Maybe I was a little bit right about late October. Yesterday we got some wonderful beaver articles. I’ll save the delight from Cows and Fish in Alberta because we already know about them. This was a bigger surprise from Idaho of all places!

Beaver bring back Birch Creek watershed

Necia P. Seamons

Two beaver families are making homes in Birch Creek. It may not seem to be earth-shattering news to some people, but the tale of their return to the creek reveals several powerful concepts. The critters represent a decade of effort and many more years of personal growth on the part of one dedicated Mink Creeker, and the benefits his efforts will have for people that will never know him.

Twenty-one years ago, Jay Wilde returned to the home he had been raised in as a child– the last house before the Forest Service border on Birch Creek. He always had a dream to raise and sell cattle, but life had taken him away from his hometown and his dream. 

“I had to do something to get the stream flowing so the cattle could utilize the feed the land was producing,” he said.

Now you might have guessed already how this ends. But read on anyway and follow his misguided effort first to “Rip out all the cottonwood trees because they were too thirsty” and eventually go to Utah state to ask their advice. The article doesn’t say but I confirmed this morning that lucky for all of us he happened to connect with Joe Wheaton and Nick Bouwes, who suggested the answer might just be a little more flat-tailed than he suspected.

But something was bothering him. He remembered from time he spent in the hills as a boy in the ‘50s that water should be running year round from Birch Creek. 

“There were all sorts of plants and animals that depends on that stream having water in it. …We just can’t throw our hands in the air and walk away. That’s not fair to all of the life that depends on that water,” he thought.

“One morning in 2006 I was sitting at my kitchen table at 4:30 a.m., waiting for the caffeine from that first cup of coffee to kick in when it dawned on me… there was no beaver activity in the drainage,” he wrote.

“My family and friends spent much time fishing, swimming, and watching the activity in the beaver ponds. Now in 2006, those ponds are all gone and there’s no sign of the rodents that built and maintained them. Could it be that the absence of those critters with their ponds and harvesting the woody species in the riparian areas was contributing to the demise of our stream?” he wondered.

Ooh ooh I know! Call on me! Now shhh Heidi, sometimes people need to work out answers for themselves. Jay was on the right track and he just needed a little nudge to get there.

The questions fueled further research and Wilde contacted anyone he could find with knowledge of beaver and their impact on an area. What he discovered was that when beaver dam up an area, the water table around the dam is raised significantly. The ground acts like a big sponge that keeps the water cool and slowly releases it as the season progresses.

“We don’t actually see any more water created. What we see is a change in the timing that it is released,” he wrote.

Through much trial and error, including the disappearance of 13 different beaver he transplanted in Birch Creek, over several years, Wilde said he finally found the right group of hydrologists, biologists, and agency directors to help him create an environment in which the beaver would stay. (He estimates over 100 people have been involved in the entire repopulation process.) 

In 2014, they created 19 mini-dams to encourage the beaver families they imported. He discovered that beaver are highly family-oriented and won’t stay put without their complete family unit,

So Nick and Joe was the one that introduced those beavers and gave him ideas about BDAs to make the water more beaver friendly. And eventually it all paid off.

Last year, beaver were introduced to the area again, and this time, they were still there when Wilde returned last spring to look for them. The creatures had transformed one grassy meadow into a series of terraced dams, with water flowing out each side of them. 

The beaver have built up some of the temporary dams, ignored others, and built their own dams. They are in the process of building a lodge on one of them.

Now, in late October, water is still running in Birch Creek and native cutthroat trout have found their way into the dams. 

Last fall, he and some of the professors from USU held a meeting to let his Birch Creek neighbors know what was going on.

“About 20 people came,” said Lyla Dettmer of the Franklin Soil and Water Conservation office. “

And Scene! That may be the very best journey of realization I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a few I can tell you. This is a lovely article to tuck away and read again or share with your disbelieving friends.Thanks to the beautiful writing of the editor Necia P. Seamons, it also has the very good sense to end with a paraphrase of a quote we will recognize from our good friend John Muir.

Wilde has learned much in the pursuit of improving the Birch Creek watershed, and his efforts offer much in understanding the impact one person can have, the power of education and the importance of a lifelong pursuit of education, the value of knowledge carried by a community’s older residents, the effectiveness of cooperation, and that all life is connected.