Well sure it’s monday I know, but it’s a special monday so Heidi is going to share with you the funniest thing that happened around her birthday last month. This article was published in MEDIA kindly quoting her in front of a noble nutria photo. In fact the title of the article is based on her quote, proudly adorned a nutria photo. Because you just knew it would happen someday.
For water in the faucets, you need beavers in the mountains
The evidence of how beavers protect land when wildfires burn through, and how they restore degraded ecosystems much faster and much less expensively than humans can, is piling up in a remarkable fashion. And it’s encouraging many projects to reintroduce beavers all across the landscapes that are most likely to burn — unsurprisingly, many of them are in California.
Heidi Perryman calls them the trickle down economy that works. “Let’s call them water savers.” If you want water in your taps, there should be beavers in the mountains, she says.
An award-winning film calls Heidi and others the ‘Beaver Believers’, who want people to embrace a new paradigm for managing western lands in partnership with the natural world. “Beavers can show us the way and do much of the work for us, if only we can find the humility to trust the restorative power of nature and our own ability to play a positive role within it.”
This article was originally published on July 8th by Rosemary Cairns in a blog called HopeBuilding. She had the nutria photo too because why mess with success? This is the way the universe rewards you. It credits your modestly clever quote that was memorable enough to be set into a film, but it highlights that quote with a photo of a NUTRIA because really all your efforts amount to nothing in this world. Sound and fury, signifying nothing.
In California, ecologists dealing with a dried out creek bed in Placer County didn’t have the million dollars they would need to bring in heavy equipment to restore the creek to health. So they brought in beavers to do the work instead. It cost them $58,000 to prepare the site, and the restoration took three years instead of a decade. The beavers brought Doty Ravine back to life, reconnecting the stream to the floodplain — for free.
“It was insane, it was awesome,” said Lynnette Batt, the conservation director of the Placer Land Trust, which owns and maintains the Doty Ravine Preserve. “It went from dry grassland. .. to totally revegetated, trees popping up, willows, wetland plants of all types, different meandering stream channels across about 60 acres of floodplain.”
The original article didn’t share a photo of doty ravine or a completely unrelated different ravine in new mexico but I’m sharing it because it’s my favorite photo at the moment. And why not give me something to take the sting of nutria out of my day?
“It’s huge when you think about fires in California because time is so valuable,” Fairfax told the Sacramento Bee. “If you can stall the fire, if you can stop it from just ripping through the landscape, even if that beaver pond can’t actually stop the fire itself, just stalling it can give the firefighters a chance to get a hold on it.”
The beaver wetlands also offer a refuge for wildlife that can’t outrun a wild fire. “The beavers are creating these patches, these fire refuges that don’t burn anywhere near as intensely,” she said. “So it’s a relatively safe spot for animals to wait and let the fire pass.”
So Emily is always good to include, and her quote is featured with her stopmotion film which is way better than a nutria. I suppose this author did a good thing for beavers by sharing all this fine information but she needs to realize that when you can SEE THE ACTUAL RAT TAIL in the photo, it’s NOT a beaver.
Sheesh.
