Warren County Wildlife: The North American Beaver, nature’s finest engineer
John Parke of NJ Audubon
What people many not know about beavers and their dams are that the dams do help slow floodwaters and also help control erosion. Studies have shown that water downstream of an American beaver dams is typically cleaner. A new study from Colorado State University even reveals that beaver dams also provide natural biocarbon storage by filtering out and trapping large amounts of sediment from the water column overtime.
Beavers are also extremely important to other wildlife. Their dams as well as their cutting of woody vegetation helps creates habitat for many species of plants and animals, including a variety of fish, reptiles, amphibians, insects, mammal and numerous bird species.
Excellent beaver-conciousness-raising from John Parke who is the Stewardship Project Director of New Jersey Audubon. I’m pretty sure he’s been heavily influenced by our friend Sarah Summerville of the Unexpected Wildlife Refuge, but if they aren’t friends yet they soon will be. Great to read such an accurate, thoughtful and descriptive piece from Audubon. Go check out the whole thing here.
You may remember that NJ just made some headlines for making a plan to issue more beaver trapping permits because of all that pesky flooding. S2665-A3944 was introduced to raise the ceiling on the number of deaths allowable per year, and I and APLNJ wrote and got very involved. It was more than a little startling to see the column I wrote about this issue for the blog submitted as part of their testimony! I’m glad to know that there are some beaver brilliant minds among the other kinds.
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Interview yesterday morning with KCBS, let me know if you heard it, and an interview for Patch. There should be an article in the Pleasant Hill Record tomorrow. The filmmaking folks are in Elko Nevada and on their way to Martinez, so things are pretty much heading in the right direction. Fingers crossed.
