Tag: Jay Wilde

REPLACING THOSE PESKY BEAVERS WITH BDA’S

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, BDA's February 6, 2023

Trust Idaho learn only part of the lesson about beaver dam analogues. They have noticed that the little dams produce really really good results for soil and fish, and have decided that the secret to having them is just to get many many people to make them by hand. Because as we have learned this year from nearly every media outlet, only human made beaver dams benefit fish and only relocated beavers can help save us from climate change.

Seriously.

Researchers try to copy beaver dam benefits

Researchers are testing artificial beaver dams as a tool to restore degraded stream systems by improving riparian habitat and bolstering the late-season water supply.

The structures, known as beaver dam analogs, cause water to pool and spill beyond stream banks, supporting marshland vegetation before seeping into the groundwater and re-emerging downstream later.

Material such as willow boughs, sediment and stone comprise the analogs, an option to restore habitat where resources are insufficient to support beavers or where the animals would pose a nuisance.

A team of researchers from University of Idaho’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences and College of Natural Resources is entering the final year of a three-year study of the concept, funded with a $75,000 grant from USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service.

75000 is a lot of money just for playing in the water! And you can bet they’ll keep right on trapping beavers while they do it. Because those rodents can seriously mess things up!

The project is bringing the colleges “to ask some of these important social and ecological questions,” Eric Winford, who is leading the project as his dissertation for a doctorate in natural resources, said in a UI release. “Across the West, we can restore some of the function beavers were maintaining in these systems by mimicking their activity.”

“There are potentially hundreds of miles of these meadows throughout the state where these could be applied,” he said.

The intermittent Guy Creek, within UI’s Rinker Rock Creek Ranch in central Idaho’s Wood River Valley, is the research site.The creek at the project’s start flowed through a deep channel disconnected from riparian areas.

Riparian vegetation can be essential for livestock, providing a verdant source of late-season forage, UI said.

Well Joe Wheaton says that this is how it starts. Get some BDA’s on the landscape and let people see what a dramatic effect they have and then when they come back complaining about maintaining them quietly remind them of the B word.

In July 2020, a group of recent high school graduates with the Idaho Conservation Corps helped the team build 65 analogs in three meadows.

The team has been using drones to evaluate gradual changes in the channel. Pools and riffles are forming, and sediment is accumulating behind the structures. Eventual gains in groundwater levels are expected as well as improvements in natural processes such as nutrient cycling.

Researchers anticipate that their stream gauges and groundwater monitoring will show the analogs build up groundwater and hold water until it is needed without curbing flows to downstream users, UI said. The state Department of Water Resources, which is interested in the research, requires anyone who installs a beaver dam analog to get a permit.

“In the lower two meadows we’ve been able to collect water samples later in the season from more pools than the year before,” said Laurel Lynch, College of Ag soil and water systems assistant professor. “It’s too early to say definitively that water levels are increasing, but it does seem anecdotally we’re pushing the system in that direction.”

She and her graduate students also are evaluating how riparian restoration influences water quality, soil carbon, microbial ecology and soil micro-invertebrate density.

That so weird, when we pay for students to make these little obstructions in the water we get more bugs and more soil and more birds and more fish and more otters. It’s such a coincidence! Can we get more students?

The team plans to host field days and workshops at Rinker Rock Creek Ranch, for public land managers and landowners.

Other College of Natural Resources team members include Jason Karl, the Harold F. and Ruth M. Heady Endowed Chair of Rangeland Ecology; and Charles Goebel, head of the Department of Forest, Rangeland and Fire Sciences.

Other College of Ag team members include Melinda Ellison, an assistant professor and Extension specialist focused on the effects of raising livestock on wildlife and range; Ellen Incelli, a graduate student studying environmental science; and Heather Neace, a graduate student studying water resources science and management.

Well I wasn’t born yesterday. I know it takes a man from Idaho to teach anyone from Idaho anything. Don’t listen to me about the workers you should really be enlisting in this effort. What do I know in my crazy golden state. Listen to Jay instead.

A NEW WAY SAVE WATER FOR CALIFORNIA

heidi08 Beaver Art, Beavers and climate change, Beavers and water September 29, 2021

You would think California would catch on, Eventually. I mean drought after drought. You would think all those almond growers would eventually wake up and smell the coffee so to speak. But you’d be wrong, California is robust in its capacity to remain ignorant.

Maybe not Oregon.

A unique way to conserve water

Rancher Jay Wilde shares how he uses man-made beaver dams to increase water availability on his ranch

PHOTO COURTESY OF BEAVERWORKS - Rancher Jay Wilde recently shared how he has used beaver dam analogues, human-made beaver dams, to conserve water on his ranch.

Rancher Jay Wilde recently shared how he has used beaver dam analogues, human-made beaver dams, to conserve water on his ranch.

As drought conditions persist locally, some members of the agriculture community were recently provided some unique water conservation tips.

Jay Wilde, a rancher in Preston, Idaho, presented “BDAs, Beavers and Bonanza on an Idaho Ranch” earlier this month at the Crook County High School auditorium. The event centered on his story of stream restoration using beaver dam analogues (BDAs) on his ranch. The event was provided by Crooked River Watershed Council and BeaverWorks Oregon.

Jay Wilde is the secret sauce on the beaver acceptability burger. If we had two of him in every state I could retire. I’m so impressed with how he talks to folks about the things they never believe me when I say them,

“This is a process that took Mr. Wilde about 15 years to finish and really implement,” Mercer said. “He had a vision of what it should be. He really felt like his land was broken, and it was his commitment and inspiration to really start healing the land.”

The Crooked River Watershed Council supports the land restoration method, highlighting several ways it could help the local watershed.

“The council believes bringing beavers back to their former and appropriate habitats increases the overall amount of water retained in the watershed, raises groundwater levels in areas associated with beaver ponds, and makes for a more resilient landscape,” said Chris Gannon, council coordinator for the Crook River Watershed Council. “Using tools such as BDAs to encourage beavers to set up a permanent presence may be necessary to create suitable conditions and bridge the time gap until they become established.”

I believe that too Jay! Let’s hope that a few people will follow your lead and convince their neighbors to do the same.

I have to end today with a cautionary tale about what happens when you have a beaver mural painted by your front door. Yesterday comcast had to come back a second time to activate the phone line they said they activated the day before. This much improved tech announced his presence using the beaver knocker which is always a good sign. And then asked about the beaver mural. And also expressed interest in the ones he had seen in town and mentioned Tim Hon and the illuminaries.

Because you see he was also a muralist. He just finished one in Antioch. And was starting one in Pittsburg, where on used to work. And no I’m not kidding. So we chatted about mural painting and beavers and keeping city leaders from interfering too much and he fixed our phone lines perfectly. Because sometimes what you love doing is not the thing that pays the bills.[wonderplugin_video iframe=”https://youtu.be/QK8fanIDBt8″ lightbox=0 lightboxsize=1 lightboxwidth=960 lightboxheight=540 autoopen=0 autoopendelay=0 autoclose=0 lightboxtitle=”” lightboxgroup=”” lightboxshownavigation=0 showimage=”” lightboxoptions=”” videowidth=600 videoheight=400 keepaspectratio=1 autoplay=0 loop=0 videocss=”position:relative;display:block;background-color:#000;overflow:hidden;max-width:100%;margin:0 auto;” playbutton=”https://www.martinezbeavers.org/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/wonderplugin-video-embed/engine/playvideo-64-64-0.png”]

IDAHO GETS A BEAVER IQ BOOST

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver ecological impact, Beavers and groundwater April 3, 2021

Forrest Gump was wrong. Life is not at all like a box of chocolates.

There are great, nouget filled days to be sure with little sea salt and almond sprinkles on top. But the saying implies that even the rotten days are still sugary sweet, And that’s just not true. Life is more like an Easter basket filled with assorted chocolates and also dotted with hang grenades and root canals.

Yesterday we tasted all of them.

The final signup numbers for the conference look really good. Better than expected even, with a new registration from Kansas fish and wildlife of all places. We stand at nearly 900 registrations, and 600 of them are from the golden state, which is everything I can hope for,

But then we saw that the scrappy newly dam built by an anonymous beaver in the park behind my house had been ripped out by city staff. Totally. You can still see the footprints where they hiked down the hill to do the deed. It feels so pointless. I almost wish I didn’t care at all because then I’d never notice and feel like this,

All the wood and mud and stone gone. The crutches and booze bottle gone. All the fresh grass on the bank dying because of the missing water and their rotten feet stomping down to the bank to wield the rake. Any hope Martinez has of being in National Geographic gone – don’t ask. Sometimes I really hate city staff.

But if the beaver is feeling like sticking around he might try again. And we also got this yesterday, which is as good of good news as your heart ever wanted to hear. If you never even watch videos on this website change your policy today because this is GOOD. And it doesn’t make up for the hand grenade and the root canal but it comes really dam close.

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GET READY FOR THE BEST BEAVER NEWS DAY EVER

heidi08 BDA's, Beaver ecological impact, Beavers, Beavers and water March 26, 2021

You know how you have some project that you’re working on, with little success. And you try one thing. Then you try the other thing. But nothing seems to make a dent in the problem. And sometimes you feel like it’s hopeless and you might as well just give up and go do something else entirely. And then something GIVES and all of a sudden success just falls into place all around you and you feel the ground shifting between your feet in a good way?

Well, this feels a little like that.

Simple hand-built structures can help streams survive wildfires and drought

Many of the wetlands in the western United States have disappeared since the 1700s. California has lost an astonishing 90 percent of its wetlands, which includes streamsides, wet meadows and ponds. In Nevada, Idaho and Colorado, more than 50 percent of wetlands have vanished. Precious wet habitats now make up just 2 percent of the arid West — and those remaining wet places are struggling.

Nearly half of U.S. streams are in poor condition, unable to fully sustain wildlife and people, says Jeremy Maestas, a sagebrush ecosystem specialist with the NRCS who organized that workshop on Wilde’s ranch in 2016. As communities in the American West face increasing water shortages, more frequent and larger wildfires (SN: 9/26/20, p. 12) and unpredictable floods, restoring ailing waterways is becoming a necessity.

You’ll want to click on the headline and read every word over and over. This article is that good.

Landowners and conservation groups are bringing in teams of volunteers and workers, like the NRCS group, to build low-cost solutions from sticks and stones. And the work is making a difference. Streams are running longer into the summer, beavers and other animals are returning, and a study last December confirmed that landscapes irrigated by beaver activity can resist wildfires.

Bring back the beaver and let them do the work. Thanks Joe Wheaton for making this and a million other articles like this possible.

Filling the sponge

Think of a floodplain as a sponge: Each spring, floodplains in the West soak up snow melting from the mountains. The sponge is then wrung out during summer and fall, when the snow is gone and rainfall is scarce. The more water that stays in the sponge, the longer streams can flow and plants can thrive. A full sponge makes the landscape better equipped to handle natural disasters, since wet places full of green vegetation can slow floods, tolerate droughts or stall flames.

Typical modern-day stream and river restoration methods can cost about $500,000 per mile, says Joseph Wheaton, a geomorphologist at Utah State University in Logan. Projects are often complex, and involve excavators and bulldozers to shore up streambanks using giant boulders or to construct brand-new channels.

For smaller streams, hand-built restoration solutions work well, often at one-tenth the cost, Wheaton says, and can be self-sustaining once nature takes over. These low-tech approaches include building beaver dam analogs to entice beavers to stay and get to work, erecting small rock dams or strategically mounding mud and branches in a stream. The goal of these simple structures is to slow the flow of water and spread it across the floodplain to help plants grow and to fill the underground sponge.

Hey I wonder if that would work in California. What a crazy idea. We’re pretty special. Do you think it’s possible?

Fixes like these help cure a common ailment that afflicts most streams out West, including Birch Creek, Wheaton says: Human activities have altered these waterways into straightened channels largely devoid of debris. As a result, most riverscapes flow too straight and too fast.

“They should be messy and inefficient,” he says. “They need more structure, whether it’s wood, rock, roots or dirt. That’s what slows down the water.” Wheaton prefers the term “riverscape” over stream or river because he “can’t imagine a healthy river without including the land around it.”

Natural structures “feed the stream a healthy diet” of natural materials, allowing soil and water to accumulate again in the floodplain, he says.

Even in California? No wayyy…. That hardly seems possible! Hey maybe there should be a summit or something to teach people about this?

Beaver benefits

In watersheds across the West, beavers can be a big part of filling the floodplain’s sponge. The rodents gnaw down trees to create lodges and dams, and dig channels for transporting their logs to the dams. All this work slows down and spreads out the water.

On two creeks in northeastern Nevada, streamsides near beaver dams were up to 88 percent greener than undammed stream sections when measured from 2013 to 2016. Even better, beaver ponds helped maintain lush vegetation during the hottest summer months, even during a multiyear drought, Emily Fairfax, an ecohydrologist at California State University Channel Islands, and geologist Eric Small of University of Colorado Boulder reported in 2018 in Ecohydrology.

“Bringing beavers back just makes good common sense when you get down to the science of it,” Wilde says. He did it on his ranch.

Hell YA it does. Bringing back beavers makes dam good sense for all the places that need water and don’t like fires. This is such awesome news and divine timing. A person given to hyperbole might suddenly be given to exaltations.

Water doesn’t burn

The Sharps Fire that scorched south-central Idaho in July 2018 burned a wide swath of a watershed where Idaho Fish and Game had relocated beavers to restore a floodplain. A strip of wet, green vegetation stood untouched along the beavers’ ponds. Wheaton sent a drone to take photos, tweeting out an image on September 5, 2018: “Why is there an impressive patch of green in the middle of 65,000 acres of charcoal? Turns out water doesn’t burn. Thank you beaver!”

Baugh Creek from above — The green strip of vegetation along beaver-made ponds in Baugh Creek near Hailey, Idaho, resisted flames when a wildfire scorched the region in 2018, as shown in this drone image.J. Wheaton/Utah State Univ.

Fairfax, the ecohydrologist who reported that beaver dams increase streamside greenness, had been searching for evidence that beavers could help keep flames at bay. Wheaton’s tweet was a “kick in the pants to push my own research on beavers and fire forward,” she says.

With undergraduate student Andrew Whittle, now at the Colorado School of Mines, Fairfax got to work analyzing satellite imagery from recent wildfires. The two mapped thousands of beaver dams within wildfire-burned areas in several western states. Choosing five fires of varying severity in both shrubland and forested areas, the pair analyzed the data to see if creeks with beaver activity stayed greener than creeks without beavers during wildfires.

I’m breathing into a paper bag but I can’t seem to calm down at all. This is SUCH A GREAT ARTICLE and such good news for beavers. I am beside myself. What a great time to remind people that beavers matter.

Could I possibly be happier? Oh yes I could.

Jon found this yesterday behind Susana park. So yes. It is truly the very best beaver day ever. Oh and for those of you keeping track at home that’s a rock in the dam, a bottle of modela AND a crutch. Because beavers are the original recyclers.

IF BEAVERS COULD PICK THEIR SPOKESMAN IT WOULD BE JAY

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beavers, Beavers and water December 15, 2020

Let’s face it. 2020 has been the poop-flavored popsicle of a year. It’s been the annus horriblis that gave us Covid, no beaver festival an the zombie election that wouldn’t die. But there are some bright spots. And this tuesday’s article from Farm and Ranch might just be the brightest spot we’ve ever seen.

Preston rancher restoring beaver to creek

Preston Rancher Jay Wilde had a dream – to restore beavers to Birch Creek.His goal was to make Birch Creek a perennial stream. And provide water – for his cattle and horses.But each time he released beavers – on his own nickel – they vanished.

“They didn’t stay. They didn’t survive or the predators got them, we don’t know,” Wilde says. “It got pretty obvious to me that I didn’t know what I was doing. As far as restoring beaver.”

Then, Jay met Joe Wheaton from Utah State University. A professor of Watershed Sciences, Wheaton specializes in using beavers and low-tech woody structures to restore streams.“They have a model called BRAT, beaver restoration assessment tool, and that identified good beaver habitat. How many dams would be supported by the habitat that’s here,” Wilde says. “I thought, finally, I’ve knocked on the right door.”

Wheaton came up to visit Jay right away to do a BRAT analysis of Birch Creek with colleague, Nick Bouwes, a professor of watershed sciences at Utah State.

“The core of it, is a capacity model,” Wheaton says. “It looks at the vegetation that’s present, and asks the question about its suitability as a dam-building material, and hydrology. Simple way to put it, beavers need water and wood.”

The BRAT analysis predicted that beavers might build 25-60 dams per mile.

Can’t you just tell this is going to be the VERY BEST ARTICLE! They should make the whole thing into a hallmark channel movie and show it every christmas. I friggin’ LOVE this story.

“Largely that’s because there’s a ton of aspen, cottonwood, other species present that they like to use for building dams,” Wheaton says.

Turns out the beavers loved Birch Creek canyon! Following the release of 9 beavers in the first two years of the project, there are over 175 beaver dams in Birch Creek five years later.

This is a story where dreams can come true. Jay Wilde showed a great deal of grit and tenacity in bringing beavers back to Birch Creek. A big silver lining is that his grand-daughter, Emily, participated in the whole project from the beginning, dating back to her high school years.

“We used to come up here every summer when I was a kid,” Emily Wilde says. “First thing, me and my sister would come up and play in the creek for hours on end, find all the bugs, and all the plants that we could. When I was 14, I understood that this is what I wanted to do, spend my life playing in the creek.”

So what could be better than restoring a creek with beaver?

“I thought it was an interesting opportunity to learn something new, expand my knowledge and find out what I wanted to do when I grew up,” she says.

Emily, right, and her sister loved to play in Birch Creek when they were young girls. Emily is a junior at Utah State University now, majoring in natural resources.

I love this. I JUST LOVE it. I can’t even find parts of the article to excerpt that I love the most because I love every single paragraph! Pinch me someone. I’m dreaming.

Jay invited key Forest Service people to meet with Wheaton to understand the potential. Wheaton suggested that they build several beaver dam analogs in Birch Creek to test out the concept. Nick Bouwes agreed.

But first they would need approval from the Forest Service – as the BDAs would be located on Caribou-Targhee National Forest land – and stream-alteration permits from the Idaho Department of Water Resources and Army Corps of Engineers.

Brett Roper, National Aquatic Monitoring Program Leader for the Forest Service, and a watershed scientist who teaches at Utah State, helped with the Forest Service environmental approval process.

“Brett got involved, and he said he’d put his neck on the line, and got them to sign off on a categorical exemption through NEPA,” Wheaton says.

And Brad Higginson, a Caribou-Targhee hydrologist, helped push the IDWR and Corps permits through in record time.

They built four BDA’s that fall, using a $3,000 grant from the Forest Service for building materials. Jay and Emily pitched in, along with Casey Wilde, Emily’s Dad and Jay’s son, and Nick Bouwes.

In 2016, they built 15 more BDA’s on Birch Creek, while Jeremy Maestas from the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) held a stream-restoration educational workshop on site. The workshop, sponsored by USDA-NRCS Working Lands for Wildlife, brought together about 40 agency biologists and engineers from around the West to learn about low-tech restoration, Maestas said.

The BDAs created inviting habitat for the beavers, Wheaton says. “They were built as a comfortable release site for the beavers, so they weren’t freaked out. And we expected them to behave like teen-agers so we wanted to have choices for them upstream and downstream. Maybe they’ll use one of those, and indeed, they did.”

Honestly I am lapping this up like a cat. And you should be too. Where can we make more Jays and dot them around the countryside like vaccines. Two in every state. Five in California and Texas.

“It’s been so fun to watch all the changes. So many positive things have happened – things I never dreamed of,” Jay Wilde says.

Forest Service officials are excited about the positive changes, too.

“So these beaver dams, they do a lot for streamflow, and they do great deal for fish habitat,” says Brad Higginson, a hydrologist for the Caribou-Targhee National Forest. “As you can see, Birch Creek before was maybe 2 feet wide and a couple of inches deep. Now you can see how deep it is, and the amount of fish that would be these ponds.”

“Another thing these beaver dams do, is they elevate the water table,” Higginson continues. “So you see a lot of storage in the channel. What you don’t see is the storage that’s underneath the land. Now, you have all of that storage that occurs during spring runoff, where there’s excess water available, and in the later summer and early fall, that water continues to feed the stream, which helps the stream flow all year long.”

So far, Birch Creek is flowing for 40-plus days longer than it did pre-beaver.

Moose are among the many species of wildlife that like the extensive wet meadow habitat created on Birch Creek. (Courtesy Emily Wilde)

Wet meadow habitat around the beaver dams diversifies the habitat for insects and birds around the stream.

Fish life has rebounded in a big way, too.

“They’re Bonneville cutthroat trout, a really pure strain,” Emily Wilde says. “So it was really important to make sure they’re doing well. I did a fish count with the Forest Service, and we caught 132 fish in this pond.”

“You get pretty excited to see something this big, it’s just shallow scrappy habitat, they’re just scraping by. And we’ve gone from a fish density of 5 fish 100 meters to somewhere around 70,” Wheaton says.

Adds Lee Mabey, a fisheries biologist for the Caribou-Targhee National Forest, “It’s like a 10- to 20-fold increase in fish out there. Fish need water but they also need habitat. The beaver ponds, they provide a lot of habitat complexity that the stream alone itself doesn’t provide — over-wintering areas, holding areas, deep-water areas, they increase the productivity of insects which means more food for the fish, all the little edge-water habitat, little beaver channels, provide a lot of nursery-type habitat for young fish.”

Color me Happy. Color me tickled pink. Honestly it really shouldn’t be better when a rancher says “beavers are good” than when some tree hugger from California like me does but it is. You know it is.

Jay Wilde’s excellent land stewardship and grazing management also made the beaver project a success, officials said.

“I can’t underscore enough how important it was that good grazing management was a pre-curser to this story,” Wheaton says. “There’s a lot of places where we go to work, and you look at the riparian, and you’ve got to fix the grazing management first. Here, that had been done, and done so well, it makes it really easy to look good.”

Jay Wilde pays close attention to how he manages his cattle. He follows the Allan Savory technique of intensive grazing with excellent results.

Jay follows the Allan Savory system of grazing management, using intensive cattle grazing on small pastures for a short period of time, and then moving on to the next pasture. He shows us an example.

“I grazed this earlier this spring, and we grazed it down really close,” he says. “And this is the recovery we’ve got.”

The vibrant grass growth on Jay’s private land stands in contrast to a different property owner to the north, and Forest Service land to the east.

“We’ve been able to make it look like this without doing any seeding, chemical treatments, it’s all been done by the way we manage the range.”

Jay uses temporary solar fence to create small pastures, and he rotates the cattle to new pastures frequently throughout the grazing season.

I hope Santa is being extra extra nice to Jay this Christmas. And Joe Wheaton. And Emily Wilde. And all the merry men and women at the forest service who made this possible. And the author of this article too who deserves special attention. Steve Stuebner we are loving you too.

Jay closely monitors the range. A series of photo-monitoring pictures shows how Birch Creek has recovered from 2001-2010. At last count, there are more than 165 beaver dams in the Birch Creek watershed.

“It’s been a dream come true for me,” Wilde says.

Jay and Joe Wheaton have held numerous show-me educational tours in the area.

Beavers aren’t perfect; they need to be managed, Wilde points out, but they have a role to play as a keystone species.

“I grew up here hating beaver, always getting in irrigation ditches, one thing or the other, creating problems. That was the mentality back then,” Wilde says.

“We have to think of beavers as our friend instead of our foe,” he continues. “It’s what you have to call a paradigm shift. There’s a lot of people who changed their mind. They decided for these watersheds to be healthy, you need beaver.”

Now Wheaton takes Jay on the road for educational workshops about restoring streams. There’s a big need for more stream-restoration projects, and it’s a powerful thing for landowners to lead the way.

“I would love to replicate Jay’s story thousands of times over,” Wheaton says. “Jay has turned into a dear friend. He and I have done workshops in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Nevada, and Idaho. Jay, telling the story, to his neighbors, to other ranchers, this is what it means to him and his operation, it’s been huge, it’s inspired a lot of people.”

“I think there’s a chance that this will start growing really quickly,” adds Emily Wilde. “It’s incredible easy to implement. It can be pretty widespread if you want it to be.”

Ohh be still my heart. I love this. I love every single sentence and and quote. I love the punctuaton. Who ever you’re friends with that can NOT understand for the life of them why you’re so crazy about beavers, send them this.