Some days there is so little beaver news that I am left sorting through my ragged thoughts and trying to find something new to say about them. This week has been a beaver explosion, so I can barely keep up. First there is the smart new beaver page out offered by Esther Lev of the Wetlands Conservancy and some graduate students who accepted the beaver challenge. You will have fun browsing the projects. Use the link to visit the site which connects to each project. I’ll let them describe the ‘zine’ themselves.

During the 2017 Winter Term, eight graduate students from the Master of Urban and Regional Planning, Master of Fine Arts, and Master of Environmental Science and Management programs at Portland State University engaged in a study of beavers in the Pacific Northwest. The question was whether better understanding the beaver could help us understand more about the culture, identity, and character of the Pacific Northwest, particularly for those of us engaged in planning and other activities with and for communities in the region.

The project had two components. First, each student identified a topic associated with beavers, and developed a research paper that explored that topic. All of those papers are posted here for your use and enjoyment. During the term we read Frances Backhouse’s Once they were Hats, her very informative and engaging book about beavers in North America. Thanks to Esther Lev, Wetlands Conservancy Executive Director, and Sara Vickerman Gage, we were able to spend a morning discussing the book with Frances Backhouse. We gratefully acknowledge the importance of both Frances’ work and her presence in the class with us. If you are interested in and/or care about beavers, do read her book!

Second, each student used their paper as the point of departure for creating pages for a class “zine” about beavers. A zine is a short, self-published, and mostly hand-crafted magazine. Usually combining words and images, the zine form attempts to both transmit information to and engage the imagination of the reader. Preliminary research in Portland revealed hardly any zines about or featuring beavers. We aimed to fill that void, at least in part.

TWC is who had me talk in Portland last year and is responsible for the art show “Beaver Tales” that is in its second venue. They are doing beaver-work wonders. I am thrilled that they’re on the scene and that all these students will remember beavers in their masters training.

A second exciting development came from our beaver friends in the Czech University of Life Sciences. They recently completed the English translation of their ‘living with beavers’ guidebook. There is a lot of great info on management and history, so I would take some good time to browse. There’s a great discussion of tree protection and flow devices, as well as some pretty creative solutions for preventing bank burrows. Enjoy!

There’s a fair bit of good news for beavers this morning, first this report from Calgary;

‘He’s quite shy’: Beaver sightings on the rise in Calgary

You notice that despite the city’s goal of ‘coexistence’ they still managed to find a few folk who call beavers pests for the interview. Journalism! Then there was this lovely article from Oregon yesterday. When it was published it had the photo listed as ‘courtesy’, I wrote the managing editor that we weren’t feeling particularly ‘courteous’ and he needed to change the credit immediately. All better now enjoy.

Nature’s engineers

While some see the beaver, officially a semiaquatic rodent, as destructive, beavers are “woefully misunderstood,” says Esther Lev, the executive director of The Wetlands Conservancy, a statewide group based in Portland.

Beavers got more than their usual share of attention in May, during the 24th annual celebration of American Wetlands Month. The beaver was a headliner this year.

The North American beaver (Castor canadensis) — Oregon’s official state animal — possesses an instinctual work ethic that is closely connected to the way it builds its habitat. Beavers create stick-and-branch structures with underwater entrances for protection from predators, and in the process expend an enormous amount of energy gnawing and gathering wood. If their lodge gets destroyed, they’ll rebuild twice as fast and twice as sturdy.

Lev, a widely respected expert in wetlands education and conservation with more than 30 years of experience, says beavers make a multitude of important contributions to our ecosystem. “Beavers not only create wetlands, but also create spawning and rearing habitat for salmon and steelhead,” she says. “Their ponds help filter water and moderate fluctuations in water flow downstream.” They also provide habitat for a wide array of insects, birds and amphibians.

While research shows that beavers make ecosystems more complex, they’ve long been incorrectly blamed for flooding, Lev says.

She calls them “nature’s hydrologists.”

Streams and rivers where beaver dams are present show high clarity and low pollution levels. As beavers build their dams across waterways — with their lodge at the center of it — a pond is created. As the water flows and filters through the dam, water quality improves and nutrient-rich sediment collects in the bottom of the pond, creating a food source for bottom feeders. Eventually, the beavers move on, their dam breaks down, and the pond slowly percolates into the surrounding terrain, leaving behind a lush meadow composed of nutrient-rich soil.

Studies suggest that there are a number of species whose survival is dependent on beavers’ “engineering” their environment. Typically, when beavers fell a tree, more light gets to the forest floor, which, in turn, helps remaining trees grow and thrive. Better light also encourages a diversity of plant life. And as the remaining stump grows new shoots, that serves as food for moose and elk.

Research shows there’s a greater abundance of birds, reptiles and plant life in areas inhabited by beavers. Migratory birds prefer the safety of landing on beaver-created ponds to open bodies of water.

Fantastic article! And following nicely on the heels of the Portland talk. Lev is the woman who was grateful my talk ‘ wasn’t delivered by a biologist’. So I know she received excellent reminders of beaver value in the landscape fairly recently if she needed them. I’m so old I can remember when talking about beaver benefits raised many an eyebrow, now we get two examples on the same day! What will tomorrow bring?

But the very best part of yesterday had to be this, which almost brought me to tears when I opened the door. That beaver and I have been through a lot together.