Today I heard from Michael Pollock who is on his way to Scott Valley for a FIRST EVER beaver workshop tomorrow – and no before you ask, its not “how to kill beavers faster, or what are the twenty five best reasons to kill beavers?” It’s something completely different. Check out the lineup which is not exactly heavy with traditional beaver-loving types.
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Be still my beating heart! Fish and Game is facilitating a beaver workshop? OHHH MICHAEL!!! Preach gospel to the non believers and turn their faces towards the rising truth! Let California begin the trickle of understanding that will pour down the pacific coast and tap the heads of salmon counters all along the state! Put that federal trapper Dennis right in the VERY front row and give him a road to Damascus moment. Great things are beginning to happen in the northern parts of our watershed, and if people ever come to understand the truth anywhere, iIt will start there.
This great article by Will Harling is a fantastic introduction to the issue. After this taste gets your attention, go read the whole thing which should make converts out of the non-believers.
Restoring Coho Salmon in the Klamath River, One Beaver At A Time
By Will Harling, Executive Director, Mid Klamath Watershed Council
After a sleepless full moon night with our 18 month old daughter, Rory, (a night where my wife bore the brunt of her midnight antics and our guests sleeping in the living room must have been guessing who was torturing who), I bundled our girl onto my back and walked down to the Klamath River in the pre-dawn light. To say I altruistically wanted everyone to sleep in would be a half-truth given the fishing pole in one hand, balancing out the diaper bag in the other. I had a spot in mind, just downstream of the Orleans Bar River Access, where the river slides over a broad riffle so shallow the fish are forced into a narrow slot that one could cast across, even with a groggy, grumpy, sleep-deprived toddler strapped to their back.
The relatively wide Orleans Valley gives the river a chance to meander a little here, reclaiming its sinuousity stolen over the past six million years as the Klamath Mountains began to rise from underneath, forcing it into steep sided canyons tracing fault lines in the uplifted bedrock just upstream and downstream of the valley. Fall chinook salmon moving upstream to spawn left wakes in the glassy water as they navigated up through the shallows, and the Klamath’s famed half-pounder steelhead run was coming in with them. Across the river, I noticed a furry head moving slowly upstream. The light brown tuft of hair visible above the water looked like what I thought a beaver would look like, but couldn’t be sure.
Just then I heard a rustle of grass and a swish of a tail on the near shore and backed into the willows to watch. Sure enough, a beaver was swimming up towards us along the edge of the river just 20 feet away. As it cleared the riffle, it moved out into the river and I slowly followed it upstream. Big whiskers and a large black snout, those dark beady eyes and two cute little ears quickly disappeared when it spotted me, and a loud thwack of its tail as it dove alerted it’s kin that danger was near. Walking home, giddy with excitement from this rare close encounter, I noticed all the stripped willow sticks along the shore, even a clump of uneaten willow shoved under an algal mat, possibly left for a mid-day snack.
Beaver are slowly coming back to the Klamath, recovering from intense trapping that began in the mid-1800’s and continuing for nearly a century after until they were almost extinct. In 1850 alone, famed frontiersman and trapper Stephen Meek and his party reportedly trapped 1800 beaver out of Scott Valley, which at the time was called Beaver Valley. The last beavers in Scott Valley were trapped out by Frank C. Jordan in the winter of 1929-1930 on Marlahan Slough1. Beaver throughout much of the Klamath basin suffered the same fate, and even today as they return to less inhabitated areas along the mainstem river and its tributaries, they are still shot and trapped in streams where their dams pose a perceived risk to residential and agricultural property.
Good luck gang. Our future is in your hands.
State of the Salmonidsby Will Harling, Executive Director, of Mid Klamath Watershed Council
Recent studies from Washington and Oregon by NOAA scientist Michael Pollock and others are further defining the intimate relationship between beaver, beaver ponds, and coho smolt production. A recent multi-year study being prepared for publication by the Karuk Tribe, Yurok Tribe, Larry Lestelle, and others, on the ecology of coho in the Klamath River identifies the lack of low-velocity habitats, primarily during winter flood events, as a major potential limiting factor to coho distribution and abundance3. Further studies are needed to relate the loss of beaver and associated habitats to the loss of coho in the Klamath River, but based on other studies, it appears that beaver ponds would provide much needed overwintering and summer rearing habitat for juvenile coho.
Get your Sunday morning coffee and pastry-of-choice to curl up with Will’s delightful account of the relationship between beavers and salmon. His friend Brock Dolman nudged the article our way, and I have been sending it to everyone I can think of. The Klamath is a much-guarded river that has active stewards from headwaters to mouth. It is also the site of some truly MASSIVE historic beaver trapping in California.
Beaver are slowly coming back to the Klamath, recovering from intense trapping that began in the mid-1800’s and continued for nearly a century after, until beavers were almost extinct. In 1850 alone, famed frontiersman and trapper Stephen Meek and his party reportedly trapped 1800 beaver out of Scott Valley, which at the time was called Beaver Valley. The last beavers in Scott Valley were trapped out by Frank C. Jordan in the winter of 1929-1930 on Marlahan Slough1.
1800 beavers. Ugh. My favorite part of the article details the plan between the Mid Klamath Watershed Council (MKWC) and various tribes to create an engineered log jam in a section of the stream that would divert water and create a great wintering space for salmonids – no doubt filling out forms and applying for grants and getting property owner permission…
This spring, MKWC proposed a project near the mouth of Boise Creek, a tributary to the Klamath near Orleans on property owned by the Coates Vineyard and Winery, that would have used an engineered log jam to re-route the creek around a bedrock cascade barrier at the mouth through a series of existing ponds maintained by several families of beavers (Figure 1). However, before the project could be implemented, beavers constructed a five foot tall dam across the creek at the exact location of the proposed log jam, diverting a portion of Boise Creek through their ponds, and into the Klamath River at a location that provides adult and juvenile fish access. MKWC and Karuk Tribe biologists have observed thousands of juvenile chinook and coho utilizing these ponds through the summer, and moving through the ponds into Boise Creek above the barrier! This fall and winter, we will see if the beavers have also effectively redesigned the creek to allow for adult spawning chinook and coho salmon to access more than three miles of high quality spawning habitat above the barrier.
Sometimes nature knows best. And sometimes she needs a helping hand….
Seiad Creek provides an example of what can be accomplished on larger tributaries, such as the Scott River (once called Beaver River) which has also been degraded through channelization, dewatering, beaver extirpation, and upslope management. Innovative research by Michael Pollock and others on a small tributary to the John Day River in eastern Oregon is demonstrating how degraded stream and riparian habitat can be restored by working with beavers to aggrade streams, connect off-channel habitats, restore groundwater and increase stream sinuosity. At a presentation in Whitethorn organized by Tasha McKee from the Sanctuary Forest this past September, Dr. Pollock showed how wood posts pounded into an incised stream channel at key locations allowed beavers to recolonize sections of the stream and create stable dams that would otherwise be washed out during high flows, resulting in increased off-channel habitat, decreased erosion, and aggradation of the stream channel.
Wood posts to help prevent washouts! Be still my heart! (Shhh, don’t tell our beavers, they’ll be jealous.) It’s all I can do as it is to keep from bringing a sandbag or two during the rains.)
The restoration of threatened coho salmon popolations in the Klamath River system may be intricately tied to enhanced beaver populations and restoration projects that mimic the positive benefits of beaver dams. Educating the public about the critical role of beaver in restoring coho salmon populations in the Klamath River and other coho salmon streams in Northwest California may also help to decrease take of beaver as a nuisance species and allow them to reclaim their role as an ecological process shaping our streams and valleys.
I love everything about that paragraph except the word ‘mimic’. I have very little patience for killing off beavers and then using bulldozers to do “pretend beaver works” in our streams. From a Cost-benefit analysis perspective alone its ridiculous. And from a beaver-advocate perspective it’s sacriledge. Anyway, this is a beautiful article. Read the whole thing and pass it along. In the meantime I am happy to announce that I bought my plane ticket for Oregon yesterday for the State of the Beaver Conference. I will fly to Eugene and get a lift down from Mike Callahan of Beaver Solutions who will be coming from Massachusetts via Portland. Assuming the hotel has Wifi I will continue to endeavor to bring you the very best in developing beaver news, discoveries, and gossip.
This guest blog is from Beaver Friend and Watershed expert Brock Dolman of the OAEC. Brock was our guest speaker at the JMA Earth day event where he charmed us by saying that everything he learned about helping watersheds he learned from beavers. Here’s an exciting tale of what happens when folks get it right.
I had a spectacular beaver discovery day yesterday on the Klamath on a tributary called Boise creek just downstream from Orleans. I went out with fish biologist and restorationist Will Harling, who is also the director of the Mid Klamath Watershed Council.
This location on private land, with pro-beaver landowners who run an organic vineyard/winery operation, has had a long history of beaver being there. But it appears that this season this family group really got their groove on! From the photos you’ll see that they have, for what appears to be the first time (?), made a full dam across the main channel of Boise Creek that was about 4’ to 5’ tall. Consistent with their well deserved reputation as genius hydro-engineers, the location of this dam could not have been better chosen or constructed! When the instream pool is full, it now sets up the capacity to laterally divert a significant amount of water towards either bank and directly into the upper portions of a series of old historic flood channels and back water basins. And yet, the diversion is not so significant at this time of year as to really affect the bypass flows as can be seen from the falls at the mouth photo.
This “headworks” dam becomes the key to allowing the beaver to manage an ideal volume of diverted flow, which has created three major parallel contour terraces (each 1000’ or more long) that are made up of several dozen ponds and/or long linear sloughs and swamps. As these travertine type terraces, which make one visualize Balinese Rice Paddies, drop their elevation over smaller dams made of mud, grass and twigs it all ends up at roughly three primary discharge points that reconnect with the mainstem of the Klamath upstream of the Boise Creek confluence about an 1/8 of a mile or so.
From the fishery perspective this system was rockin!! With the use of my binoculars Will was able to peer into many pools, especially in the lowest terrace pool complexes that parallel closest to the Klamath, and see many hundreds of juvenile salmonids, with chinook, coho and steelhead all present!!! Besides their abundance, based on Will’s field experience, he felt that they all looked really healthy and comparatively extra large for their age class. In this area – it is hard to imagine a better rearing and refugia system for these threatened fish than what we witnesses yesterday! The MKWC and Karuk fisheries folks around here survey upwards of 60 tributaries for fish and finding places like this that appear to be able to hold so many fish, especially coho!!, appears to be critically important to a vision of coho recovery in this part of the system?
The coolest (literally) part about each of these points of river-reconnection is that they are low gradient and very easily passable slow water situations for juvenile salmonids that are rearing in the beaver pools above to head out or, hopefully allow entry for summer juv., salmonids looking for cold water refugia to escape from the hot mainstem? In essence they have created a braided series of delta channels with varying depth and velocity, which would appear to optimally allow for in and out migration passage of varying sized/aged juveniles?
See the one photo that shows the Klamath on the left with some sandy bottom and open willow areas with a small flow moving amongst them. This creek to river mouth access stands in stark contrast to where the primary Boise Creek mouth meets the Klamath which is a raging whitewater torrent over bed rock falls that is absolutely impassable to juvenile fish! See that photo for comparison.
Interestingly, from where the primary headworks beaver dam is on Boise Creek to the raging creek mouth is less than 100 yards of creek that appears to provide very little functional habitat for fish. But with the beavers pulling this proportionately small flow off the main creek and Slowing It – Spreading It – Seeping It for Salmon!!!, the actual total amount of newly accessible, way more productive and functional habitat that has been creating by the beavers is likely many orders of magnitude greater!! Ooh yeah- the neo-tropical migrant breeding bird songs and frog songs were thick around us the whole time as well! We need a grad student to work up & publish this whole beaver-re-storyation situation…anyone got such a eager student???
I want to say thank you to Will for being willing to spend that much time with me out of his busy life to go and witness such and inspiring and reinforcing situation. Always nice to find a place to enhance the feeling of more confident that our efforts to restore the reputation of beaver in CA as a friend of fish and people is a good path to being walking right now!!
From the front lines of Beaver-landia – over and out,
Brock
