BEAVERS DESERVE BETTER SECOND CHANCES

heidi08 Beavers January 4, 2022

You probably heard the joke about the very old man who started dating a young woman a third of his age. His friends were impressed but his physician was worried. “Walter,” he advised shaking his head. “You’re not a young man. At your age, sexual activity can kill!”

To which Walter replied glibly without missing a beat “Well, if she dies, she dies!”

I actually think of this joke every time I read a report about Emma Doden and her extremely risky beaver relocation in Utah. This article doesn’t mention it but the success rate is less than 5o percent. There never seems to be any improvement in getting the beavers to live after they are moved. But the stories spin on as if there was a great accomplishment being hailed. I guess it’s slightly better than being crushed in a conibear, but for pete’s sake. The Methow project has been doing this work a long time and has some good advice about how to improve survival. Why aren’t you using their information?

Beavers Saved From Euthanasia Transform and Replenish Rivers in the Utah Desert

Beavers and their dams can positively impact essentially any environment they’re placed in, even the scorching heat of the Moab Desert in Utah. And that’s what a university researcher has achieved. (more…)

MOVING BEAVERS WINS AWARD

heidi08 Beaver ecological impact, Beavers April 15, 2021

Stick with beavers,baby. They’ll take you places.

What kind of places. you ask.Well places like this for starters.

WILD Grad Student Emma Doden Wins Prestigious Robins Award

Wildland Resources graduate student Emma Doden is this year’s recipient of the Master Student Researcher of the Year award at the 2021 USU Robins Awards. Emma studies beavers and their effects on riparian ecosystems. As part of the USU Beaver Translocation Study (a partnership between USU Department of Wildland Resources, Department of Watershed Sciences, and Ecology Center), she focuses on the movements and dam-building activities of beavers translocated to desert waterways, a particular area of research that has not yet been fully explored.

That’s right, baby. Moving beavers wins grad student of the year award. Boy howdy those beavers sure picked a winner!

In an environment where their activities may come into conflict with human beings, beavers can be regarded as ‘nuisance animals’ and are often killed. Recognizing beavers’ potential to be ‘ecosystem engineers’ and to significantly alter habitat for the betterment of wildlife and plant communities, the Beaver Translocation Study aims to see if some of these ‘problem animals’ can be put to work. Over the past two years, Emma and her team have relocated over 40 beavers (many from the USU Beaver Rehabilitation and Relocation Center in Millville, Utah) to the Price and San Rafael Rivers in central Utah. While some beavers moved away from the relocation sites or perished, the team found that many of the translocated beavers stayed nearby and built dams along these rivers.

Yes it’s a dam shame that her thesis isn’t on letting beavers be ecosystem engineers right where they are but we’ll cover that story next time.

The study will continue for the next two years, during which the team will build beaver dam analogs, man-made structures that imitate the function of beaver dams. The analogs may make conditions more hospitable for the animals to initiate dam building and call these streams their homes. Analogs have been used across North America to help return beavers to areas that have been deeply eroded. The hope is that through these efforts, beavers will create local wetlands that can elevate water tables, reduce channelization, and enhance fish habitat.

Emma would like to thank everyone who has collaborated on her work, especially her advisors Drs. Julie Young and Phaedra Budy. “Without the support of people from numerous agencies and organizations, I would not have been able to execute a study of this size and scope so successfully,” she says.

Congratulations to Emma on this honor!

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Who knew they even had award ceremonies for this kind of thing? Not I. that’s for sure. Congratulations Emma for letting people do exactly what they would like with beavers and turning it into a masters thesis! People would rather move a problem than kill it.

But they would rather do either than FIX IT.

Here’s a little award ceremony of my own I’ve been enjoying since last week.

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BEAVER MORTALITY CONFOUNDS RESEARCHERS

heidi08 Beaver relocation, Dispersal October 23, 2020

Everyone has been thinking more about the desert beavers, as we get ready for the NM Summit. Apparently it grew out of advocates wish for Game and Fish to adopt a beaver management plan like Utah’s. Of course not ALL of Utah gets the idea. Some of the regions are still chugging along without a single beaverclue.

Beavers in the Desert? The Potential for Translocated Beavers to Serve as Restoration Tools in Desert Rivers

The USGS Utah Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit at Utah State University (USU) is partnering with the Ecology Center (USU), the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Reclamation, Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, and U.S. Department of Agriculture-National Wildlife Research Center to evaluate the efficacy of beaver translocation for desert river restoration by comparing the fates, space use, and dam building activity of naturally occurring and translocated beavers in the Price and San Rafael Rivers in eastern Utah.

Beaver translocation is an alternative solution to lethal control that is gaining popularity. Beavers are taken from a conflict situation and translocated to a targeted area with the goal of harnessing their dams as a passive, cost-effective, and natural method of restoration. The challenge of translocation is getting beavers to stay, survive, and build dams in a specific area. Success of beaver translocation projects varies widely and lacks standardized best practices; failures are typically undocumented, and the cause of failure is often unknown.

Well it’s known by the beaver I dare say, but I guess that’s not what you mean.

So far, nine naturally occurring beavers have been captured and monitored, seven adult residents and two subadults, while 31 nuisance beavers have been translocated to the rivers, 18 adults and 13 subadults. All individuals were fitted with a tail-mounted radio-transmitter and a PIT- (passive integrated transponder) tag for post-release monitoring. Most (65%) of the translocated beavers have unknown fate, from radio-transmitter failure or individuals leaving the targeted restoration areas, while only 33% of resident beavers had unknown fate. Translocated beavers also experienced proportionally higher mortality (19% vs. 11%), primarily due to predation or exposure during drought. The only mortality of a naturally occurring beaver was a dispersing subadult, preyed upon by a mountain lion.

The researchers calculated the farthest straight-line distance an individual was detected from its release location to compare space use between resident and translocated beavers. Resident adult beavers exhibited an average maximum displacement of 0.58 km²and dispersing subadult beavers had an average of 42.76 km². Translocated adult beavers had an average maximum displacement of 79.13 km²and translocated subadult beavers had an average of 67.74 km².

Hmm I guess that means the relocaters got their release sight an average of 25 km wrong?

In this study, it appears that translocated beavers have not directly contributed to restoration efforts by building dams, likely due to their higher mortality rates and larger space use, spending more time traveling and exploring than remaining in an area and using their energy to construct a dam. This is similar to the behavior of dispersing subadults as they search for a new territory to establish. However, given the behavior of the translocated beavers and the wood-limited systems they were translocated into, the outcome likely would have been different if translocations were accompanied by the construction of structural features such as beaver dam analogues.

Yes it is very hard to build a maintain a dam when you’re dead. New research has shed light on the confounding effect of mortality. The researchers will remember not to overlook that fact next time? That’s encouraging.

This study also highlights the importance of post-release monitoring. If no monitoring of individual movements and behaviors were taking place, it may be falsely assumed that translocated beavers built the newly observed dams. Other studies have had varying success with translocation, but perhaps the initial results are an indicator that harsher, arid systems are more difficult for translocated beavers to establish. This could be due to poorer habitat quality, with the best habitat already occupied by naturally occurring beavers.

Those pesky beavers. We sprinkle them like table salt into dry areas and they either crawl to water or die outright. Sheesh who do they think they are?