Mid-Columbia Fisheries Enhancement Group

Nature at work for you – Beavers help fish, wildlife and people

Beavers are industrious engineers, constructing dams and lodges for shelter and food storage. Beavers actively modify streams and surrounding woodlands, improving the health of a watershed by creating lush ponds or wetland habitat for a variety of fish and wildlife. By damming water, beavers create a refuge for juvenile and overwintering fish. These ponds provide homes to aquatic invertebrates (fish food), amphibians, reptiles, waterfowl, songbirds, and mammals.

Benefits of Beavers in a Dry Climate

• By building dams, beavers are able to slow spring runoff, reducing the potential for flooding and erosion.

• Beaver dams spread water onto the floodplain and reconnect side channels allowing for greater water storage.

• Beaver ponds provide a continuous water supply that percolates into the ground, recharging aquifers.

• Beaver ponds trap sediment and filter out toxic materials providing cool, clean water for downstream water users.

A pretty wonderful beaver benefit broadcast from the Mid-Columbia Fisheries Enhancement Group. It even ends with a discussion of beaver conflicts and where to go for resolutions. The Mid-Columbia is centered in the middle of Washington State (beaver mecca, from which all wisdom flows) and has good team members like project manager Melissa Babik who heads the heaver relocation project for Yakima that we read about everywhere last fall. I tend to think a river group does serious restoration when they are divided into head, mid and lower. But check out this map for Regional Fisheries Enhancement Groups in Washington. Created by the voters in 1980 it is no wonder why Washington is so good at managing streams and advocating for beavers.

One thing they don’t have is links to us, Beaver Solutions, The Land Trust, the Grand Canyon trust or Joe Wheaton in Utah, Beavers: Wetlands and Wildlife, or Skip Lisle, to name a few. Don’t you think they should? I’ll see what I can do.

And some good cheer from Tundra sent yesterday by Rickipedia and Art Wolinsky….

The previous photo reads: In this Sept. 12, 2014, photo, a tagged young beaver explores water hole near Ellensburg, Wash., after he and his family were relocated by a team from the Mid-Columbia Fisheries Enhancement Group…

I worked very hard to track down Melissa Babik after I saw this photo. Sinceher email wasn’t listed online it meant looking up the group she worked with and using their format from the listed emails to speculate about hers. After a few false starts I cracked the code and wrote her to ask about the possibility of a leftover beaver. In the mean time, I even quarreled with beaver champion Joe Wheaton who politely admonished me for complaining about one abandoned beaver when Yakima was generally doing such a good job promoting beaver benefits. I respect Joe very much, and don’t want him to see me as some beaver-eco-terrorist – but leaving behind family is the opposite of what I want for beavers. I worried and fussed about this for more days than I will confess, thinking about the difference between what it means to be a beaver advocate (which is quite rare actually) and a “beaver benefits” advocate (which is getting to be much more common).

Then yesterday Mel wrote me back. And guess what she said? She said this photo was taken in his new location AFTER the entire family was moved. And she added:

We work hard with the best possible techniques to capture entire family units. We moved 7 beavers total in this family that would have been lethally removed. We trap for a minimum of 5 consecutive nights with no fresh activity to ensure we have the entire colony (on average this means we trap for a minimum of 2 weeks at a site but generally longer). Often we’ll go back after the sites “cools” and try again. It is sad to leave members behind and with their strong social bonds we know this limits our success.

Isn’t that GREAT news? No beavers left behind and at least 5 days of no activity before the team moves on – which often takes two weeks! I can’t remember a time I’ve been happier to be wrong, and I asked Mel for permission to share it with you so you could be happy about my wrongness too! For some reason this sound track is playing in my head.

Thanks for reading so carefully.. another misinterpretation in this generally well written article is that ~50% of our relocated beavers get preyed on our go back to their colonies. When in fact what I said was they are unaccounted for: SOME may get preyed upon (we’ve never seen evidence of this but know it happens), one we know went back to his colony, and others we are slowly finding elsewhere in the headwaters doing great things!

Again thanks for asking these questions and clearing up misconceptions! We appreciate the work you do to educate folks about beavers!

MEL

This is all fantastic news and I couldn’t be happier! Careful of beavers and their delicate family systems! I sent it right away to Joe who I had already repaired things with. He was thrilled to have the data to back up his positive view. This morning I will send it to everyone I contaminated with my previous gloom because they deserve to have their reputation restored. They are spreading good beaver cheer all over the country, and even if it’s not QUITE as wonderful as keeping the beavers in town, they are doing it responsibly! (I just saw an article about them yesterday in the Idaho Statesman).

I have been such a big scrooge about the Yakima good news that I feel you might deserve this clip as well. Maybe its the looming season ahead, but I can’t resist.