BEAVERS FINALLY SWIM INTO BAY NATURE

heidi08 Beavers December 22, 2023

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.

BEAVERS COULD MAKE US SMARTER

Whenever I see an article with a headline like “Smarter ways to work with water” I am like a hound who catches a whiff and suddenly springs to attention. Or maybe one of those busy body old ladies who sit by their widow and lower their bifocals when they see that woman pulling up in the driveway with another new man.

I pay attention, but I don’t always expect to be please by the result.

Smarter ways with water

People need to find better and more productive ways to become allies with water — which might mean giving it space for its processes.

With mounting climate-fuelled weather disasters, social inequality, species extinctions and resource scarcity, some corporations have adopted sustainability programmes. One term in this realm is ‘circular economy’, in which practitioners aim to increase the efficiency and reuse of resources, including water — ideally making more goods (and more money) in the process.

Okay, I admit when I saw that the author was Erica Gies I got a lot more hopeful.

Working with wildlife

Taking a holistic approach is also paying off in Washington state and in the United Kingdom, where people are allowing beavers space for their water needs. The rodents in turn protect people from droughts, wildfires and floods. Before people killed the majority of beavers, North America and Europe were much boggier, thanks to beaver dams that slowed water on the land, which gave the animals a wider area to travel, safe from land predators. Before the arrival of the Europeans, 10% of North America was covered in beaver-created, ecologically diverse wetlands.

Environmental scientist Benjamin Dittbrenner, at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, studied the work of beavers that were relocated from human-settled areas into wilder locations in Washington state. In the first year after relocation, beaver ponds created an average of 75 times more surface and groundwater storage per 100 metres of stream than did the control site⁹. As snowfall decreases with climate change, such beaver-enabled water storage will become more important. Dittbrenner found that the beaver’s work would increase summer water availability by 5% in historically snowy basins. That’s about 15 million cubic metres in just one basin, he estimates — almost one-quarter of the capacity of the Tolt Reservoir that serves Seattle, Washington.

I always have time to stop and enjoy a good Ben Dittbrenner reference. Yes lots of beavers doing their things all over would increase our available water. And help wildlife. And act as fire reduction. And reduce nitrogen.

But don’t listen to me.

Beavers have fire-fighting skills too, says Emily Fairfax, an ecohydrologist at California State University Channel Islands in Camarillo. When beavers are allowed to repopulate stretches of stream, the widened wet zone can create an important fire break. Their ponds raise the water table beyond the stream itself, making plants less flammable because they have increased access to water.

And beavers can actually help to prevent flooding. Their dams slow water, so it trickles out over an extended period of time, reducing peak flows that have been increasingly inundating streamside towns in England. Researchers from the University of Exeter, UK, found that during storms, peak flows were on average 30% lower in water leaving beaver dams than in sites without beaver dams¹⁰. These benefits held even in saturated, midwinter conditions.

Beaver ponds also help to scrub pollutants from the water and create habitats for other animals. The value for these services is around US$69,000 per square kilometre annually, says Fairfax. “If you let them just go bananas”, a beaver couple and their kits can engineer a mile of stream in a year, she says. Because beavers typically live 10 to 12 years, the value of a lifetime of work for two beavers would be $1.7 million, she says. And if we returned to having 100 million to 400 million beavers in North America, she adds, “then the numbers really start blowing up”.

But we love our pollution! We would so miss it! Said no one ever in the history of the world. Why not let beavers do what beavers do and start off on the right foot?

For the most part, mainstream economics doesn’t take into account the many crucial services provided by healthy, intact ecosystems: water generation, pollution mitigation, food production, crop pollination, flood protection and more.

Yup. We don’t put a price on the good things beavers do and what it actually cost us to continue killing them the way we do.. If we did it would blow our frickin’ minds.

BEAVERS ALWAYS WANT WATER TO WIN

heidi08 Beavers and water August 28, 2022

I pledge allegiance to the streams
and the beaver ponds of America
And to the renewal for which they stand,
One river, underground, irreplaceable
With habitat and wetlands for all

I’ve been hearing a lot about this book lately, and coming across beaver believers who recommend it highly. So I thought we should spend some time thinking about it. The author Erica Gies is an author and accomplished journalist. She’s the kind of women who’s seen things all around the world, so when she talks, we should listen.

Reflections on the extraordinary power of slow water

For her new book, Water Always Wins, National Geographic Explorer Erica Gies criss-crossed the globe, witnessing some of the unanticipated results of modern society’s preference for engineered solutions.

The tendency to hem water in and wrestle to alter its natural course with enormous dams and ever-higher dikes, straightened rivers and hardened shores often exacerbate the symptoms of global warming, the environmental journalist found.

But an array of microbes, animals, and communities enjoy beneficial relationships with this vital element by harmonizing with water’s wishes, Gies discovered. As such, her book explores hopeful and resilient approaches to working with water that respect its natural flow and rhythms, with positive outcomes for humans, biodiversity and the climate.

Hmm. Got your attention yet? What does water want? Well might you ask young Jedi. It almost always has seemed to me that water wants the freedom to move where it chooses and rest when it feels like it. But Erica has different ideas.

“Basically, what water wants is a return to its slow phases that we have dramatically eradicated with much of our development,” Gies said.

As much as 87 per cent of the world’s wetlands have been eradicated since the 1700s, and humans have heavily encroached on floodplains worldwide, risking homes and businesses should water reassert its return, she said.

There are so many examples of the folly associated with interfering with the natural filter, trickle or spread of water, Gies said, pointing to California, the poster child of perpetual drought.

“California is arguably the apex of water engineering hubris,” Gies said.

Now that’s interesting to me. I never thought of California as spectacularly worse than any other large state at managing water. But maybe because are so long. From wet to dry. I wonder if the reason California pretended to forget it had beavers was because it needed to focus on its own water management needs and get theirs out of the way.

Since the mid-19th century, the corralling of two great watercourses, the Sacramento and the San Joaquin rivers, has eliminated the historic annual flushing of the Central Valley — once a vast floodplain — drying it out and denying vital aquifers below an opportunity to top themselves up, she said.

Compounding the problem, the rivers’ water is funnelled vast distances across the state while the region’s groundwater is heavily tapped to fuel California’s vast agricultural empire — helping in part to create a critical shortage of water in areas where it once existed in abundance.

Surface water and groundwater are mutually entwined, Gies said.

“We have deprived the natural recharge that happens when the water slows on those lands and moves underground,” Gies said. And in reverse, stressed aquifers can’t help recharge rivers and tributaries at the surface during the dry season.

“For a long time, California had this sort of political attitude that they were dealing with two separate sources of water that could be regulated independently, or in the case of groundwater, not regulated (at all).”

Yes I guess we did forget that all water is the same. And that when you deplete one bank you run out of funds in the other. You know who didn’t forget? Beavers that’s who.

“But beavers are incredibly important for the health of the hydrological cycle, and they’re being used in different places around the world to help protect against drought, wildfire and also flooding.”

Gies dedicates a full chapter to the multitude of ways we can better our relationship with water by relying on and living with beavers.

The skill of these once ubiquitous mammals has been recognized by U.S. authorities, who on various occasions in the past parachuted beavers into wilderness areas to restore watersheds.

Slow-water projects, principles, and solutions are unique to each location, community, and culture, she added. But there are some common principles.

“I think it’s really about respecting water and appreciating the benefits that collaboration can bring.”

Can I get an amen? I know why Stanford referred to you in its water in the west study. You can see the writing on the wall. And it’s been written by beavers.

WILL SOME ONE PLEASE TELL “BAY NATURE” ABOUT BEAVERS?

heidi08 Beaver ecological impact, Beavers and Flooding, Beavers and water February 3, 2022

Rusty Cohn of Napa alerted me to an interesting interview with Erica Gies in KQED last night. It was all about finding the ancient prehistoic waterbeds that used to flood the central valley and solve California’s rain problem year after year. I was particularly struck by this quote: