John Day – Worth A Dam

“Beaver” dams aid fish restoration in John Day River drainage

Ecologists and biologists working in a tributary of the John Day River in northeast Oregon are encouraging the building of dams to restore degraded stream habitat – beaver dams, that is.

The stream recovery operation has already significantly increased wild juvenile steelhead survival in Bridge Creek as opposed to the control tributary Murderers Creek.

The researchers from NOAA Fisheries Science Center in Seattle did this by increasing the local beaver population’s ability to maintain long-term and stable beaver dams. The outcome is a healthier stream habitat that is less channelized and has less annual erosion from floods.

Here’s a lovely article about our friends working at John Day, who are making ‘starter dams’ to increase the staying power of beaver dams along this watershed with significant results. Maybe you’re thinking, ” I don’t have any friends at John Day” – but you’d be wrong. Click on the video in the left hand margin (or below) and you’ll recognize the players, including Dr. Michael Pollock who will be presenting on this very topic at our beaver seminar at the salmonid restoration federation conference. He actually grew up in Walnut Creek so he’s an old local. Here he is visiting with me and the dams in Martinez:

Biologists will continue to monitor both the stream’s health and the health of the threatened steelhead in the stream. They are also considering expanding the techniques used in this project to the remainder of Bridge Creek. In the meantime, Pollock is fielding phone calls from interested agencies throughout the West, his crew is producing a how-to manual and they will hold workshops on their techniques in the winter of 2014-15.

“It’s been exciting to see the number of agencies interested in using beavers for stream habitat recovery,” Pollock said. “It’s an affordable technique and very effective.”

Pollock is one of the key players that was so famous and busy he never wrote me back after all my many emails until our own wikipedia Rick tracked him down and got him to be a reviewer on our Sierra paper. When I was invited to speak at the state parks conference in Yosemite I asked him and Rick to come as well. They both accepted and we drove in Rick’s Range Rover up and back in 24 hours. We drank too much wine and had a glorious dinner at the Tenaya lodge with some overly attentive waiters. The best part of the entire trip was when he showed a photo of a nutria in his talk instead of a beaver. Cheryl and I said nothing but exchanged THAT LOOK which he did not miss. (I dare say he will never, ever make that mistake again.) Here he is with Cheryl and Rick in front of my house after our marathon drive.

What a good article to wake up to! I can’t wait to hear the updates in Santa Barbara. All people should care about beavers for their own sake. They’re fun to watch, good at what they do and helpful to wildlife. Bur even if they don’t – we might be able to get them to care about beavers for steelhead’s sake.

RICHARD COCKLE/ Loren Stout, a John Day ex-logger and ex-rancher, inspects a beaver dam along Deer Creek in Grant County. The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife opened up at least one beaver dam along this busy tributary of the John Day River System last spring to enable migrating steelhead to pass. Biologists say beaver dams benefit fish, but low water made it impossible for steelhead to get past some dams. Stout claims he freed two 29-inch steelhead that became caught in a dam. (RICHARD COCKLE/THE OREGONIAN)

Beavers, fish and cows: Restless co-existence in Grant County

JOHN DAY — Here in Grant County, bumper stickers sometimes proclaim, “Beaver Taught Salmon How to Jump,” a light-hearted commentary on the lowly animal’s place in the biological hierarchy.

But the North American beaver, the world’s third-biggest rodent, is more abundant today in the Beaver State than you might expect. And a thriving beaver population can be too much of a good thing, according to biologists for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, who partially dismantled a beaver dam southwest of John Day in May to open up Deer Creek to migrating steelhead.

“We got reports from two or three members of the public that there were steelhead stacked up below this beaver dam,” explained ODFW biologist Jeff Neal of John Day. He blamed a disappointing winter snowpack and undersized springtime flows for making it impossible for threatened steelhead to get past the dam.

Don’t you just hate when steelhead get backed up behind a beaver dam in low flow conditions! Those poor fish! If only there were NO beaver dams and all the streams were dried up entirely! Then those fish could just ride trail bikes up the creek bed in comfort. Good lord this article annoys me. Why on earth do cattle ranchers get interviewed about their unfounded fears about steelhead? And why do those fears get written down as if they had some kind of merit?

But ranchers like Stout and Stangle argue that summertime water in the pools behind dams turns warm under the sun’s heat, which they say can’t be good for steelhead. “The holy grail of the steelhead is the temperature of the water,” said Stangel, adding that beaver aggravate that problem by gnawing down trees, alder and underbrush that otherwise would provide cooling shade.

Wrong, says Corrarino. Beaver dams force the ponded water down into the soil, where it is cooled. The water then recharges summertime river channels, providing fish with chilly, plentiful water, he said. In winter, rain and snowmelt wash woody debris into beaver ponds where it shelters fish, “so they don’t use all their energy fighting the current and avoiding predators,” says Corrarino.”

Of course not all beavers are busy ruining our fish with their traffic-jamming-dams. Some beavers that don’t build dams are like an entirely new species and have crazy unpredictable habits.

ODFW biologist DeWayne Jackson of Roseburg said many beaver don’t build dams, and thus go unnoticed. Known to biologists as “bank beavers,” they are nocturnal and hide in underground burrows that sometimes extend 50 feet back from a stream, with an underwater entrance, said Jackson.

50 feet back from the stream? Really? To paraphrase Jerry Maguire, “Show me the DATA”. Funny story, in Martinez folks were certain that beavers tunneled miles from the water and undermined the city, and when Skip dug up the lodge he found one hole the size of a bathtub. Period.

Neal, the state biologist in John Day, would like to see more beaver and more dams in Oregon’s high country. Many intermittent streams in the John Day River Basin that are dry this time of year could have year-around and late-season flows if beaver were present, he said.

That, Neal said, would benefit ranchers and rural residents. “Out here, water is everything,” he said.

Some ranchers aren’t so sanguine. Still convinced beavers harm fish more than they help, the cattlemen worry they’ll be stuck holding the bag. “There is a lot of fuzzy math when it comes to the government, period,” said Harry Stangel, 68, of Dayville. “Cows are always gonna be blamed.”

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is what it looks like when when information is knocking at the door and STUPID is still holding it tightly shut from the inside. I suppose it’s nice to see this argument taking place in Oregon where there are at least voices of reason in the mix. But honestly, should we even be having this discussion in John Day of all places? Have you ever seen this 2010 report?