Day 2 done at last. I never thought I could get tired of hearing all the good things beavers do, but making a short film where you have to hear it over and over and over again will do it to you.
Enjoy! And please share with all your super busy friends.
Now THIS is the article that should have been in the Smithsonian. Plus a link to the California beaver Summit.
Killing is easier than paperwork
If a farmer, landowner, or property developer wants to get a beaver out of a certain area, it’s easier to kill the beaver than to apply to move it elsewhere. Across the states, it’s common for landowners to dynamite beaver dams, with whole forums dedicated to the topic and dramatic instructional YouTube videos.
In 2019, the California Fish and Wildlife Department issued 187 depredation permits to kill beavers across the state. In 2020, that number rose to 204. While not all permits are necessarily fulfilled, it’s also true that multiple beavers in a single area can be killed under one permit. Despite the fact that beavers once roamed far and wide across the state’s waterways, it’s illegal under California law to release one into a new location. Though beavers are native to the state, they weren’t recognized as such by California Fish and Wildlife until 2013.
BOOM! This is the article that she wanted to write in the Smithsonian. I’m sure of it. This is the article ALL of california needs to read. Great thinking to start with the Sierra Club.
The beaver does more to shape its environment than nearly any other animal on Earth. They can cause incredible amounts of destruction to infrastructure; downing power lines, and blocking and rerouting waterways. But their dam-building also can improve water quality, reduce flood risk, and create the conditions for complex wetland habitats to form —providing refuge for wildlife and storing carbon in the process.
“It’s not that complicated,” says Joe Wheaton, an associate professor at Utah State’s Department of Watershed Sciences, who developed the university’s BRAT project (short for Beaver Restoration Assessment Tool.). The initiative serves as a planning aid for researchers and restoration managers who are looking to assess the potential of beavers to restore watersheds. Wheaton has worked on the Tule River Tribe’s reintroduction project and many others across the States. “If you wet up the sponge of your valley bottom you have the potential to at least slow the spread, if not at least have the land act as livestock and wildlife refuge during wildfires. If you have a wide enough valley bottom, and beaver are present, it can be big enough to actually stop the advance of these wildfires. That information just needs to get out there.”
Articles like this are going to help. I can tell you that.
Dr. Emily Fairfax and the case of the missing beaver research
One thing that has been missing in the discussion of beavers and wildfires has been science connecting the two. But that is beginning to change. In 2018, Emily Fairfax, a young PhD student studying hydrological science at the University of Colorado Boulder saw a tweet posted by Joe Wheaton, of the wildfire-scorched landscape following Idaho’s Sharps Fire, with a small patch of green at the center. “Why is there an impressive patch of green in the middle of 65,000 acres of charcoal? Turns out water doesn’t burn. Thank you beaver!” wrote Wheaton.
But she found herself struggling to find any previously published research on the subject. “It was no man’s land,” says Fairfax, who found plenty of research on beavers, fish, and waterways, but none on beavers and fire. “When you try to do new research it really helps when you can stand on the work of previous scientists,” says Fairfax. “After a certain amount of time, after a question hasn’t been studied, you start to think ‘oh, it’s because there’s nothing there.’”
Instead, her leads came through people like Wheaton, and an educational site called Beavers in Brush, which aggregates information about prescribed burns, as well as rewetting the lands through beaver protection. “That made me realize this has merit, there are people who are aware that this can work,” says Fairfax “I don’t know why people haven’t studied this, but obviously this is a thing.”
Yes it’s a thing, If you pay attention you’ll realize how much of a thing. Now let’s write the article that SHOULD be written Lucy, Beaver help salmon, help drought, help erosion, help fires, help frogs. When is California going to HELP THEM?
Fairfax hopes her research will help change California’s strict rules around beaver relocation, the way policy is already changing in Washington, especially as wildfires in California have reached record-breaking levels over the past several years. In 2017, while McDarment was still trying to get permission to relocate beavers to tribal lands, the Pier Fire consumed 8,800 acres of Tule River tribal lands, including several giant sequoias.
Meanwhile, Fairfax’s research on beavers and wildfires is only beginning. “I set out to ask a question: Do beavers keep the land green during fires, yes or no?” she says. “The answer was yes. But that’s not the end of the story. Why? How? Does this happen everywhere? What if you have a tight canyon? I’m digging into the specifics now, so people can implement this and actually use beavers for fire prevention. I would love to be able to call someone up and tell them how many beaver dams they need in their creek.
Here endeth the lesson. Allow me to leave you with a special explanation of why beaver habitat is 3xs more protected from fire.
You know how you have some project that you’re working on, with little success. And you try one thing. Then you try the other thing. But nothing seems to make a dent in the problem. And sometimes you feel like it’s hopeless and you might as well just give up and go do something else entirely. And then something GIVES and all of a sudden success just falls into place all around you and you feel the ground shifting between your feet in a good way?
Many of the wetlands in the western United States have disappeared since the 1700s. California has lost an astonishing 90 percent of its wetlands, which includes streamsides, wet meadows and ponds. In Nevada, Idaho and Colorado, more than 50 percent of wetlands have vanished. Precious wet habitats now make up just 2 percent of the arid West — and those remaining wet places are struggling.
Nearly half of U.S. streams are in poor condition, unable to fully sustain wildlife and people, says Jeremy Maestas, a sagebrush ecosystem specialist with the NRCS who organized that workshop on Wilde’s ranch in 2016. As communities in the American West face increasing water shortages, more frequent and larger wildfires (SN: 9/26/20, p. 12) and unpredictable floods, restoring ailing waterways is becoming a necessity.
You’ll want to click on the headline and read every word over and over. This article is that good.
Landowners and conservation groups are bringing in teams of volunteers and workers, like the NRCS group, to build low-cost solutions from sticks and stones. And the work is making a difference. Streams are running longer into the summer, beavers and other animals are returning, and a study last December confirmed that landscapes irrigated by beaver activity can resist wildfires.
Bring back the beaver and let them do the work. Thanks Joe Wheaton for making this and a million other articles like this possible.
Filling the sponge
Think of a floodplain as a sponge: Each spring, floodplains in the West soak up snow melting from the mountains. The sponge is then wrung out during summer and fall, when the snow is gone and rainfall is scarce. The more water that stays in the sponge, the longer streams can flow and plants can thrive. A full sponge makes the landscape better equipped to handle natural disasters, since wet places full of green vegetation can slow floods, tolerate droughts or stall flames.
Typical modern-day stream and river restoration methods can cost about $500,000 per mile, says Joseph Wheaton, a geomorphologist at Utah State University in Logan. Projects are often complex, and involve excavators and bulldozers to shore up streambanks using giant boulders or to construct brand-new channels.
For smaller streams, hand-built restoration solutions work well, often at one-tenth the cost, Wheaton says, and can be self-sustaining once nature takes over. These low-tech approaches include building beaver dam analogs to entice beavers to stay and get to work, erecting small rock dams or strategically mounding mud and branches in a stream. The goal of these simple structures is to slow the flow of water and spread it across the floodplain to help plants grow and to fill the underground sponge.
Hey I wonder if that would work in California. What a crazy idea. We’re pretty special. Do you think it’s possible?
Fixes like these help cure a common ailment that afflicts most streams out West, including Birch Creek, Wheaton says: Human activities have altered these waterways into straightened channels largely devoid of debris. As a result, most riverscapes flow too straight and too fast.
“They should be messy and inefficient,” he says. “They need more structure, whether it’s wood, rock, roots or dirt. That’s what slows down the water.” Wheaton prefers the term “riverscape” over stream or river because he “can’t imagine a healthy river without including the land around it.”
Natural structures “feed the stream a healthy diet” of natural materials, allowing soil and water to accumulate again in the floodplain, he says.
Even in California? No wayyy…. That hardly seems possible! Hey maybe there should be a summit or something to teach people about this?
Beaver benefits
In watersheds across the West, beavers can be a big part of filling the floodplain’s sponge. The rodents gnaw down trees to create lodges and dams, and dig channels for transporting their logs to the dams. All this work slows down and spreads out the water.
On two creeks in northeastern Nevada, streamsides near beaver dams were up to 88 percent greener than undammed stream sections when measured from 2013 to 2016. Even better, beaver ponds helped maintain lush vegetation during the hottest summer months, even during a multiyear drought, Emily Fairfax, an ecohydrologist at California State University Channel Islands, and geologist Eric Small of University of Colorado Boulder reported in 2018 in Ecohydrology.
“Bringing beavers back just makes good common sense when you get down to the science of it,” Wilde says. He did it on his ranch.
Hell YA it does. Bringing back beavers makes dam good sense for all the places that need water and don’t like fires. This is such awesome news and divine timing. A person given to hyperbole might suddenly be given to exaltations.
Water doesn’t burn
The Sharps Fire that scorched south-central Idaho in July 2018 burned a wide swath of a watershed where Idaho Fish and Game had relocated beavers to restore a floodplain. A strip of wet, green vegetation stood untouched along the beavers’ ponds. Wheaton sent a drone to take photos, tweeting out an image on September 5, 2018: “Why is there an impressive patch of green in the middle of 65,000 acres of charcoal? Turns out water doesn’t burn. Thank you beaver!”
The green strip of vegetation along beaver-made ponds in Baugh Creek near Hailey, Idaho, resisted flames when a wildfire scorched the region in 2018, as shown in this drone image.J. Wheaton/Utah State Univ.
Fairfax, the ecohydrologist who reported that beaver dams increase streamside greenness, had been searching for evidence that beavers could help keep flames at bay. Wheaton’s tweet was a “kick in the pants to push my own research on beavers and fire forward,” she says.
With undergraduate student Andrew Whittle, now at the Colorado School of Mines, Fairfax got to work analyzing satellite imagery from recent wildfires. The two mapped thousands of beaver dams within wildfire-burned areas in several western states. Choosing five fires of varying severity in both shrubland and forested areas, the pair analyzed the data to see if creeks with beaver activity stayed greener than creeks without beavers during wildfires.
I’m breathing into a paper bag but I can’t seem to calm down at all. This is SUCH A GREAT ARTICLE and such good news for beavers. I am beside myself. What a great time to remind people that beavers matter.
Could I possibly be happier? Oh yes I could.
Jon found this yesterday behind Susana park. So yes. It is truly the very best beaver day ever. Oh and for those of you keeping track at home that’s a rock in the dam, a bottle of modela AND a crutch. Because beavers are the original recyclers.
Happy last Trump-Monday! The very air hums with anticipation. Or maybe that’s the virus, just waiting for us to get on with it already. Today is a particularly good day to be thankful that there are still a few humans in Southern California that aren’t infected, and this one we are very very happy about.
Dr. Emily Fairfax, Assistant Professor, California State University Channel Islands. Dr. Fairfax leads the BEAVS Research Group: Beavers, Ecohydrology, and Visual Storytelling.
Her current research focuses on the ecohydrology of riparian areas, particularly those that have been impacted by beaver damming. Dr. Fairfax uses a combination of remote sensing, modeling, and field to work understand how beaver damming changes these landscapes and on what timescales those changes operate. In addition to learning about beavers and Dr. Fairfax’s research, participants in this CONES will have an opportunity to practice finding signs of beaver in both on ground photos and in satellite images.
So Emily”s online course goes active tomorrow at noon, and she teaches naturalists across California why beavers matter. If you want to register you can still sign up here:
Our much beloved festival artist Amelia Hunter sent her rough sketch of what she’s thinking of for the summit logo. I’m practically panting in anticipation.
Since Martinez no long has a thriving beaver population, I get a little thrill from hearing about the fairfield beavers, or the Sonoma beavers. or the Napa beavers. We love to learn about beavers and their reception from afar. It’s the second best thing to being there.
And when England proclaims that beavers should be reintroduced or Oregon argues why beavers matter and their lives should be protected on public lands, well we live vicariously through that too. This one is from Quinn Read, the policy director for the Center for biological diversity in Oregon.
Who knew that beavers — those industrious, buck-toothed, mutant-tailed rodents — would still have such a rough go of it in Oregon?
We are the Beaver State. There’s even a beaver on our state flag. (Sure, it’s on the back of the flag, but it’s there.) Yet beavers are classified by law as predators and “furbearers,” a terrible moniker that, if applied to other species, would define salmon as meat-tubes and mule deer as antler-holders. This means beavers can be hunted and trapped across Oregon with few restrictions.
Refill that coffee cup, You just know this is going to be good.
And recently the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission rejected a petition that would have given beavers a break and closed federal public lands to commercial and recreational hunting and trapping.
Beavers rival humans in their ability to shape the landscape. Fortunately for us they do a much better job of it. In fact, we’ve spent untold millions of dollars trying to recreate what beavers do naturally.
Wetlands restored or created by beavers help mitigate the harmful impacts of climate change. Dams and ponds keep water on the landscape longer, slow water flows to prevent erosion and decrease flood damage, replenish the water table and even trap carbon.
Nice! Do trappers mitigate climate change or save water? No they do not. Say what you want about the age old skill passed on from father to son but trappers don’t increase biodiversity OR prevent erosion.
So beavers win.
During the commission’s Nov. 13 hearing, no one denied the important role beavers play in restoring and maintaining healthy ecosystems. But the group refused to have a science-based discussion on the impact of hunting and trapping on beavers and their activities.
Instead, the commission created a workgroup with a vague direction to analyze and provide guidance on beaver management without a timeline or any anticipated rulemaking. This decision ignores the fact that there is already a beaver workgroup and it hasn’t actually worked. It remains to be seen how or if this process will be different.
Beavers deserve better from the Beaver State.
The commission must be held accountable for reforming beaver management, and it must do so on a reasonable timeline. It must consider beavers in the context of climate change, the extinction crisis and water pollution and scarcity. And it cannot ignore the impact of hunting and trapping, which is under the commission’s direct authority to regulate.
No it can’t. Nor should it. Obviously public lands need to be preserved in a way that protects the interest of the greatest public good. Let’s see, in all of Oregon are their more trappers or people who drink water?
I’ll wait while you do the math.
If this commission won’t do its job, it’s incumbent upon Gov. Kate Brown to appoint commissioners who will. We need a commission that listens to science, respects the public and prioritizes conservation.
Today, with climate change bearing down on us in the form of extreme droughts, wildfires and floods, we understand that we cannot afford to turn our backs on such an important ally.
AMEN! I hope that makes the department heads squirm uncomfortably. Beavers will never win until it is in bureaucrats best interest to let the win. And I’d say columns like this help enormously. Great work Quinn.
It’s Saturday. Let’s have some more vicarious living from our friends in San Luis Obispo.
Spotting a beaver-made dam is like walking into another world, according to Audrey Taub.
“You’re walking through this sandy-dry arid environment, and then all of a sudden it’s green, lush, and full of birdsong and herons. You can even see the fish and frogs,” Taub said. “Something big is happening here.”
Taub founded the San Luis Obispo County Beaver Brigade, a local advocacy group whose efforts include raising awareness about beavers in the county and educating the community about how beavers benefit wetland habitats.
Well, well, well. This may require a second cup of coffee. And a donut. Audrey is our friend from way back and SLO is rapidly becoming the Martinez of the next generation.
The brigade is now working with Emily Fairfax, an assistant professor of environmental science and resource management at California State University Channel Islands.
Fairfax and Taub connected because Fairfax was moving to California from Colorado and wanted to find areas with beaver populations to study. She’s studied beavers her entire academic career.
A Google search led her to the Beaver Brigade, and now Fairfax studies SLO County beavers and leads educational walks to limited groups—for the time being.
Through her research thus far, Fairfax found that beavers have been present in the Paso Robles region of the Salinas River since 2013. In that time, 59 unique dams have been fairly active.
Biodiversity First! developed a university-funded grant opportunity for Fairfax and a group of students to study beaver complexes in the upper Salinas River through 2021. The grant, “Beavers, Climate Change, and Ecosystem Resilience,” will result in the first peer-reviewed study of beaver habitat in San Luis Obispo County.
This is the kind of story you want to tell your children every Christmas. Regular people banding together to make a difference for beavers and the world.
In Southern and Central California and in the Salina River, especially, Fairfax said, the most pressing benefits of beavers is their ability to create wetland habitats that are resistant to stressors like droughts and wildfires.
“The way that beavers dig channels around the landscape, ultimately, makes it so that these patches in the landscape can withstand droughts and fires because it’s so soggy. It just holds a lot of water there and keeps it green and lush even when the rest of the landscape has been put into a degraded and stressed-out state,” she said.
Over the next year, Fairfax and her student group are hoping to continue locating beaver dams, identify the number of beavers in the area, understand their activity in the upper Salinas River, observe beaver activity during droughts, and study water quality.
Hurray! Beavers get way more respect if you attach a scientist to them. It’s not the way it should be, of course. But it’s the way it is. That works because any persuasive power that can help us keep beavers on the landscape is GOOD. In Martinez it was voters and their children. But in SLO it might be science.
And when England proclaims that beavers should be reintroduced or Oregon argues why beavers matter and their lives should be protected on public lands, well we live vicariously through that too. This one is from Quinn Read, the policy director for the Center for biological diversity in Oregon.
