original Sierra Nevada population, but there were beavers in Nevada’s Humboldt River and other locations in Nevada from where they could have migrated. Some of today’s beavers are definitely descended from when beavers were re-introduced to SierraCreeks by California Fish and Game in the ’30s and ’40s, specifically to restore watersheds.”
Hurray for beavers! Hurray for Rick and Chuck and hurray for Sherry! It’s so nice to see that our research actually stuck to some of those more stubborn minds like one of those burrs you get in your socks in the summertime. I love to think of these things falling into place over the years. It feels like a eons ago we were working on the Sierra paper, but I guess its very much still news to some.
A beaver carries twigs to its lodge along Taylor Creek near Lake Tahoe on Thursday, October 4, 2012. The state Dept. of Forestry has been tearing down beaver dams in the Lake Tahoe area to ease passage for coho salmon. Beavers use such dams to store food for winter, so their destruction puts the beavers' future in peril.
Sure we might have worked two solid years researching the nativity of beavers in the sierras, and sure Rick bought every historical volume from Aubrey to Zeiner but even though the papers were published with almost no challenges, and even through the editors at fish and game thanked us personally for our hard work, they might easily have gone unnoticed by everyone in the scientific community who isn’t a regular reader of this website. No one might have known. If a beaver-chewed tree falls in the forest and no one hears it – well, you know how it goes.
What we needed was some massive regional event, pitting beaver nativity against a large scale federal agency. Highlighting in stark profile the issue that beavers were once native in all the places where they’re now routinely killed. We needed a local advocate, some fantastic spokeswoman to sound sincere but intelligent, a white-hat who knows better. We needed a vocal non-believer, and maybe someone salt-of-the-earthy like a farmer or a trout fisherman. But where are we going to get a money shot like that? What are the odds that such a tempest in a tea pot will boil over just when we need it? Sure we could hire actors to stage this whole drama hope some news crews picked it up, but that takes cash and production value. And where are we possibly going to find actors to play the crazy federal nay-sayers, to say that beavers aren’t native over 1000 feet? No one could pull that line off believably.
LAKE TAHOE – To Sherry Guzzi, the beaver dam on Taylor Creek was more than a watery jungle of sticks and branches. In that snarl of debris, she saw hope for a species long regarded as non-native in the Sierra but which new research claims has occupied the range for centuries and is key to ecosystem health. Late last month, her hope was extinguished when the U.S. Forest Service tore down the dam to protect a tourist facility celebrating a non-native species: kokanee salmon.
“They are doing all this to showcase an introduced species,” said Guzzi, co-founder of the Sierra Wildlife Coalition, a local environmental group. “It’s a little nuts, isn’t it?” The Forest Service, which is holding its 23rd Kokanee Salmon Festival this weekend, defended the action. But spokeswoman Cheva Heck said the agency hopes to make its facilities and festival more beaver-friendly in the future.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the best setup for announcing beaver research that you will ever have. To remind you, Sherry Guzzi and Mary Long are the women who were trying to save the beavers in Kings Beach a few years back. Worth A Dam gave them a scholarship and they founded the Sierra Wildlife Coalition and have been working installing flowdevices all over the sierras. Now the stage is set, bring in the scientist.
What’s happening here is more than a flap over a furry, flat-tailed rodent with a penchant for gnawing down trees and damming up streams. It is part of a wider controversy over the role of beaver in nature and their provenance – native, non-native or both? – in the Sierra Nevada.
“A beaver can go 10 kilometers by land or 50 kilometers by water in a day. What would keep them out of the Sierra?” said Richard Lanman, a historical ecologist from Los Altos and co-author of two new studies concluding beaver occupied the range long before settlers arrived.
“Every mountain range from northern Mexico to the Arctic tundra, from the Atlantic to the Pacific” had beaver, Lanman said. “And they were supposedly never native to the Sierra? This makes no sense.”Lanman and his colleagues also write that beavers help “fish abundance and diversity in the Sierra Nevada” and their dams “reduce (the) discharge of nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment loads into fragile w” ater bodies such as Lake Tahoe.”“!
Rick Lanman historical ecologist! Sometimes referred to on this website as our friend “Wikipedia Rick”. He became interested in the nativity issue for the very local reason that he purchased his home from an 80 year-old gentleman who said that he used to be able to ‘fly-fish’ in the stream behind his house all year round. Of course that stream was now ephemeral and Rick wondered if beavers might have something to do with it, but was of course assured by the authorities that they ‘weren’t native there’.
Rick wrote me years ago and we got chatting about beavers and where they belonged. I met a USFS hydrologist at the Flyway Festival who was interested in proving beavers were native in the sierras because they were useful for meadow creation. He introduced me to Chuck James the archeologist who had carbon tested the dam in Plumas county, and a cluster of us started work on the research.
“They have a right to be here,” said Heidi Perryman, founder of Worth A Dam, a beaver conservation group in Martinez. “There is a way to manage their difficult behavior. And there is a reason why you should bother to do it.”
“Killing them is an extreme response to managing their behavior,” she added. “It’s like shooting all the cars that speed. It would work, but at what cost?”
Perryman is one of the researchers whose articles in California Fish and Game, a peer-reviewed scientific journal, challenge the long-held view that beaver did not inhabit the Sierra above 1,000 feet on the west slope.
Some of the most persuasive evidence in the articles comes from a beaver dam found buried along a creek in Plumas County. Samples sent to a laboratory for radio-carbon dating showed the structure was built at the dawn of the Middle Ages, around A.D. 580, and used and reused until around 1850.
Did anyone else just hear a crescendo? What a delicious lead-in to a scientific paper that would otherwise only be dustily published in a journal nobody ever heard of! Fantastic writing by Knudson, who wrote the USDA articles published earlier. If Galileo had just had a good reporter working on his side, maybe that whole helio-centrism thing might have gone better for him.
In recent days, the Taylor Creek beavers have been busy with matters of their own – gnawing down more aspen and willows to repair the dam the Forest Service tore down. By Thursday, the dam had been rebuilt. But when Guzzi returned to the site Friday, she said it had been destroyed again.
“On some level, (the Forest Service) must realize how ludicrous a situation this is,” said Guzzi. “It’s so counterproductive. They are wasting tax dollars and harassing an animal that is good for the lake and its clarity.”
And that is as good as a button as you are ever going to get out of a beaver article in the northern hemisphere. Great work Sherry! And great work Rick! Great work Thomas Knudson for seeing the forest for the beaver-chewed trees and working the recent publication into your story! It was January 24, 2010 (‘‘Don’t cause a Nativity Scene“) when I first posted about this issue and just the next month met the hydrologist from USFS at the Flyway Festival, tracked down Chuck’s phone number, and had a thrilling phone call that became a ride on the tail of a leaping dragon from there. Not a bad result for two years of effort.
A Beaver Who’s who from out meeting this year at the Occidental Arts and Exology Center: Sherry Guzzi second row second from the left, Rick Lanman, tallest man in baseball cap on the right, to his right Chuck James the archeologist who carbon tested the dam. back row left – me!
Also in that picture (and not in the article but hugely important to the process) are Brock Dolman (center) Mary Long (beside Sherry) Lisa Owens Viani (beside Mary) and Eli Asarian (one ‘s’) who did the watershed figure for the article. Every other person not mentioned you can be sure you’re hear about soon.
All in all a great delivery for a pretty timely message. Go, team California, go!
Animal activists, including those on the city’s Animal Welfare Advisory Committee, want to see councillors pass new rules for how the woodland creatures — and their dams — are handled in the city.
“Typically in London, trapping is used. That’s the archaic method,” said Deb Harris, who until last month sat on the committee and is continuing to work on the issue. “Other municipalities have employed non-lethal alternatives successfully.”
No no no, you haven’t gone back in time 5 years and history is not repeating itself. This story is from Guelph Canada. (And I just met someone who explained that this doesn’t rhyme with ‘elf’ just so you know) Ahh it brings back memories though doesn’t it?
Tempers flared in the beaver debate Monday when city staff asked council’s planning and environment committee for permission to continue trapping the animals if they pose harm to infrastructure, like drains.
That, members of the animal welfare committee, flies in the face of a June council decision requiring that administrators trap no more beavers until a report on other means of warding off the creatures is heard.
Coun. Bud Polhill, chair of the planning committee, pulled administrators’ request off the consent agenda, asking that a report come back at a later date with more information.
Members of the animal welfare group, who said they didn’t know about the staff request until late Sunday, hope that means they’ll get a chance to state their case. They’re prepared to make a report, recommending the city consider using tools to ward off the wildlife instead of removing those that pose a threat.
Oh how exciting! Tempers flaring! City staff pontificating! Passionate pedestrians protesting! Are these meetings video taped? I’d love to watch with some popcorn and a nice bottle of this…
Need more good news? The proofs came this weekend for our historic beaver prevalence articles…we are really being published – which means a century of misunderstanding is really about to be overturned!
Chris McFarling, a cabinet member of Forest of Dean district council, said: “Beavers are the most natural water engineers we could ask for. They’re inexpensive, environmentally friendly and contribute to sustainable water and flood management.
The beaver has long been thought to be non-native to the Sierra, but new evidence proves otherwise. As winter approaches, we will be working right alongside this “native” resident as it too gets ready for the cold, hard season.
