Beaver Parenting

The beaver whisperer

The lovers are wards of the Methow Valley Beaver Project, a partnership between the U.S. Forest Service, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Methow Salmon Recovery Foundation that, since 2008, has moved more than 300 beavers around the eastern Cascades. These beavers have damaged trees and irrigation infrastructure, and landowners want them gone. Rather than calling lethal trappers, a growing contingent notifies the Methow crew, which captures and relocates the offenders to the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest and state land.

Why would Washington invite ditch-clogging nuisances — so loathed that federal Wildlife Services killed 22,000 nationwide in 2014 — into its wildlands? To hear Methow project coordinator Kent Woodruff tell it, beavers are landscape miracle drugs. Need to enhance salmon runs? There’s a beaver for that. Want to recharge groundwater? Add a beaver. Hoping to adapt to climate change? Take two beavers and check back in a year.

Decades of research support Woodruff’s enthusiasm. Beaver wetlands filter sediments and pollutants from streams. They spread rivers across floodplains, allowing water to percolate into aquifers. They provide rearing grounds for young fish, limit flooding and keep ephemeral creeks flowing year-round.

“We want these guys everywhere,” says Woodruff, a white-stubbled Forest Service biologist with an evangelical gleam in his blue eyes. On this sweltering July morning, he watches as wildlife scientists Catherine Means and Katie Weber hoist Chomper and Sandy, now caged, into the truck that will convey them to the Okanogan-Wenatchee. “We want beavers up every stream, in all the headwaters.”

Yes we do. And mouth too. (Ahem). I’m so happy this is getting the attention of the higher-ups. Kent is a mild-mannered but passionate man who makes easy alliances across party lines. I’ve always been a little jealous of him. Compared to our hard scrabble here in Martinez, the Methow project has always lived a fairly charmed life because it has SO much agency support. Here’s the list of partners in 2014:

So you can see he’s very gifted at playing well with others. One thing I love about the article is getting the back story about Kent himself;

That’s where Woodruff came in. Since arriving in the Okanagan in 1989, he’d focused on birds, installing nesting platforms for owls. But he yearned to leave an enduring legacy, and in 2008 his opportunity -arrived. John Rohrer, Woodruff’s supervisor, had been relocating beavers on a small scale since 2001 — even digging a holding pool in his own backyard. Meanwhile, the Washington Department of Ecology wanted to improve regional water quality. Woodruff thought beavers could help. He offered to expand Rohrer’s endeavor.

I never knew he was a bird man! Cheryl will be happy to read that. Now I’m a purist and want there to be a sentence in here crediting Sherri Tippie for the realization that beaver families do better when they’re relocated as a unit. But I guess saving beavers is a bit like the story of Stone Soup if you’re lucky. Everyone contributes what they can without realizing it matters and in the end helps create something nourishing.

Anyway, its a great article. Go read the whole thing, and if you feel inclined leave a comment about the valuable role beavers can play in urban landscapes.

Here’s was my contribution yesterday, which is an timely response to the articles implication that the answer to our beaver problems is to take them out of the city and move them up country. (As you know, I believe the answer is to let them move wherever they dam well please and make adjustments accordingly.) Credit where its due, the play on words comes from our friend Tom Rusert in Sonoma. But I’m fairly happy with its application here. See if you can tell what city this is:

A flooded Highway 9 in Blue River during July’s high water hearkens back to a Western landscape governed by beavers.

It’s been said that the West we’re accustomed to — the “fast-flowing streams and invitingly open banks, celebrated in photographs and songs and pickup truck commercials,” Kevin Taylor wrote in the June 2009 issue of High Country News — is an illusion. It’s a message Grand Canyon Trust project manager Mary O’Brien preached in Taylor’s story.

Janice Kurbjun

Gosh it’s nice to see a reminder of Taylor’s seminal article again after all this time. I love that it made enough of an impression to get a mention two years later. I remember being so excited to read it and learn about heroine Mary O’brien preaching beaver gospel with “her thick rope of a gray braid” that when I travelled to Oregon for the conference I scoured the 200+ attendees looking for that rope.

(I quickly realized there were far too many gray ropes to identify hers in particular, and had to wait until we were properly introduced. Now she’s coming to the beaver festival to see about starting her own in Utah, and you’ll have a chance to see for yourself!)

Looks like at least half the gospel was heard in Colorado, since everyone is willing to admit that beavers are a Keystone species but no one seems willing or able to install a flow device.

“There’s been some pesky ones up there by Highway 9,” he said of the beavers — and Blue River second-home owner Mark Ronchetti agrees. Speaking on a drive to his Albuquerque, N.M. broadcast meteorologist job, he said when he bought his 9-acre property the area was “so choked off by beavers building dams that it stopped up the water to make it like wetlands.”

He said he found 10 to 15 dams “clogging the flow” that he’s since broken up. He’s also relocated some of the architects because beavers are such hard workers, they’ll rebuild a dam within days, sometime hours.

“Without that, the house would’ve been flooded,” Ronchetti said. He’s noticed properties north of his lot that are vacant, and where beavers are happily abiding. “It’s been ignored,” he said. “I understand having beavers and habitat, but we can’t just let it go. Some wetlands is good, but there must be some control of what’s going on. The Blue River has got to be able to flow through there.”

Hmm. “We only need so much of this habitat business. A river has to get where its going, otherwise they’ll be anarchy! I can’t be held responsible for ripping families apart when there are young to take care of. I’m a meteorologist for gawdsake. Never mind that if I move THESE beavers I’ll just get new ones. You can’t expect me to think of past tomorrow’s forecast.”

Taylor called the rodent a time shifter, “having the power to extend the release of water late into summer, saturating the ground and healing watersheds. It has the power to re-create the primordial, wetter West that existed for millennia — a West we just missed seeing.”

Beaver activity can transform an ephemeral stream that traditionally runs for just a few days in spring into one that lasts for several months. The present disconnect with the beaver comes largely from the trapping era, when beavers were extensively eliminated. North America had an estimated 60 million beaver before European settlement, which eventually dropped in a century of trapping to roughly 100,000, common figures show. According to Taylor, the West held just a fraction of that. They’ve since made a comeback that beaver-restorers believe still has a long way to go.

They are a keystone species that restores riparian habitat and raises the water table. Their fur was used for felt in beaver hats, a fashion later replaced by silk hats — a shift that likely saved the beaver from extinction, according to the Colorado Division of Wildlife.

“No mammal other than humans has a great an influence on its surroundings. This is a ‘keystone species’ in riparian communities; without them the ecosystem would change dramatically,” states the Colorado Division of Wildlife. The ponds that well up behind their dams create navigable waters beneath the ice so they can be active year-round.

Ahh Kevin, we missed you. It’s great to read you again. Come to think of it your article never mentioned flow devices. That might have been a mistake. Not quite sure the state of Colorado is quite ready for your vision. They seem to be missing a lot of the point.

Further north, in Silverthorne, public works director Bill Linfield and his crew spend hours, days and sometimes up to a month in spring breaking dams at Straight Creek as it approaches the outlets and Willow Creek upstream from the Willowbrook neighborhood.

Wetlands in Willow Creek require Linfield’s crew to go in with wader and pull the dams apart “one stick at a time,” Linfield said. “By the next morning, the beaver has rebuilt the dam. It’s a constant battle.”

Which is why he’s relocated several of the beavers. This year, no trapping took place, but it’s been an almost annual occurrence since public works took on the task of protecting the outlet buildings and the Willowbrook houses.

“We don’t want to kill them. We just want them to go somewhere else,” Linfield said.

Once again for the folks at home, you want these beavers to stay just where they are. Honestly. If you move them out new beavers will move in and you’ll have to deal with this problem all over. Figure out what are the conditions you require to maintain safe roads, properties,ranches and find out what tools will allow you to have those conditions EVEN IF THE BEAVERS STAY. A flow device? A culvert fence? A dam reinforcement? Figure out the right tool(s) for the job and then build it. Then thank your lucky stars that those beavers will keep any others away.

Nice article, but missing key points of the sermon kinda reminded me of this,