Making of “Big Bend: The Wild Frontier of Texas”

Filmmaker Skip Hobbie discusses his and the crew’s experience making Big Bend: The Wild Frontier of Texas. Hobbie talks about both the challenges and exciting moments while filming the animals of Big Bend, such as beavers and bears.

Ahh I remember it well. Waking up before 5 and blearily trudging down to the dam to watch the beaver family finish it’s day. Sure we didn’t have to watch out for bears of jaguars but it was still a good idea to keep an eye out for the homeless or trains. Memories!

Let’s follow that excellent film up with an exciting new article out of Maryland that contains one of my very favorite quotes of all times. I can barely wait to highlight it but I’ll be patient and give you the excellent overview first,

Leave it to Beavers: Chesapeake Bay Restoration by Nature

At the 2020 BeaverCON–a biennial, international conference held in March in Hunt Valley, Maryland–wildlife and environmental professionals gathered to learn what works in human-beaver conflict management and restoration. Following the conference, DNR staff and other partners formed a Beaver Working Group to help promote the science and understanding of beavers as ecosystem engineers and to elevate “process-based” stream restoration as a climate-resilient bay cleanup tool.

Blue-spotted sunfish

Throughout 2020, the Maryland Beaver Working Group has met virtually to discuss a path forward for beavers in Maryland–seeing beavers becoming a key player in increasing wetland acreage, improving habitat for a myriad of different wildlife species, and promoting healthy watersheds for brook trout and other aquatic species in need of conservation, such as the native coastal plain sunfish.

Well that’s very nice. Isn’t that very nice? Congratulations to Mike Callahan and Scott McGill for making this happen in the first place and for years and to Lois and Len Houston for years of conferences in Oregon for modelling good behavior.

To further the science and implementation of this relatively new approach, DNR is partnering with the Baltimore and Harford County Soil Conservation Districts and Ecotone, a Maryland-based ecological restoration company, to implement this approach in a number of degraded stream systems. This approach promotes ecological recovery with minimal corrective intervention. The partners in this effort are cooperatively monitoring existing beaver dam complexes to determine effects on stream temperature and fish habitat.

Early findings indicate that while some areas behind a beaver dam can see increased water temperature, the technique promotes groundwater recharge, resulting in an overall cooling effect on water temperatures.

Beavers can modify their environment more than any other animal except humans, and have a large role to play in combating climate change. For example, elevated water tables surrounding beaver-modified areas increase the density and height of vegetation, reducing diurnal fluctuation of water temperatures, maintaining base flow, and increasing aquatic habitat complexity. These environmental modifications created by beaver activity can be essential components to restoring riparian corridors and building resilient ecological systems which help to mitigate against the effects of land use changes, increased impervious surfaces, and effects of climate change.

That’s right. Not only is the Department of Natural Resources interested in beavers, The County Soil and Conservation District wants in too. Here’s my favorite part. Shhh.

Beaver Working Group members believe that like oysters, the beaver should be thought of as a keystone species in our restoration efforts. The difference is that the beaver is at the top of the watershed. Oysters are at the bottom. Both are equally important in maintaining healthy ecosystems. But beavers can help filter nutrients and sediments before they get into the tidal systems–leaving oysters with less work to do “filtering” the bay.

Be still my heart, Erik Michelsen of Public Works in Anne Arundel County might well be my favorite human ever. Just imagine hearing those words come out of Dave Scola in Martinez. Well a girl can dream can’t she?

Now wish me luck at Oakmont! And come see for yourself if you’re not sleeping in.

It’s rare enough in the beaver biz to come across the good beaver article. I’ve done this every day for a decade so I know how rare. Even rarer to get a great one. When those happen they are usually written be someone we know and love OR they are made palatable to the editor with a luke-warm headline.

This is because the author of the article usually isn’t who writes the headline. That’s the job for some underling whose work is more about selling stories than saving beavers, So when the perfect beaver article also has a PERFECT HEADLINE that is very, very rare indeed.

Unicorn rare.

To engineer is human; doing it right might require beavers

Duck behind a seniors’ apartment complex and enter lush expanses of ponds, wetlands and forested creek bottoms that sponsor natural diversity, slow stormwater runoff so it can soak into underground aquifers, allow natural processes time to cleanse and clarify the discharge, and reduce downstream flooding.

One side of the road represents the worst of human engineering, maximizing one thing, water removal, to the ruin of all else. The other maximizes nothing, except life in all of its buzzy, croaky, splashy, winged wonder — water as resource. The latter represents a most hopeful collaboration between humans and beavers, the animals that once engineered the Chesapeake watershed with a thoroughness unmatched even by today’s 18 million people.

Guess who made it? Who am I kidding. You know who made it.

Beavers are coming back, even to the inimical conurbation that is most of northern Anne Arundel County. Michelsen, acting deputy director of the county’s Bureau of Watershed Protection and Restoration, is my guide to what is no less than a demonstration project, with beavers themselves doing much of the construction.

For Michelsen, it was good news around 2015 when beavers started showing up on the county restoration project that enhanced the north branch of Cypress Creek here. It drains to the Magothy River and then the Chesapeake Bay. What humans began, the beavers enhanced, impounding the whole stream with a series of dams and ponds.

Until recently, the beavers would not have been embraced for their ecosystem contributions. They’d have been removed, meaning trapped and killed. That’s still too common around much of the Bay watershed.

Beavers are compelled to chew, to control their marvelous, self-sharpening teeth that never stop growing; compelled also to dam, annoyed by the sound of flowing water.

The beaver dams here were raising water levels, with a potential to flood Ritchie Highway. The county responded by installing a simple, low-tech device called a pond leveler. A sturdy metal cage toward the lower end of the pond protects one end of an 18-inch diameter plastic drainpipe.

Be still my heart. This article has the perfect content, the perfect headline AND it mentions a successful flow device? Is such a thing even possible. I need to sit down. I’m feeling faint.

Michelsen estimates there are hundreds of beavers now in Anne Arundel County.

Complaints about beavers typically run about “50/50, flooding and chewing down peoples’ trees,” said Peter Bendel, with the Wildlife and Heritage division of the state Department of Natural Resources.

“So now it’s a matter of education, teaching co-existence, offering solutions, explaining beavers’ benefits,” Michelsen said.

More fainting! Teaching coexistence and emphasizing education! Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness.

The shift toward an ecological beaver ethic remains slow and uneven across the watershed. Tools like pond levelers, abrasive paint and other techniques to protect trees are available, notably from Mike Callahan’s Beaver Solutions in Massachusetts. Callahan’s companion Beaver Institute provides both hands-on and do-it-yourself training for organizations or individuals working for a peaceful coexistence with the beavers.

We’ve scarcely begun to plumb the potential of beavers to restore water’s rightful way throughout Bay landscapes. But Michelsen has high hopes. “I am convinced that, even in a highly urban watershed, they can do wonders,” he said, “if we just allow them to work.”

Erik Michelsen is the acting deputy director of the county’s Bureau of Watershed Protection and Restoration and my new favorite human. Just imagine if such a thing existed in every county; In every watershed.

I’m getting faint again.