Tag: Joe Wheaton

IDAHO GETS A BEAVER IQ BOOST

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.

CALIFORNIA FARM BUREAU FEDERATION FOR BEAVERS

heidi08 Beavers March 10, 2021

Stunning new article this morning from the California Farm Bureau Federation by reporter Bob Johnson. James Haulfler of S.A.R.S.A.S. sent it my way last night and I hope you’re sitting down because it’s a doozy.

Range managers employ beavers, benefiting forage

Issue Date: March 10, 2021

By Bob Johnson

A century and a half after their ranks were decimated to make coats and hats for fashionable Europeans, beavers are making a comeback as an energetic tool for rangeland river and creek restoration.

The new appreciation of beavers comes from a shift in thinking among specialists toward believing that slowing and spreading creek water results in more diverse habitat, better drought and flood protection, a refuge during fires—and more forage production.

“We know rivers and streams are the center of the riverscape ecosystem; we’ve been too obsessed with managing them as channels,” said Joe Wheaton, Utah State University associate professor of watershed sciences.

Wheaton, a leading specialist in the low-tech approach to riparian restoration, joined the virtual California Rangeland Coalition Summit, as researchers and ranchers discussed efforts to mimic beavers in making land near creeks and rivers more diverse and productive.

Wow. In California! Thanks Joe. Wouldn’t it be amazing if people who cared about farms and ranchlands cared about beavers? And hey they stole our name. Hrmph.

“We use beaver dam analogues, which mimic and promote beaver dam restoration,” Wheaton said. “The process is wood accumulation, which makes for a healthier riverscape.”

Wheaton worked extensively with an Idaho rancher, who moved his cattle to take advantage of forage in the more marginal areas during the wet season and away from ground near Birch Creek.

The warm weather forage refuge near the creek expanded exponentially, Wheaton said, after the rancher put up a few beaver dam analogues—low-tech and low-cost, temporary structures to spread the water—and let the real beavers come in and finish the job of making the forage-producing wetland larger and more diverse.

Oh I knew it would all come down to self interest. If beavers are in California’s self interest we stand a real chance.

“Traditional stream channel movement emphasized diesel and rocks to stabilize the channel,” said Damion Ciotti, restoration biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services in Auburn. “We were not achieving our goal of increasing migratory birds and fish.”

Ciotti helped lead the Doty Ravine restoration project in Placer County, where selective grazing of invasive plants played an essential role in restoring the riparian ecosystem.

That project largely abandoned the use of heavy equipment to quickly clear the creek, in favor of the more process-oriented approach of slowing and spreading the water and letting the beavers do their work.

“The beavers are teaching us a ton about working with the stream system,” Ciotti said.

Oh and where have I seen both men’s name before? That’s right on the schedule for the California beaver summit!!!

The central lesson has been to stop thinking of the creek as a channel to move water quickly and uniformly, he said, and start thinking of it as the center of an ecosystem that spreads out to include habitat for migratory birds, fish and grazing livestock.

“We want to increase the productivity of fish and migratory birds, and the key to that is connectivity of the floodplain,” Ciotti said. “We saw an incredible increase in bird populations, and we saw salmon out there, all while grazing continued.”

When fourth-generation rancher and University of California Cooperative Extension livestock and natural resources advisor emeritus Glenn Nader took on the job of restoring the Witcher Creek Ranch property in Modoc County, he decided he would do well to rely on people with a range of expertise.

“I may think I know what I need for cows, but how does that work for other species?” Nader said. “You need a multi-discipline team.”

Wow that’s really amazing. I didn’t know any of these groups. But I saw a few of them signed up for the conference and wondered.

Part of that team came from Point Blue, a Petaluma-based group of 160 scientists who work with ranchers, farmers, fishers and other land and water managers to bring their expertise to conservation and restoration projects.

Nader was a couple decades into his project at Witcher Creek Ranch when scientists from Point Blue advised him about the role beavers could play in restoring the creek ecosystem.

“Thanks to Point Blue for coming in and enlightening us about beavers and beaver dam analogues,” Nader said.

The idea behind the dam analogues is that by putting in some simple barriers that slow the creek and spread out the water, mimicking the work of beavers, the rodents will come in and take over.

Nader built about 25 of the dam analogues at Witcher Creek, and then the beavers built another 150 of their dams.

“I think our long-term solution isn’t grandiose projects, but simple stuff,” he said.

Let the rodent do the work. That’s what Joe says. You know Joe Wheaton who went to highschool in Napa and who’s sister came to the beaver festival twice?

The simple projects begin with beaver dam analogues, placing a few pieces of wood across a creek to slow and spread the water, then waiting as beavers move in.

Wheaton’s detailed, 288-page manual on Low-Tech Process-Based Restoration of Riverscapes is available free on the internet: lowtechpbr.restoration.usu.edu.

Oh be still my heart! Perfect timing. Perfect audience and perfect opportunity for beavers. I can’t wait to tell them all about it.

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.

AMERICA THE BEAVER-FUL

heidi08 Beavers and groundwater, Beavers and Nitrogen removal, Beavers and soil, Beavers and water November 3, 2020

What, me worry?

When beavers are on NPR? Not bloody likely. In addition to being most excellent reporting and great news for beavers, this also happens to provide me with the perfect audio to make into a powtoon later today which is an ideal low-stress way to spend nerve-racking election day. Thank you Dr. Brazier!

Beavers bring rich biodiversity back to Devon, England

Come to think of it. America is pretty darn lucky England killed all their beavers 500 years ago. Hear me out. I mean in addition to the shortage driving people to look for them elsewhere and paying for the pilgrims to come to America and basically starting our whole country, the fact that they want them back NOW and are doing such excellent research to justify their existence works well for us in America.

So, thanks England.

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Yesterday’s NM Summit was beyond awesome. Any day when you get to listen to Joe Wheaton AND Jeff Ogburn in the same place you should literally jump at the chance. Jeff is the North Eastern Habitat Biologist for NM Game an Fish so of course he’s very interested beaver. He also has that enviable, pragmatic, energetic style that says ‘lets solve problems and work together and I’m not trying to sell you beavers’ which is SO SO SO helpful and needed on the landscape. (Something I will never be able to do because I am literally always trying to sell beavers, obviously.)

The entire presentation will be available online later an you can bet I’ll be sharing it. Much of Joe’s work is available already in his guidebook online, but wow here’s just a little. Remember he is from the Bay Area, went to high school in Napa where his mother still lives AND his sister came to the beaver festival twice.

By which I mean to say obviously he’s brilliant.Beavers are SO LUCKY to have Joe an all these amazing defenders on their side. Mary Obrien will bring it all home tomorrow, and hopefully by then we will know much more than we do now.

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Now here’s one last gift to get you through today. It has already made the humans in this household cry hopeful tears several times today which is not something I ever believer Taylor Swift could do.

You’re welcome.

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