If corporate America ever got it’s hands on you. you haven’t escaped the mandatory office ‘baby pool‘. Some secretary or project manager was having a baby and everyone chipped in to ‘sign up’ for their official prediction of sex or birth date The best ones include complex details like ‘where she’ll be when her water breaks’ or other assorted privacy intrusions. The winner of course gets all the pooled cash and feels very smug for an entire day.

I’m beginning to think we should do a similar pool – Only one that asks participants to predict which state will be the very last to proclaim that beavers are beneficial. Since we had beaver heroes in already Kentucky and even in Tennessee this year, and a prominent spokesman in Oklahoma last year, my money is still on South Carolina.

Or California.

I guess you can officially cross Montana off the list. This morning’s guest column in the Missoulian from retired forest service fisheries biologist Greg Munther makes that clear enough.

Beavers can mitigate climate change effects

The newly released National Climate Assessment should be a wake-up for even the ardent skeptics. Climate changes will negatively affect our well-being, economy and our natural resources. The warmer climate here in Montana will have less snowpack, and that diminished snowpack will be gone sooner each summer. Longer and hotter summers mean surface water temperatures will also dramatically increase. For irrigators, a longer, hotter summer with diminished water will reduce crop and pasture production. For cold-water fish, it means more streams going dry, and waters too warm and even lethal for trout, especially for threatened bull trout. These changes will adversely affect the agricultural economy as well as the fishing and tourism economy. It will affect why we live here.

One of the most cost effective, available mitigation tools is restoring beaver in all suitable headwater streams. For too long, we have often relegated this obscure rodent to nuisance status.

Greg! I’m liking where this article is headed. I can’t believe we aren’t already friends, but I know we’ll get along famously. You are in an excellent position to be heard and make a difference.

Where beaver are present, their dams moderate floods by holding water until it seeps into the streambanks as water storage. Beaver colonies can store 30 percent of floodwater in streambanks to return to the stream later in the summer when it is most beneficial. This water storage benefit is realized both to reduce peak flows, and later in the summer this stored water is slowly released back into the stream. This provides more summer water for both fish and irrigators. The bank stored water is also significantly colder so it reduces the trout bearing waters temperature for trout. A single beaver pond can make some difference, but collectively enhanced beaver activity across Montana can be a huge mitigation measure.

Here here! Imagine the good things beavers could do for any state if we just stopped killing them long enough to let them!

The dams and ponds the beaver build and maintain at no cost provide benefits to both man as well as wildlife. Moose, in serious decline across Montana, benefit from the enlarged waters and succulent riparian vegetation. Other furbearers, including otter and mink, benefit, as do waterfowl, songbirds and amphibians. Trout, including bull trout, overwinter in the quiet, deep beaver ponds and juvenile trout congregate in beaver ponds.

To ensure beaver can do their work to mitigate climate change, we need to modify trapping regulations and improved streamside vegetation management to assure beaver can occupy habitat. Let’s let beaver do their work.

Ho ho ho. Merry Christmas! This is just the article I asked Santa for, and from just the kind of place I like to see it best. Montana had the good sense to re-elect senator Tester and I see it has the wisdom to recognize a friend when it sees one.