Tag: Joe Wheaton

LETTING BEAVERS DO WHAT BEAVERS DO IN COLORADO

heidi08 Beavers May 10, 2025

All of Colorado is just bursting at the beaver seams. In addition to hosting their own beavercon this year, and their first beaver festival this summer, they are working hard to let actual beavers do their actual jobs.

Leave it to Beavers: Cross-species collaboration may help restore wetlands

Envision Chaffee County held a conversation on Apr. 23 with the leader of an ecological initiative that hopes to restore wetlands in the Fourmile Creek area, which, in addition to restoring biodiversity in the region, may prevent sediment from accumulating in downstream reservoirs.

Ecologist Mark Beardsley, principal with EcoMetrics and the Colorado Open Lands project Riparian Reconnect, shared his enthusiasm for the hydrological engineers of rodentdom at a talk at the Buena Vista Community Center on April 23.

“We said, gosh, how can we control all the sediment coming down into the Arkansas River? Because that sediment sometimes kills fish and kills aquatic bugs and fills up reservoirs with gunk,” said Envision Chaffee County executive director Cindy Williams. “Mark helped us figure out that really the best way to control sediment is to enhance wetland using beavers … We’re super excited about the project. I mean, big picture. I think this is probably the most notable and the coolest project of its kind in the state of Colorado. It’s given a lot of attention from all over the state, from a lot of people. It’s an opportunity to prove that this really works.”

Beardsley said that he initially expected to see resistance to wetlands restoration from owners of large water rights, as wetlands lead to greater evaporative water loss compared to simple streams.

“The fact that these sediment dynamics are in play and these trapping mechanisms are there has gotten the attention of very important people, the types of people that originally scared me as people that wouldn’t be interested in this,” Beardsley said. “Colorado Springs Water, Denver Water, (Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District), these people are all in, starting to invest in headwaters restoration and restoration of this type.”

A “majestic animal” in Beardsley’s eye, beavers are awkward on dry land but highly adapted to living in the water. A keystone species, they engineer their environment to suit their needs. When they build dams in simple streams, the water pools and floods outward rather than continuing to deeply incise a single narrow channel in the earth, raising the water table and allowing a riparian ecosystem to thrive.

Let beavers make their way in YOUR world too. They leave some truly epic footprints.

“These high elevation streams and wetlands wouldn’t be what they could be if it wasn’t for beavers. That point became exceedingly obvious the longer I spent looking at them,” Beardsley said.

When Europeans came to North America, they began hunting beavers for their thick pelts. The fur trade was a prime driver in the expansion westward and the North American Beavers were hunted nearly to extinction. Beardsley compared the extirpation of beavers to that of the bison.

The demand for beaver fur waned as silk began to replace it and beavers slowly but surely began to return. That brought them into conflict with humans.

“Other than humans, I’d say beavers are probably the most adept animals at changing their environment for their own use. They’re good. We call them ecological engineers. And so many other living things have adapted to live with the work that beavers do. But they don’t know that the areas that they’re coming back to, we may have already got other ideas about how that should be managed,” Beardsley said. “We’ve grown up with generations now that are thinking of these animals as pests, as nuisance animals. And they’re kind of still sort of classified that way, according to the state of Colorado.”

Beardsley hopes that the human-beaver relationship can move on from competition to collaboration, with people relying on the large rodents “as partners to restore some of these waterways that have become damaged.”

“This activity – building dams, blocking of water – that gives them these places where they can swim and get from food to shelter and all these places they need to go without having to waddle around like an awkward duck,” Beardsley said. “I almost said we could take advantage of that, as wetland restoration practitioners, and we kind of do, but I like to think of it as we partner with them. They get to do what they want to do. We get something out of it too.”

It’s a win-win whenever you cooperate with beavers. That’s for certain.

Not only do the dams capture sediment, but the wetlands they create can also help contain wildfires.

“Joe Wheaton, a famous beaver scientist, explains that very complicated thing in three words: ‘Water doesn’t burn’,” Beardsley said.

How would Joe the hydrologist feel about being called a famous beaver scientist? Well he’d like the word famous anyway.

Because of this, wetlands act as safe havens for animals during wildfires.

“This is the place where you hide, if you’re an animal. This is what spawns back, the regeneration of these habitats,” Beardsley said.

What EcoMetrics has been doing in Fourmile over the past several years is beaver mimicry: building beaver-like dams in waterways like Fourmile Creek to create wetlands and, more importantly, to invite beavers back into the area to build their own dams, showing the primates how it’s done.

Using historical aerial photography, Beardsley can infer where beaver populations are along Fourmile Creek and its tributaries by identifying the ecological footprint of beaver dams and lodges. He has identified 22 sites in Chaffee County that were once beaver habitats that are ripe for restoration.

“Our aim is, with Colorado Open Lands, to develop up to six projects to start moving forward on in the future,” Beardsley said. He’s been working on the Fourmile watershed project since 2017.

The impact of this kind of work over time can be seen along the road over Trout Creek, whose riparian zone was restored through a project by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933.

Before the project, the area around Trout Creek was described “as this completely denuded, decimated, destroyed landscape,” Beardsley said. A team of hundreds of workers built thousands of small dams along the waterway.

“Then they were seeding it, and they were riparian planting,” Beardsley said. “Another reason I think it worked is because beavers found it, and beavers keep finding it, and they’re maintaining it now.”

Here, we’ll take it from here Mark.To quote a famous beaver scientist, “Let the rodent do the work.”

Enos Mills would be so proud!

“MESSINESS IS GOOD IN ECOLOGY”

There are articles about the installation of BDA’s that fill my heart with dread: clearly when real beavers stroll into the project they will be trapped outright because they’re destroying their trees or ruining their hydrological experiment. But every now and then one comes along and makes my heart sing…

Returning to past practices for future water management

In 2014, John Coffman arrived in Wyoming as The Nature Conservancy’s new steward for the Red Canyon Ranch and quickly encountered an unforgettable lesson. “We were trying to figure ourselves out on some new country and trying to make sure we were on top of getting the hay meadows irrigated. An intern was having trouble with a beaver plugging a headgate,” he says, preventing water from getting to the fields. They opted to get rid of the pesky beaver, as agricultural operations have done for a long time.

The following year, high spring flows washed away bridges and crossings from the fields, forcing Coffman and his team to restore irrigation ditches and pipes, a resource-intensive process. In a different part of the ranch, however, a stream system that still had beavers showed more resilience to the spring flows. “Instead of those streams eroding away, the [beaver] ponds slowed everything down,” says Coffman. “The ponds filled with sediment and are now growing willows and lush grasses.”

Seven years later, during a mid-July visit, Coffman showed me this historic beaver complex, still thriving after those floods. For twenty feet on either side of the stream, floodplains were green with grasses, willows, goldfinches, and a rattlesnake we were lucky to hear first. Coffman chuckled; he had cautioned me earlier that they’re after the rodents abundant in the area. Four beaver dams bridged deep, still ponds. The beavers built with no regard for clean, neat lines or straight waterways—challenging my understanding of what streams should look like.

After the consequential floods in the spring of 2015, Coffman says, “We came to the observation that there were some serious benefits to having beaver dams and beavers in place.” This beaver complex serves as a model for the conditions that he hopes to restore several streams to. Across an increasingly parched and degraded West, land managers and researchers seeking effective and efficient water management solutions may benefit from the same realization. Perhaps, it’s time to end recent antagonism against beavers and instead form an alliance with nature’s most effective, once prolific waterway engineers.

Wha-a-a-a-t? You mean maybe the beavers had the right idea all along? And maybe when you work for the freakin’ Nature Conservancy you should know better than to kill them anyway? Isn’t that funny? It’s almost like beavers know more about how a stream should work than YOU do!

“None of us in our lifetimes have seen how common beavers would have been,” says Niall Clancy, a PhD student at the University of Wyoming surveying fish diversity in beaver ponds. Before the arrival of Western settlers in the early 1800s, there were as many as four hundred million beavers in America, creating wetland mosaics that covered almost three hundred thousand square miles of land in serene greens and glittering blues. Beavers dam up slower streams to form deep moats around their homes, creating refuges not only for themselves, but also for plants and animals that rely on, and co-evolved with, these dam structures. Series of dams spawn floodplains, wetlands, and ponds—so called “beaver complexes.” Sheltered pools of standing water provide safety for young fish, invertebrates, and amphibians. They are also havens for threatened or rare birds, like sandhill cranes. “The more complex the types of habitats you have, the more types of wildlife you can support,” Clancy says. “Messiness is good in ecology.”

Messy can also be how land looks when humans are stewards. “When we think of the past, we need to add Indigenous people,” says Rosalyn LaPier, faculty in the history department at the University of Illinois and enrolled member of the Blackfeet tribe of Montana and Métis. “When the first settlers arrive in the West, what they are seeing are these ecosystems that have co-evolved with plants, animals, and humans.” To survive in water-limited environments, Indigenous communities living between the plains and Rocky Mountains studied and manipulated natural processes. LaPier says that they managed beaver populations to manage water; beaver ponds provided a water source for Native peoples as well as the animals they hunted. Beavers were so important that the Blackfeet considered them sacred and divine. Thus, humans developed a close, symbiotic existence with beavers and their natural worlds.

Isn’t funny how the white man moved in and displaced all the “primative” natives and built their farms and factories and ultimately their universities so that their masters candidates can suddenly report that science shows that maybe those backwards peoples weren’t so backwards after all?

It’s almost like people who lived in harmony with the land for thousands of years knew something we didn’t.

In their places are thousands of miles of down-cut streams like the ones that caused Coffman and his team so much trouble a few years back. In straight, unobstructed waterways, controlling transportation to agricultural fields is the main objective. The force of water travelling quickly does not allow water to collect in the soil or for nutritious sediment to be deposited, so incised banks become unable to support plant life. Without roots to hold the banks together, exposed soil dries and crumbles in the heat of summer, eroding the streambanks.

Braided stream systems shrink to a single water channel, drying the surrounding land. This cycle eats away at floodplains and wetlands, which otherwise accumulate nutritious sediment, retain water underground (resisting evaporation), and promote biodiversity. With nature’s “sponges” gone, water and nutrients wash out to the ocean, leaving behind arid land and lost habitat.

Reconnecting waterways, reducing erosion, and replenishing groundwater is difficult and expensive. When I asked Coffman about solutions for managing and retaining water on Red Canyon Ranch, he emphasized the hefty costs of bringing heavy machinery and hiring engineers and landscape architects. Such disruption could also set back ecological processes, displacing invertebrates, mammals, and birds alike. The integrity of the ecosystem could take years to recover. Not to mention the challenge of maintaining such an elaborate construction when faced with the unpredictable nature of rivers and streams, which change their courses over time. All in the hope of mimicking the effortless effects of floodplains and wetlands.

Nationally, hundreds of millions of dollars have been allocated toward the labor and materials required to develop water resiliency projects in the West alone. These interagency developments prioritize the storage and protection of water in reservoirs and groundwater, as well as the restoration of wetlands and waterways. Though this large sum recognizes the importance of restoring ecosystems, humans cannot accurately replicate natural processes.

“What [modern] restoration practice has done is borrow from empirical observations and produce average conditions. We are crap at designing for variability and complexity,” explains Joe Wheaton, an ex-civil engineer studying nature’s engineers at Utah State University. Nature, he says, does not adhere to averages but is rather unpredictable. The movement of water and how streams change course are challenges that researchers and engineers cannot account for. Unlike scientists, though, beavers instinctually adapt to and engage with the changing courses of water. They foster jigsaw ecosystems, supporting critters that are co-dependent on one another in ways that scientists often overlook and would be hard-pressed to reproduce. That makes beavers cost-effective tools for maintaining and helping manage the natural water systems that so many people, industries, plants, and animals rely on. For Wheaton, beavers are tools of restoration that engage natural processes, balancing the “mismatch between effort and scope of problem.”

In the most degraded waterways, beavers and their accompanying biodiversity will not return on their own, but we know how to entice them. Clancy’s team facilitates the return of beavers by installing beaver dam analogs, commonly called BDAs). He and his collaborators strategically select for where a beaver’s work is required, targeting heavily eroded streams devoid of life and too deep for cattle to cross. Spanning the width of these channels, they weave sticks and logs, and pack mud to mimic dams. These barriers slow the force of water as it moves downstream while creating pools, the goal being to create a habitat appealing to beavers. Should beavers move in, they build upon and maintain these structures without need for human labor and constant surveillance.

And planting willow right? Lots and lots of willow.

In places where beavers have been reintroduced, ranchers and researchers alike have seen streams flowing anywhere from an extra week to an extra month. Beaver restoration can also replenish groundwater, often a key source for municipal water use. Meanwhile, burying plant materials during the damming process sequesters carbon, preventing it from entering the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas. And in some once-degraded sites where beavers have been successfully introduced, their restoration effectively increased the variety of habitats and the abundance of critters they could support.

Exploring a symbiotic relationship with beavers is still a new but growing practice that has not been without challenges. Coffman says, “Since that situation years ago, we got beavers back creating messes: damming up ditches, plugging up headgates. But we’re trying to approach it a lot differently now.” Rather than treating beavers like nuisances, his management approach centers around the balanced relationship between beavers and stewards. Like Clancy, he is installing beaver dam analogs throughout streams on the ranch—a project that started with five and expanded to over forty structures. Though there are headgates and irrigation ditches where damming is undesirable, Coffman still allows beavers to exist under his watchful eye. After all, early dams can be dug out and individuals relocated—but beavers’ effectiveness in retaining water and restoring floodplains cannot be replicated.

Beavers may not be the ultimate clean-cut solution for our water resource problems. Messy, multi-faceted tools, they challenge the modern concept of controlling water. But researchers and land managers alike have found that nurturing an alliance with beavers, adapting to their activities, and integrating science with natural processes—the way Indigenous peoples have—can help build resiliency in the face of dynamic environmental challenges.

My my my. Beavers are messy little balls of magic. They do grand things in a very cluttered way. This isn’t your father’s concrete channel or shooting stream anymore. It’s a braided wandering tangle of obstructions and sinks. And it’s much much better than you or your engineers could create.

Let it Beaver.

OBJECTIFYING BEAVERS AND SCARECROWS

heidi08 Beavers October 25, 2022

This so rarely happens. There are two very compelling beaver articles that I want to write about this morning. Both have language that makes me want to talk about them and both are by friends whom we know and love. Both have really good qualities worth sharing and both have questionable things worth setting aside. What shall I ever do? I will do an “eenie meenie” and just do both starting with whichever.

:Let’s start with Adam’s article which I would paraphrase as “They’re not doing it for you.”

The Free Agent Beaver

Beavers are having a moment. After being hunted to near extinction, they’ve steadily made a comeback, and today both the scientific community and the public have become increasingly aware and appreciative of their profound influence on habitat.

But as environmentalists, journalists and others praise beavers and expound upon their many planet-saving virtues, a problem has emerged: Beavers are too often seen as a tool for humans, rather than animals with their own agency and agenda.

Even those of us who are closely involved with beavers through conservation organizations or habitat restoration have long defaulted to an innate personification of beavers, unfailingly objectifying them and the “ecosystem services they provide.” How many times have you read or said that beaver activities restore watershed health, provide wildfire breaks and refuges, regulate stream flows, and stabilize the water table?

Okay now part of that echoes the thoughts in my head when people act like relocated beavers can just be simply stapled into the stream to fix some problem or other and that’s that. And part of me just laughed aloud at the sentence “OBJECTIFYING THEM and the ecosystem services they provide.” I see in my mind a voluptuous beaver laying across a dam saying in a languid and accusative voice “You’re objectifying me!”

Seeing beavers as “whole persons” and not just the services you can apply is probably the very last battle I will ever wage. After all the other ones are well solved.

Beavers are not beholden to the human-caused issues of our planet, and it’s time to adjust our language to reflect that simple but profound fact.

A simple substitution of vernacular, conceptualization and attitudes toward beavers and their natural behavior is vital to creating a well-rounded understanding of the natural processes of wildlife. Endless messages — perpetuated by well-meaning journalists and others — of giving beavers a “role” or “putting beavers to work” can be explained more accurately by “attracting them to locations where they might be naturally successful.” Rather than creating a “collaboration” or “partnership” with beavers, we are simply attempting to “support beaver success” and “restore conditions needed for ecological success.”

I am truly not sure how I feel about that sentence. A partnership kind of pressures someone to accept things from their partner that they wouldn’t naturally choose. like a little more water in the pasture or a little chewed tree on the lane. I think its a good thing to hold people accountable to the concept that they can’t have water storage without accommodation and flexibility on their part. Maybe even a little sacrifice.

When we stop seeing and talking about beavers as tools and partners, and instead treat them as free agents with their own agenda completely unrelated to humans, we can collectively transition to the next phase in our conservation effort. We can reach a point where nature is not hierarchically divided in a Linnaean system but recognized as a dynamic organism in concert with itself.

Maybe. In truth every beaver conference I’ve ever attended has me irritated by the second day with people just talking about beaver “As a means to an end” instead of an end in their own right. And maybe that’s the feeling that drives this article.

But the realist in me answers back that people have to have selfish reasons to appreciate beaver because when they don’t beavers die. It’s just that simple.

Objectify if you wish. Just don’t trap.

Now onto this from the Global Policy Institute of California. Which is perfect timing.

Beavers: The Unlikely Climate Hero

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) recently allocated money to support beaver restoration throughout the state, calling the beaver an “untapped, creative climate solving hero.” California native Joe Wheaton is a professor of riverscapes at Utah State University who leads teams working on beaver restoration. We asked him to tell us more about this unlikely climate hero and its role in restoring streams and meadows.

Why beavers? How do beavers to a better job than traditional approaches to restoration?

After decades of studying rivers and the ecosystems that depend on them, we’ve learned that dynamic systems—systems that are regularly adjusting and shifting—perform better. Beavers are experts at creating and maintaining these ecosystems: They have at least 30,000–40,000 more years of engineering experience on this planet than we do.

Okay. So far so good. I am very happy with a California policy article interviewing Joe Wheaton about why beavers are good news for the state. Beavers are in good hands. What could possibly go wrong?

Funny you should ask.

Beavers and people don’t always get along. What do we do about that?

The beaver is a versatile rodent that can occupy many habitats, which is why they sometimes cause problems for humans. We find them in saltwater systems, in Superfund sites, in pristine systems—all over the place. We find them in irrigation ditches, messing with diversions and sometimes flooding infrastructure.

Our team has worked with different municipalities and cities to come up with adaptive beaver management plans. We identify where it may be desirable to encourage beavers and where they may harm infrastructure. In those places, we focus on simple mitigation measures (e.g. pond levelers,

beaver scarecrows tree harvest deterrents) first, and, if necessary, live trapping and relocation. Live trapping is a last resort, however—it’s much easier to deter beavers than to relocate them. However, if we relocate a family of beavers to a beaver dam analogue, they can become a much-needed restoration agent in their new home.

Beaver SCARECROWS??? Is this a nightmare? Dr Joe Wheaton who is possibly the smartest beaver mind in the known universe is invited to talk policy to the authors of CALIFORNIA POLICY and he recommends beaver SCARECROWS????

Ohh I know right away what he is referring too and it’s the BANE of my professional beaver life. I’m guessing it’s that stupid blowy sheet article by Elijah Portugal saying that beavers can be discouraged by a billowy sheet from working at a dam where they are not wanted. Supposedly the method was recommended by a trapper.

Allow me to say, in my most delicate cultivated voice, THIS IS BUNK.

Dear Joe. I understand you want to give people the feeling like they can stop beavers without killing them. I do also. And a blowy sheet could frighten beavers once or twice, But beavers HABITUATE to stimuli just like people do. It might scare them for a minute but it won’t work over time. Our beavers habituated to trains. Garbage trucks. Street Cleaners. Crowds.

If a beaver can adapt to the noise of a 100 car rail train rumbling over their dam I do not think that they are going to be thwarted by a blowy sheet.

Call it a hunch.

Even crows get habituated to scarecrows. The only kind of scarecrow that will work with beavers is possibly this one and it it will only work in Voyageurs Park and a few other places where they have learned what a wolf is.

Without support from agriculture and ranching, restoration efforts could backfire. In the UK, beavers are now a protected species, which—much like an endangered species listing in the US—takes decisions out of local control. That’s a huge problem. It set back relationships with private landowners by decades by pushing too quickly on protection. There’s a delicate balance to strike here—we need to be more pragmatic and careful.

Joe is telling us not to save beavers with sticks. Don’t punish ranchers for trapping beavers. Okay. But why not save them with carrots. Let’s pay ranchers for having dams on their property. Let’s reward them for all the gallons of water they are saving for state.

ONE HECK OF AN INTERESTING MEETING

heidi08 Beavers and Fire Prevention June 2, 2021

I had such an interesting meeting yesterday. I was told by Joe Wheaton’s sister Anne that the mayor of St Helena wanted to know more about beavers and their impact on fire prevention. The meeting happened on Zoom and Brock Dolman and Kate Lundquist from OAEC were there too. He talked about identifying places for beaver in the Napa River and I pointed out that there already were plenty on the Napa River including some that are depredated for eating grape vines. Then we talked about how to involve and educate the public and how to get the wineries on board by stressing the impact they could have on fire. He was especially interested in coordinating with the Suscol intertribal council who had grown interested in beavers and thought maybe the local college would be willing to participate.

It was a heck of an interesting meeting.

Two facts stood out in my mind. Did you know our governor owns a vineyard in St Helena? And that the past president of the California Fish and Wildlife commission lives in St. Helena? I did not. That sure makes St Helena an idea location for a high profile Emily Fairfax-Joe Wheaton collaborative study about the impact of beavers on California wine country Wildfires don’t you think?

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DAY 2: CLIFF NOTES VERSION

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver Conference May 5, 2021

Day 2 done at last. I never thought I could get tired of hearing all the good things beavers do, but making a short film where you have to hear it over and over and over again will do it to you.

Enjoy! And please share with all your super busy friends.

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