First you find out where they are and where they aren’t. And then you do things to make them more likely to stick around, like planting trees and kicking out the trappers. And then you sit back and let beavers do the work.
U.S. Forest Service to find out just how many beavers live in the valley
A beaver census is just downstream, to be administered by the White River National Forest this summer through October.
The Pitkin County Board of County Commissioners on Wednesday unanimously approved an agreement to allocate $50,000 of the Healthy Rivers and Streams Fund to partially finance a study into beaver activity and habitats Roaring Fork Valley headwaters.
“This agreement is to investigate and implement actions to promote beaver utilization of our headwater streams up on federal land in order to promote watershed health and occupation by native aquatic species,” said Lisa Tasker of the Healthy Rivers and Streams Citizen Advisory Board.
The money will go to hire two seasonal employees to visit high-elevation sites across federal land in the valley. Clay Ramey, a fisheries biologist with the White River National Forest, said he compiled 200 randomly generated sites, including Thompson Creek, Castle Creek, Snowmass Creek, eastern Maroon Creek, Hunter Creek, Woody Creek, and the upper Frying Pan area.
Now that and a beaver festival to teach everyone why it matters sounds like a really really good idea. Heck talk to Ellen Wohl and fund a couple graduate students doing the same thing while you’re at it.
“I’m really enthusiastic about this,” Commissioner Greg Poschman said. “And it’s this sort of activity that helps, you know, turn our kids on to preservation in the natural world and protection of important resources.”
“I imagined that we might use it for getting some beavers introduced into some river areas that maybe used to have them in the past but don’t have them now,” he said. “Because I see beavers as a way of backing the water up and helping the high-elevation wetlands become more of a sponge to hold water for later in the summer. To me, it’s really a good thing to do to keep the water back and up in the high country as long as possible.”
Ecologically, beavers dams and the pools they produce allow a healthy, vibrant riparian zone in areas they might not otherwise exist. And they hold runoff water at higher elevations for longer.
Ramey said that once the U.S. Forest Service knows where beavers already live and where they would improve the ecosystem, they can relocate beavers to sites that make ecological sense.
Okay I can tell you right now where they make sense. EVERYWHERE. And including all those nice places you’re relocating them from too. Every place where you want the water cleaner.
Sure if you have some places where you want to keep the water dirty, good ahead and move those beavers.
“Beavers were native here. And so, before the gringos showed up and killed them all, there were beavers everywhere. And more or less every stream that’s less than something like 5% slope was just chock a block with beaver dams. The animals adapted to that, and the plant communities adapted to that. And the water that came out of these watersheds probably a lot slower than it did once we took all the beavers out,” Ramey said. “It’s using beavers as a management tool in this way; it’s attempting to re-create what was the existing natural, ecological context for the way water came off of the mountains here.”
Beaver dams also help in wildfire mitigation, as their pools encourage greater ground water retention and a refuge for wildlife in the event of a fire.
Once USFS has a complete data set of beavers and potential habitats throughout the forest, Ramey said that he will be able to inform Colorado Parks and Wildlife where to relocate beavers that have set up shop in residential areas.
“It’s not a beaver re-introduction project,” he said. “We’re just looking around.”
Well sure. First look around. And find out what’s currently happening in these places. Maybe streams are so damaged by the beaver shortage that you’ll need to help them along with some beaver dam analogs. Maybe there’s some scrubby places that could use a little more willow or aspen before you get a healthy beaver population.
The entire discussion was pretty congenial, even when one commissioner talked about disscecting a road kill beaver in his daughter’s fourth grade class…children love to learn about nature ya know.
