Are beavers good for streams? Dam straight they are. Very, very good. Don’t take my word for it. Check out this excellent new paper from the Methow Project.
North American beavers (Castor canadensis) were targeted within North American headwater landscapes by European loggers and fur traders in the 19th century, reducing beaver populations to near extinction by 1900. The extirpation of beavers from river networks has had profound effects on riparian zones, including channel geomorphology, temperature regimes, sediment storage, channel-floodplain connectivity, carbon storage and nutrient dynamics. i
Consequently, reintroducing beavers has been provisionally implemented as a restoration approach within some watersheds. We characterized how reintroduced beavers influence the short-term dynamics of organic material accumulation within the sediments of 1st and 2nd order streams within the Methow River watershed of Washington State. In collaboration with the Methow Beaver Project, we identified four creeks where they had reintroduced beavers within the past five years, as well as a control non-beaver pond. At each site, we collected shallow sediment cores from upstream, downstream, and within beaver ponds, and then measured organic material via elemental analyses of sediment carbon (%C) and nitrogen (%N) content. We compared those samples to sediments accumulated in local pond areas not created by beaver activity.
Our results show greater organic C and N content of sediments in beaver ponds than non-beaver ponds. C/N ratios indicate elevated accumulation of allochthonous organic material in beaver impoundment sediments that would otherwise not be integrated into headwater streams from the terrestrial landscape. These findings suggest that the reintroduction of beavers could be an effective means to promote restoration of whole ecosystem function.
Allochthonous means appearing other than where it originated, so material moved by the beaver and then by the stream the beaver influenced. Basically this article is saying that moving things around is one of the essential ecosystem services that beavers provide because these materials and nutrients are integrated into headwater streams in ways that couldn’t have happened without them.
The Methow Beaver Project is an enormously successful beaver reintroduction project in the Northwest of Washington. It was the brain child of beaver friend Dr. Kent Woodruff of the USFS and has literally convinced thousands of people to think differently about beaver benefits. They asked me yesterday if I would share this for their fundraiser and I said I’d be happy to. All beaver defenders owe a tremendous amount to Methow who were the first to learn how reintroduction could be successful on a larger scale and have advanced understandingin pairing beavers successfully and getting them to stay put in their new home so they can start changing the landscape. Kent also provided the lovely quote for our newsletter you see at the right. (Because beaver people stick together – get it?)
The Methow Beaver Project has been working to relocate beavers in the Methow Valley for the past decade as a natural way to restore riparian habitat and address climate change. Although we are affiliated with numerous agencies we are independent and totally grant supported by individual contributors like you and private foundations. Your support during the Give Methow campaign will enable the Methow Beaver Project to continue our restoration efforts to the benefit of flora, fauna, fish, and you. We’ll be using your donation to purchase beaver food, educational and outreach materials, volunteer training materials, and to support our ongoing scientific investigations.
The Give Methow campaign, put on by the Community Foundation of North Central Washington, makes every cent of your donation go to your favorite organization (they cover the CC fees) and based on the amount each organization raises, additional funds from their “stretch pool” is allotted. Finally, every Monday someone who donates will be drawn and receive $500 to go to the Methow group of their choosing.
Meanwhile we’re getting ready for Saturday’s Wild Birds Unlimited event in pleasant hill. I thought I might as well start promoting our new and improved beaver festival so I put this together. What do you think?
Yesterday the bookmarks arrived and they are every BIT as cute as you might imagine. Jon ran some over to our buddies at Parks and Recreation and the oohed and passed them around with glee. Yesterday was also very exciting because I suddenly realized I didn’t have the contract for the solar panel, and fell into a state of panic that I hadn’t ordered it this year. What if all the bands were lined up and the sound guy was there and there was NO SOUND! I called them in alarm only to find out that every single representative was at a big meeting and they would call me on monday. I must have sounded so truly forlorn that they made Ryan call me back from the meeting – which I found out was IN HAWAII by the way – YES they would help me, not a problem, but please let the man go back to his hawaii meeting so he can spend the last part of his last weekend at the beach.
Whew.
Good lord. That was close. I know I spoke to someone about something way back in March, but I also know nothing is firm without a contract and they need us to show our event insurance will cover their panel and these things take time. Three weeks should do it. So that’s good.
Meanwhile our friend Kent Woodruff at Methow was being rewarded by a lovely, slick magazine profile in the outdoor clothing store of Filson’s. Even though the head quarters is in Seattle they have a store in San Francisco so I have NO idea why they aren’t donating to the beaver festival, but good for Ken (again), it’s still lovely to share.
Beaver ponds store a lot of water. Millions of gallons. And scientists are now realizing that reintroducing the animals to struggling streams is a way to buck a drying trend. This Filson Life is part of Filson’s celebration of the Forest Service and the people of the Pacific Northwest Region of the USFS, Region 6. As the Northwest gets less snow, Kent Woodruff says it needs more beavers.
Less snow means less rainfall. Less rainfall means less water for farms and streams – which leads to a decrease in spawning ground and shelter for salmon. Beavers dam streams and streams flood their floodplains, which produces more trees for more dams and provides millions of gallons of water for everything in the vicinity. It even provides shade for salmon.
“One of the things we know is that beavers improve streams,” says Woodruff, a beaver biologist with the Forest Service. “Beavers make things better by adding complexity to streams to enhance everything that needs to happen out there.”
For the past ten years Woodruff has been the driving force behind the Methow Beaver Project, a partnership that relocates problem beavers – those that have dammed up irrigation ditches or felled high-value fruit trees – from private land to mountain streams in the National Forest surrounding Central Washington’s Methow Valley.
“We’re in a very water-limited situation in the Methow Valley,” he says. “So we do this balancing act between the towns, the rural folks, the agriculturalists, and the fish. To find a natural solution in beavers for water storage and temperature moderation, which are critical limiting factors to endangered salmon, is really exciting to what we do.”
After trapping a problem beaver, Woodruff temporarily keeps it at an old fish hatchery that he’s set up with beaver homes. He’s found that relocating beavers is best done with male-female pairs, and he waits until he traps a beaver of the opposite sex before pairing the two at the fish hatchery. He then transplants the pair—with a bundle of sticks and willow switches they’ve been chewing at the hatchery—to a suitable, beaver-free stream in the forest.
“We’ve found that a male-female pair is a lot more sticky than just a lone beaver,” he says. “Two of them are more likely to stay where we put them than just one.”
Half a dozen universities are making plans to use his beaver restoration work as laboratories to answer questions about the role of wetlands in the larger ecosystem. How much carbon does a large beaver complex store? How do beaver ponds contribute to the insect life of a river? How many gallons of water are stored in the spongy soil surrounding a wetland? Interns, graduate students, and Ph.D. candidates from colleges and universities around the Northwest will show up in the Methow Valley this summer to work toward answering those questions.
Woodruff and Johnson estimate that their pro-beaver message reached 2.8 million people in 2015. The benefits of beavers, Woodruff says, are becoming more widely recognized. Biologists in Canada, Mexico, and Europe are interested in the work coming out of the Methow Valley and elsewhere around the region.
“California is very interested in modernizing its approach to beavers,” Woodruff says.
“Washington state is beginning to take similar steps. We’re talking to people in Britain where beavers have been extinct for 600 years, and now in the past ten years they have them in five different places. Idaho has a fledgling relocation program, too. It feels to me like we are just getting started learning where beavers could help.”
Nice review! Wonderful to see beaver benefits emphasized. This is a rugged outdoor clothing profile so they chose the strapping young Ph.D. candidate for the photo, which is foolish because Ken’s very handsome and there are way more mature shoppers than young ones, but never mind. It’s a nice spread with a good focus on salmon and water and I’m very grateful about that. Of course I’m very impatient with ANY article that mentions problem beavers without talking about beaver solutions.
But still.
I confess I was alarmed reading that in 2015 reached their message reached 2.8 million people, because how on earth is that even possible? This meager website gets 10,000 hits a week, and over 10 years that’s maybe 1 million, but how are they so much more visible than we are? What’s WRONG with us? But then I though they maybe meant through Sarah’s great film, which was wonderful and really allowed a lot of people very quickly to learn the story of why beavers matter. And they have more supporting players (NGO’s and GO’s) than god. And plus, people are always happier thinking they’re doing good for the environment when they get rid of beavers than when someone tells them to keep them.
CANYONVILLE — Oregon’s official state animal, the beaver, plays an important role in the state’s wetland ecosystems. Those advocating for the beaver plan to convene next month for a series of presentations focusing on beaver ecology as a crucial part of threatened species recovery.
The fifth State of the Beaver Conference, slated for Feb. 22-24 at the Seven Feathers Convention Center in Canyonville, is meant “to provide an international venue for academia, agency and stakeholders together to disseminate information pertinent to beaver ecology,” according to Leonard Houston, conference coordinator and co-chair of the Beaver Advocacy Committee (BAC) of the South Umpqua Rural Community Partnership.
“We chose the theme of ‘agents of regeneration’ largely to highlight the role that beavers play both in natural regeneration, which is ecological succession, and designed regeneration, which is restoration ecology,” Houston said.
Sherri Tippie and Me
The nicest part about this conference, and there are many, is that the famous names you have been reading about for years here or elsewhere are walking or sitting right next to you. Or coming up to say ‘hi’ and ask
about your presentation. The truth is that it is both a blessing and unfortunate that the science of beaver ecology isn’t yet so advanced that names like Woodruff, Obrien or Pollock can send
Mike Callahan and Me
their undergrads to do the presenting for them and report back if they find anything interesting. As renowned as they are, they have to do their reporting in person and are eager to share ideas and learn from each other. They’re even happy to hear what you have to say.
Suzanne Fouty and Me
Admittedly,they are probably even happier if you invite them out for a beer to say it. (And happier still if you offer to pay for it. Government salaries being what they are.)
Michael Pollock, Mary Obrien, Sherri Guzzi, Mike Callahan and Me!
The point is, I think this is a golden moment in time where beaver science hasn’t become dominated and controlled by lofty minds and big research institutions. You can contribute, you can interact. They need you! But already the world is starting to shift. More and more folk are interested in taking charge of the beaver meme, and it won’t be easy and collegial forever.
Mike Callahan of Beaver Solutions just got back from Washington where he worked with the Methow Project and highway workers training folks to use flow devices. I think its pretty wonderful to have Kent and his merry band interested in solutions that allow pesky, trouble-making beavers to stay put instead of just whisking them away. I thought you’d want to see and hear about it. So these are Mike’s own words.
I was recently privileged to travel to north central WA State to train Okanogan County Highway personnel how to coexist with beavers. My thanks go to the Methow Beaver Project’s (MBP) Kent Woodruff and Julie Nelson for working to arrange it. We installed trapezoidal culvert fences at a couple of sites the County had been battling beavers at for some time.
Kent, Julie and Josh Thomson (County Highway Engineer) were instrumental in the planning and execution of these two projects. I was very impressed with the County Highway workers and of course the MBP personnel who jumped right in the water to help construct these flow devices.
That part of the country is so beautiful! I also got to see the Methow Beaver Project in person as they relocated beavers to their new habitats saving them from being killed. Their program is awesome and I have many great memories, such as Kent open flame grilling some fantastic Steelhead Trout!
Thanks for sharing your skills and letting us watch Mike! If you want to stay abreast of Mike’s work you should join the FB group “Beaver Management Forum” which always has interesting things.
Now for me, we’re still on vacation. And while it was uncomfortably warm on Saturday, I awake to rainstorms in the morning. So of course I did the only reasonable thing a person could do in the rain at the ocean. I played with my toys.
Beaver ponds store a lot of water. Millions of gallons. And scientists are now realizing that reintroducing the animals to struggling streams is a way to buck a drying trend. This Filson Life is part of Filson’s celebration of the Forest Service and the people of the Pacific Northwest Region of the USFS, Region 6. 
“One of the things we know is that beavers improve streams,” says Woodruff, a beaver biologist with the Forest Service. “Beavers make things better by adding complexity to streams to enhance everything that needs to happen out there.”
After trapping a problem beaver, Woodruff temporarily keeps it at an old fish hatchery that he’s set up with beaver homes. He’s found that relocating beavers is best done with male-female pairs, and he waits until he traps a beaver of the opposite sex before pairing the two at the fish hatchery. He then transplants the pair—with a bundle of sticks and willow switches they’ve been chewing at the hatchery—to a suitable, beaver-free stream in the forest.
