More Beaver Gospel from HCN

heidi08 Beaver News, Beavers, Beavers and Birds, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Who's saving beavers now? November 9, 2015

In the beginning there was the word.

And the word was beaver.

The first truly exciting article I read about beaver was from High Country News in 2009. It described the way we had forgotten what watersheds were supposed to look like and introduced me to the dynamic character of Mary Obrien, describing her ‘long think rope of a gray braid.’ I was so excited to see her on the schedule at the first beaver conference that I peeked around looking for long gray hair, and was dissappointed that there were too many possibilities to guess. It was okay, she had cut her hair by then, but we met anyway, went to lunch and next year she came to the beaver festival. Remember?

Well this morning High Country News has done it again: celebrated beaver contribution on a grand scale with an article about the much beloved Methow Project and its guiding light Kent Woodruff. I feel obliged to say that the great headline was hijacked from the Canadian version of Jari Osborne’s game-changing documentary. But the rest of the text is golden.

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:

Beaver Investments with Joe

heidi08 City Reports, Creative Solutions, Who's saving beavers now? July 3, 2014

Restoration Ecologist Joe Cannon, standing on a beaver dam in Liberty Lake Regional Park, searches for solutions when beavers become pests.

Man vs. Nature

The outdoors can be a bit hard to tame — but for restoration ecologist Joe Cannon, that’s part of why it’s worth preserving

That’s where Joe Cannon, restoration ecologist for the Lands Council’s beaver program, comes in. It’s his job to be an advocate, of sorts, for beavers — to show that, as irritating and destructive as nature can be, it’s worth protecting.

When beavers chew up a farmer’s orchard trees or wreak havoc on local infrastructure, Cannon meets with the landowners to try to find a solution. That may mean wrapping fencing around certain trees or running pipes through the beaver dam in order to shift the flow of a river.

About a third of the time, when beavers are too much of a nuisance, he traps them, brings them home and keeps them in his backyard, until he can trap the rest of the family. Then he and other volunteers transfer the whole beaver clan up to the Colville National Forest.

Ideally, though, his advocacy pays off. He’s able to convince the farmers and homeowners that beavers play a starring role in the local ecology. “These conversations are really important to have when someone is losing thousands of dollars in property,” Cannon says.

Joe Cannon of the Lands Council has earned this lovely article which emphasizes solutions, beaver benefits, and nature being natural. The Lands Council has been a beacon on the hill to beavers supporters for more years than I can count. Joe started out as an intern through Americorp for them, and it transitioned into a career. With them he has helped make national news, creative legislation, and ground-breaking policy with neighbor-to-neighbor level interventions. And they made this, which remains one of the most awesome things you’ll ever see.

Joe and Amanda came to Martinez to see our beavers in 2011. We had dinner, talked beavers and did a post mortem on that year’s festival. Then we went down and watched the beavers in person. They were both amazed at how closely and easily they could be observed. The next week there was a huge article about their work in the Wall Street Journal!

Yes, the beaver is disruptive. But that’s why it’s valuable. It dams rivers, redirects streams, digs side channels, fells old trees. A little gnawing, and — timber! — it has altered nature’s rhythm.

“They add fish habitat, they add fish streams, cover for fish and perches for birds to hunt,” Cannon says. “When they’re taking down cottonwoods and aspens, a small forest comes up from the roots.” As beavers paw at the sediment that collects at the back of their dams, they’re spreading seeds.

Great work Joe! If you’re hungry for more here’s the interview I did with him back in 2012.

Beavers:From Main Street to Wall Street!

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Beavers or Social Ambasadors, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental August 30, 2011

Finally the article featuring last wednesday’s Worth A Dam visitors is featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. What a treat! First watch the video all the way through to see what Joe and Amanda do for a living, and then go read about it here.

“We can spend $200,000 putting wood into a stream, cabling down logs. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t,” she says. “Put in a colony of beavers and it always works.”

The believers’ beavers come from places like Tumtum, Wash., where Amanda Parrish checked beaver traps one morning early this month by the Spokane River.

What a fantastic article! Thanks so much Amanda and Joe, and everybody else for the work that you do! Now if we can just get folks to see the forest for the trees, so to speak, and realize the good that beavers do everywhere, not just on ranches!

Thank you from the Lands Council

heidi08 Educational, Environmental, Friends of Martinez Beavers August 28, 2011

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Environmental, Festival, Friends of Martinez Beavers August 17, 2011

Meet Joe Cannon & Amanda Parrish from the Lands Council in Washington. Amanda is the Director of the Beaver Project and Joe is its Senior Ecologist. They came to the Lands Council as Americorp volunteers and now are golden employees running a prestigious program that California needs to copy. Together they run an all expense paid relocation resort program for beavers in Washington. I met them in Oregon at the State of the Beaver Conference where they presented on their community outreach programs and work with the public. (Amanda likes ma king candy dams with children which is a delicious way to learn ecology!) They had planned to come down for the beaver festival, but missed it by ten days. Instead they will come tonight for a meet and greet and get to sit in on the Worth A Dam post-mortem of the event.