Tag: Lucy Sherriff

BEAVERS IN THE BBC

Beavers Used To Restore Wildlife Habitat In Lincoln

Who would believe over the last ten years Lincoln has been issued the single most depredation permits for beavers? Well this story couldn’t happen to a nicer town. Great work Damion Ciotti who talked them into it and all the people who are taking credit for the idea they resisted on camera.

Another great news story from Lucy Sherriff in the BBC today. You’ll remember she’s the one that wrote the fantastic piece recently in the Smithsonian and that great one in the Sierra Club. I knew she was working on something about beavers and deserts and connected her with Carol Evans of Nevada, but this is wayy better than I expected.

One small, plucky animal has an outsized ability to transform its environment, helping to replenish river ecosystems even in the desert.

Getting these beaver populations to thrive in Utah’s desert landscape has been a challenging task for Emma Doden, a masters student in translocated beaver ecology at Utah State University. Doden and several other researchers set out to reintroduce beavers to the drought and fire-stricken land. Water shortages are severe here, and much of the river ecosystem is degraded. Doden’s primary goal is to restore the quantity and quality of water in eastern Utah, whose waterways sustain an array of wildlife, riverbank vegetation and endangered fish species.

“In desert environments, water can be very limiting, but it serves as the lifeline to so many species that live out there, including livestock,” she says.

Ahh Emma Doden is getting plenty of mileage out of her beaver thesis. Let’s hope it leaves a mark.

The animals are best known for their skill at building dams in rivers, which create wetlands and standing ponds. These changes in the watershed contribute to a number of improvements in the environment, including better stream quality, leading to healthier fish populations; carbon capture via the shallow ponds which hold back silt and sequester the gas; increasing resistance against wildfires; and providing a habitat for other animals. All this contributes to their status as a “keystone” species, essentially defined as an animal that multiple other species rely on within an ecosystem.

As the world heats up and extreme weather becomes more frequent, scientists have been rushing to reintegrate beavers into struggling ecosystems and dry landscapes.

Emma’s finishing her master’s and handing the work to another beaver disciple. Good Lets keep the good news coming. All the way to California. Cue Emily Fairfax,

If beavers can be persuaded to stay put, their impacts can be wide-reaching. Just one beaver dam can improve water quality, as well as acting as a firebreaker for the surrounding land.

North America is facing an intense battle against wildfires, which raged across the American West in 2020 – including in Utah – burning 8.8 million acres (3.6 million hectares) of land, and could be even worse this year.

Beavers, some scientists believe, could provide the key to reviving watersheds and mitigating wildfire risks. In a paper published last year, Emily Fairfax found that areas where beaver dams were present were better at surviving wildfires than regions without beavers.

“I thought that beaver dams would work sometimes,” Fairfax says of the creatures’ impact on wildfire-ravaged regions. “But in every one of the sites I studied, if there was a dam, the land was protected from fire.”

Nice. Can someone please shout this from the mountain top? Now let’s hear it for Castor Fiber too.

“We do have farmers – and fishermen – who are very keen to see beavers coming back, who recognise they are great for fish and the livestock and irrigation,” Brazier says. “But there is a group who doesn’t want to see beavers back in the landscape, and one of the key things has been knowing where farmers are coming from, knowing what their concerns are, and engaging with them. It’s an ongoing process and we’re working with them to manage any negative impacts.

“It’s about learning to live with these animals again in a renewed co-existence.”

Beavers might well incur costs to landowners, but Brazier believes they can be addressed by providing adequate compensation for any flooded fields higher in the watershed. He believes it’s a small cost in comparison to that of other flooding prevention, or the value of the other benefits that beavers bring such as water quality improvement, carbon storage and enhanced biodiversity.

That’s the way with spreading the beaver gospel. First your the only one. Then there are two lone voices in the wilderness. And suddenly you can barely pick up a copy of Teen Monthly without reading another great story about how much they matter. Good.

With beaver releases happening in South Downs, Wales, Cornwall and Cheshire, across the pond in Utah, Idaho and on Indian Reservations in California, Washington and Oregon, and even more on the horizon, many more of us could soon be feeling the effects of beavers flourishing in the wild.

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd scene. Who will be writing about the good things beavers do tomorrow? I can’t wait to read all about it.

WHAT THE SMITHSONIAN SHOULD HAVE WRITTEN

heidi08 Beaver ecological impact, Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Fire Prevention May 4, 2021

Now THIS is the article that should have been in the Smithsonian. Plus a link to the California beaver Summit.

Killing is easier than paperwork

If a farmer, landowner, or property developer wants to get a beaver out of a certain area, it’s easier to kill the beaver than to apply to move it elsewhere. Across the states, it’s common for landowners to dynamite beaver dams, with whole forums dedicated to the topic and dramatic instructional YouTube videos.

In 2019, the California Fish and Wildlife Department issued 187 depredation permits to kill beavers across the state. In 2020, that number rose to 204. While not all permits are necessarily fulfilled, it’s also true that multiple beavers in a single area can be killed under one permit. Despite the fact that beavers once roamed far and wide across the state’s waterways, it’s illegal under California law to release one into a new location. Though beavers are native to the state, they weren’t recognized as such by California Fish and Wildlife until 2013.

BOOM! This is the article that she wanted to write in the Smithsonian. I’m sure of it. This is the article ALL of california needs to read. Great thinking to start with the Sierra Club.

The beaver does more to shape its environment than nearly any other animal on Earth. They can cause incredible amounts of destruction to infrastructure; downing power lines, and blocking and rerouting waterways. But their dam-building also can improve water quality, reduce flood risk, and create the conditions for complex wetland habitats to form —providing refuge for wildlife and storing carbon in the process.

“It’s not that complicated,” says Joe Wheaton, an associate professor at Utah State’s Department of Watershed Sciences, who developed the university’s BRAT project (short for Beaver Restoration Assessment Tool.). The initiative serves as a planning aid for researchers and restoration managers who are looking to assess the potential of beavers to restore watersheds. Wheaton has worked on the Tule River Tribe’s reintroduction project and many others across the States. “If you wet up the sponge of your valley bottom you have the potential to at least slow the spread, if not at least have the land act as livestock and wildlife refuge during wildfires. If you have a wide enough valley bottom, and beaver are present, it can be big enough to actually stop the advance of these wildfires. That information just needs to get out there.”

Articles like this are going to help. I can tell you that.

Dr. Emily Fairfax and the case of the missing beaver research

One thing that has been missing in the discussion of beavers and wildfires has been science connecting the two. But that is beginning to change. In 2018, Emily Fairfax, a young PhD student studying hydrological science at the University of Colorado Boulder saw a tweet posted by Joe Wheaton, of the wildfire-scorched landscape following Idaho’s Sharps Fire, with a small patch of green at the center. “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!” wrote Wheaton.

But she found herself struggling to find any previously published research on the subject. “It was no man’s land,” says Fairfax, who found plenty of research on beavers, fish, and waterways, but none on beavers and fire. “When you try to do new research it really helps when you can stand on the work of previous scientists,” says Fairfax. “After a certain amount of time, after a question hasn’t been studied, you start to think ‘oh, it’s because there’s nothing there.’”

Instead, her leads came through people like Wheaton, and an educational site called Beavers in Brush, which aggregates information about prescribed burns, as well as rewetting the lands through beaver protection. “That made me realize this has merit, there are people who are aware that this can work,” says Fairfax “I don’t know why people haven’t studied this, but obviously this is a thing.”

Yes it’s a thing, If you pay attention you’ll realize how much of a thing. Now let’s write the article that SHOULD be written Lucy, Beaver help salmon, help drought, help erosion, help fires, help frogs. When is California going to HELP THEM?

Fairfax hopes her research will help change California’s strict rules around beaver relocation, the way policy is already changing in Washington, especially as wildfires in California have reached record-breaking levels over the past several years. In 2017, while McDarment was still trying to get permission to relocate beavers to tribal lands, the Pier Fire consumed 8,800 acres of Tule River tribal lands, including several giant sequoias.

Meanwhile, Fairfax’s research on beavers and wildfires is only beginning. “I set out to ask a question: Do beavers keep the land green during fires, yes or no?” she says. “The answer was yes. But that’s not the end of the story. Why? How? Does this happen everywhere? What if you have a tight canyon? I’m digging into the specifics now, so people can implement this and actually use beavers for fire prevention. I would love to be able to call someone up and tell them how many beaver dams they need in their creek.

Here endeth the lesson. Allow me to leave you with a special explanation of why beaver habitat is 3xs more protected from fire.

WHAT OREGON NEEDS TO TEACH US

heidi08 Beaver ecological impact May 2, 2021

If you were from a large family you know what it means to wait for the hand-me-downs. Along with the horrific items you never wanted there was always some really popular jacket or sweater that you saw make its way from sibling to sibling before it was finally YOUR TURN. I was the youngest so I had to wait a long time and I could keep it as long as I liked. Which means I’m used to this. I’ve always said that beaver wisdom on the pacific starts in Washington, trickles down to Oregon and will eventually get to California. Which means that even though Oregon is behind their older brother, they are still way, way, smarter than us.

Here’s another example of how much smarter Oregon is than California.

Bringing beavers back to the Beaver State

C’waam and Koptu were once a staple meal for the Klamath Tribes. They’re a rarity now — members are allowed to catch only two of the suckerfish a year. The ray-finned C’waam, with its long snout and the smaller white-bellied Koptu, with a large head and lower notched lip, are only found in the Upper Klamath Basin.

The tribal government has tried various tactics to restore fish populations: raising young fish to older ages before releasing them in the lakes, monitoring water quality, working with landowners to restore riparian habitat, and bringing a lawsuit, which was eventually dropped, against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to save the C’waam and Koptu. Now the tribes are turning to an unlikely hopeful savior: the beaver.

“Their activity is a driver for the productivity and diversity for the whole ecosystem,” said Alex Gonyaw, senior fisheries biologist for the Klamath Tribes in Southern Oregon and Northern California.

Well isn’t that a true thing! Thanks Alex whom I’ve never met but feel we’re going to be fast friends soon enough! Yet another reason to appreciate beavers. Will the list ever be completed?

Two bills currently moving through the Oregon state legislature would respectively prohibit the taking of beavers on federally managed public land and exclude beavers from being classified as predatory animals.

“We hope fish biodiversity would increase and we would have an opportunity for tribal fishing rights to return,” said Alex Gonyaw, a senior fisheries biologist with the Klamath Tribes.

“Our aim is to work with nature not against it,” Gonyaw explains. The tribal government, which hopes to establish a stable fish population as a food source, wanted to reshape the land to provide healthy fish habitats. But they didn’t want to use bulldozers to reshape the Williamson River. “We needed to hold the water back, and beavers do that naturally.”

There’s a lot of things beavers do naturally, you better sit down while I review then, Restore fish, save water, improve birds, remove nitrogen, prevent fires. Oh I could go on and on.

Beavers, a keystone species, have been found to help mitigate the spread of wildfires, thanks to their water-damming habits.

Gonyaw hopes the tribes’ efforts at attracting beavers — by using natural posts and woven willows to give the animals a foothold to make dams — will start to hold back water and that the historic vegetation, of local lily pads and bulrushes, will return.

“And we’ll eventually have a shallow lake wetland system again,” Gonyaw said. “If there is continuous standing water here, we hope fish biodiversity would increase and we would have an opportunity for tribal fishing rights to return.”

First you get the beavers, then you get the fishes, Yes that’s the way it works.

The two proposed laws moving through the state legislature — HB 2843, which protect beavers on public lands, and HB 2844, which would take them off the predator list, would mean stricter policies around how, when, and where they can be killed — could make an “enormous” difference in improving the health of Oregon’s landscape and biodiversity, said Suzanne Fouty, a hydrologist who helped legislators craft the bills.

“It is really serious what we are faced with, and we have very little time left to create conditions that help our wild and human communities be somewhat buffered against the impacts of climate change,” Fouty said.

Hi Suzanne! We knew you’d show up in this article eventually! Isn’t retirement fun? You get to tell the truth about beavers and it doesn’t matter whose toes you cross to do it!

Carl Scheeler is wildlife program manager for Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, Scheeler describes beavers as the “Indian Corps of Engineers,” holding the soil back during floods, creating an opportunity for water to stay longer in the system.

“They create habitats which support all other wildlife in the system,” Scheeler said. “When we’re talking about righting the wrong that has been done by past land management, we can reset things back to far enough where the beaver can then take over and recreate the habitat they used to create all over North America. We would not have the landscape that we have if it were not for beaver.”

And, he adds, the land is “without a doubt” in a better, healthier condition than neighboring land where there are no beavers.

Carl! Another friend for the making! Can I saw how impressed I am with your work and advice?

“Jakob Shockey, is executive director of The Beaver Coalition, a nonprofit working to increase public and private landowner support for beavers.

“They’re so important for the environment that we can’t afford to have them trapped out,” Shockey said, particularly when it comes to wildfires, which in 2020 were the most destructive in the state’s history, burning more than 1 million acres. Beaver dams create pockets of lush, saturated landscape that resists fires.

It’s vital (Oregonians) have the ability to make better beaver habitat and give landowners the tools they need to peacefully coexist with the animals. They’ll travel up to 100 kilometers (62 miles) to find new habitat, but it’s hard for them to start from scratch,” he adds.

“There’s a love/hate relationship with beavers in Oregon,” Lum said. “A constant push-pull. Beavers are running out of places to be because man wants to live there too.”

“We need to stop killing beavers where they choose to live,” Shockey said.

Can I get an amen?

Call this the money quote. It’s my favorite in a series of champions. Lucy Sherriff, the free lance author from California, did a fantastic job. But she needs to be doing something about California beavers next. AHEM. Maybe a certain beaver summit that changed the landscape a little.