Excellent beaver news this morning, and I’m wondering if I should stop counting positive articles for the year. Maybe we’ve crossed some kind of ‘beaver rubicon’ where it is suddenly no big deal to say beavers help rivers.
Beavers: Nature’s first river restoration engineers
Sometimes the fact that beavers dam up water, cut down trees, and flood riverbanks is seen as a problem. Not everyone wants busy beavers in their backyard! But these same activities that beavers do so well are exactly what river restoration professionals have been trying to emulate for decades to improve habitat for Pacific salmon species, which co-evolved with beavers over millenia. Adding wood to streams, creating backwatered areas, and reconnecting a stream with its floodplain are frequently the very same objectives of river restoration projects. For this reason, beaver reintroduction is identified as a priority action in the multi-agency Upper Columbia Spring Chinook Salmon and Steelhead Recovery Plan. The Methow Beaver Project is relocating beavers from places where they are seen as a problem, and moving them to places where they can be part of the solution to salmon recovery.
My, my, my. It’s nice to see the beaver get the recognition he deserves, and the Methow project is a great showcase of his accomplishments. Of course beavers don’t need a massive re-introduction with fish hatcheries and federal grants to do their job, they just need humans to get out of the way and let them do it. Take Martinez for instance, where urban beavers famously proposed some additions to Alhambra Creek and the zoning committee objected and decided to kill them instead. Remember that?
Yesterday I was driving home listening to KQED and stunned to hear the work of beavers discussed on Marketplace – well not discussed so much as obviously left out of the conversation where they clearly belonged. Listen and tell me if you don’t think it’s an error to ignore their contribution:
Of course I took the liberty of writing Dr. Glennon about this oversight. Maybe it can spark a dialog?
And as if all that wasn’t exciting enough, this morning Rick sent me hot off the presses the paper we are submitting regarding historic range of beaver in coastal california. It tracks physical and indirect evidence of beaver in 5 regions from northern to southern california in what I can only describe as a series of successful 1-2 punches that knock the wind out of every silly objector. But shhh, his head might explode if he were to find out I shared this but I can’t help passing along this delightful paragraph from the discussion section.
Studies conducted and reviewed by Pollock et al. (2003; 2007) in semi-arid Western habitats, have found that re-introduction of beaver can rapidly aggrade stream sediments, elevating incised channels and reconnecting them to their floodplains, ultimately converting formerly incised xeric valleys into gently sloping ones with more abundant riparian vegetation. As ecosystem engineers (Johnson et al. 1994), beaver increase bird, fish, invertebrate, amphibian and mammalian abundance and diversity (Naiman et al. 1988, Rosell et al. 2005). There has been a tendency to underestimate the influence of beaver on ecosystems (Pollock et al. 1994), and the impact of this aquatic mammal on threatened species in California may be more important than previously realized.
To which I can only reply, (laughing and wiping my eyes) it’s about frickin’ time.
