If people get to the right answers anywhere first about beavers its going to be in Vermont. It looked like Utah and Washington might beat them for a while but the are speeding along at a great rate. It has a few head starts including being the home of on Skip Lisle inventor of the beaver deceiver and the man who has installed flow devices across the Northern Hemisphere.. And it’s own VDFW now installs flow devices itself. It has writers like Patti Smith of the beavers of Popples pond fame and years of education and rehab provided at the BEC Ecology center. Vermont might just be the place to be if you’re a beaver.

Restoring Vermont’s Beavers: The Cheapest Insurance to Reduce Damage from Climate Chaos

Increasing the state’s beaver population can reduce some of the costs — social, environmental, and monetary — of lessening Vermont’s climate risks and can improve our state’s ecological health.

Encouraging beavers in woodlands is inexpensive and can be implemented in a few years, versus decades. If we restore beaver populations, particularly at high elevations, beaver dams and canals will significantly reduce the risk of flooding and the cost of flooding that does happen, clean natural waterways, and enhance the abundance of animal and plant life that are part of the reason many of us live here.

Hows that for an opening paragraph. You may remember that Vermont suffered terrible flooding this year and suffered damages to the tune of 2,13 billion. That’s billion with a B and fixing things for the future to get ready for more ,climate changes will cost twice that much.

And beaver? What do they cost?

Recent articles in Scientific American and Science News reinforce older studies reported in books on the benefits of beavers. Beavers can be inexpensively reintroduced to public lands and — with owner approval — private property at little cost other than moving them there. Wildlife managers can investigate potential sites with a day visit and locate the pairs of beavers to sites that meet all their requirements This greatly reduces the chance that they will wander and build dams elsewhere.

Efficient Water Management

Beaver are efficient managers of flowing water, incidentally mitigating the effects of both floods and droughts, creating conditions that favor trout and other aquatic animals, providing dry-season water for all manner of creatures, and cleaning water before it is released from their dams. As beaver ponds age, trapped silt creates woodland meadows with rich, well-drained soil that provides habitat for all sorts of animals, some of which thrive nowhere else.

To the ecologist, beaver dams provide a stockpile of pioneer forest species that could not survive in the shade of a mature forest. For the fisherperson, they improve habitat by allowing cool, well-oxygenated flowing water with flow from dams that somehow do not block migrating fish such as trout and salmon. Beaver ponds purify water by allowing soil and pollutants to settle out and by stabilizing them, and store surface water and recharge ground water. For these and other reasons, beavers are considered a keystone species, one that increases the health and productivity of the whole ecosystem.

I hope you are all taking notes because the author of this article certainly did. Honestly this should be assigned reading in every flood control, fire department and civil planning division around the country.

Storing Water in the Ground

According to author Ben Goldfarb, researchers of beaver dams in eastern Washington found that a typical beaver dam stored “an average of 3 1⁄2 acre-feet free water and at least five times that figure below ground.” Some of that is water that might otherwise exacerbate a flood. It is not unusual for folks to notice that formerly reliable springs dry up when beavers have been trapped-out. Water conserved in hundreds of beaver dams adds up to huge volumes removed from flood potential without huge risks.

A Keystone Species

Because of their ecological importance, beavers are regarded as a “Keystone Species.” Their work in creating small clearings and managing water multiplies the diversity of plant and animal species as well as their general abundance. Unlike big dams on the rivers below, beaver dams do not require expensive public bonds. Storing smaller amounts of water in many beaver dams means that damage, if any, is minimal, if one dam fails. I have personally only seen beaver dams fail when abandoned (gradually) or dynamited by an impatient landowner (suddenly). Even the dynamited dam did not overflow the stream banks where I watched water race by.

Dan Hemenway is the author of this article and I just might have to buy him a beer. Or a car. This is the kind of massive serious reporting that you expect from Slate or the Smithsonian but they are too busy scratching their heads about rodents to put together.

Where Dams are Unwanted

Sometimes beavers dam water where flooding is inconvenient to people. The Vermont “Department of Fish and Wildlife has installed … (hundreds of) flow (management) devices since 2000 at a success rate approaching 90%” at inconvenient beaver dams, according to author Goldfarb. The other 10% require removal, of course, as will be necessary in a small percentage of cases. Overall, beavers decrease maintenance costs.

Where a dam that floods farm fields is judged useful by experts in river hydrology, the landowner might be recompensed with something like a conservation easement, received in years when the land is flooded. The practice could be extended to other situations on a case-by-case basis. The population of the state as a whole benefits from flood mitigation and water conservation. The small cost of such easements is negligible compared to the reduced costs of flooding.

He even hits the paragraph I almost never read. Flow devices solve problems. Stop being a baby and suck it up and wrap trees. Or would you rather flood?

Low-Cost Alternative to Geo-Engineering

Recently a proposal to create a floodplain to protect Waterbury has been revived. The plan calls for excavating as much of seven feet of soil to trap water that would otherwise contribute to flooding. When first proposed, following Tropical Storm Irene, the estimated cost was $3 million. Today it would cost more. The owner does not want to sell. Aside from objections to most uses of eminent domain, and I have some, such projects always risk unintended effects.

For a tiny fraction of the projected cost, reintroduction of beavers could protect the entire watershed, resulting in a system of dams and other water works that would slow water flows downhill; clean water; improve habitat for fish, game, other birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians and insects; moderate all stream flow, low water as well as high; and reduce erosion. I suspect that 10% of the projected cost to mitigate flooding in Waterbury would be far more than what is needed to establish beaver-built flood mitigation for the entire Winooski watershed.

Go beaver!

Good lord I feel like I need a cigarette after that articles and I never smoked. Dan hit all the good places and knocked it outta the park with that article. Remind me to send him a thank you note.

Nature Can Still Help Us, Despite the Errors of Humanity

For some time, I have been thinking that restocking beavers in the hills and mountains of Vermont would solve many problems with minimal cost. A network of little dams that store water at elevation, in small impoundments instead of big Army Corps of Engineers scale structures, has the potential to keep the ‘Ver’ in Vermont. Manifold small beaver dams would restore springs, help forests resist fires likely to result from climate change heat and drought, decrease erosion from aberrant climate-change-induced deluges and tropical storms, increase groundwater, improve forest production far in excess of the trees beavers use, and cool the temperature of brooks and rivers. Healthy trees, with ample water for transpiration in blistering heat, can cool much of the area around them.

Excellent opening argument Dan. I’m completely invested in what you are going to write next.

While dithering about whether to suggest introducing beavers as self-regulating climate-moderating engineers, I encountered an article labeled “Beavers help climate change: Dams boost water storage and lower temperatures” while reading Science News (Sept. 10, 2022, p.8). People (and beavers) are doing it already!

Science News reports that a year after stocking beavers in the upper reaches of the Skykomish River in Washington State, “average water temperatures dropped by about 2° C” (3.6° F), “while nearby streams without beavers warmed by 0.8° C” (1.44° F), more than a 5° F difference. The beavers “raised water tables by as much as 30 centimeters” (almost a foot). The researchers estimated that the dams resulted in double the amount of water stored in the ground as was stored behind beaver dams after just one year.

That seems like a really good service. I mean isn’t there someting IN that water that wants it to stay cool?

People who fish for trout, in particular, will appreciate lower water temperatures, which are vital to trout. Not mentioned in the article is that beaver dams smooth (dampen) stream flow fluctuations. Brooks and rivers are more likely to run year round with no or less severe flooding and little likelihood of drying. Think of the Winooski River if it never dries as it runs through Montpelier as it did this year. Dampening flooding from the anticipated increase of extreme ‘rain events’ by small high ponds would help reduce river flooding, maybe making it a rarity.

The increase in groundwater not only would help the forest resist fire, it would add to the water available to forests, springs, and any wells below the beaver ponds. In my latest commentary in The Bridge (Sept. 6, 2022), I discussed the likelihood that the Montpelier area, and much of northern New England, will be a magnet to climate chaos refugees. Improving the hydrology of the slopes around Montpelier would be an excellent way to prepare for the added human stress on our environment and at least partly counter the damage from a wilder and more dangerous climate.

Well sure, If you’re going to list all those good things beavers do you’re going to make it sound like we need them. But they flooded my cousins basement! They at my aunt’s hawthorn tree! We can’t just let a menace like that run loose!

Eons of erosion ideally shaped the region’s hills and mountains for small pond construction, by beavers or people, to store water in a way that stabilizes and enriches the environment in even more ways that I’ve mentioned. Small dams are minor adjustments to the landscape; they do not pose the wholesale failure risk of large dams. Being modular, with far more potential sites than anyone would propose utilizing, they can be developed carefully and gradually without huge appropriations. Therefore, I suggest some forms of economic incentives, perhaps a rotating fund for low-head hydroelectric where, as the generators pay off, repayment money is made available for new landowner projects. I suspect that the state fish and wildlife folks would enthusiastically stock beavers if that becomes seen as a public good.

All the residents of the area, from songbirds to fish, moose to rabbits, Republicans to Democrats, would benefit from efforts to restore the health of the environment by managing the water as nature arranged before we got here. If we make the right moves, deliberately and incrementally, we can accommodate our forests, our streams and rivers, our wildlife, and an enlarged human population. If we wing it, we will likely make a mess of the change that population numbers and the waste of consumerism bring down on us.

Well said, Dan.

Beavers can help us navigate the armageddon we have brought down on ourselves. I think that’s worth having a moon named after them. Don’t you?