Great work from our beaver friends in Sonoma, featuring RUSTY’S amazing beaver photos!

Beavers: A Potential Missing Link in California’s Water Future

The landscape desperately needs rain.

It could also use beavers, according to ecologists who say the near eradication of Castor canadensis from parts of the West in the 19th century has magnified the effects of California’s worst dry spell in history.

“Beavers create shock absorption against drought,” says Brock Dolman, a scientist in Sonoma County who wants to repopulate coastal California with the big lumberjacking rodents.
By gnawing down trees and building dams, beavers create small reservoirs. What follows, scientists say, is a series of trickle-down benefits: The water that might otherwise have raced downstream to the sea, tearing apart creek gullies and washing away fish, instead gets holed up for months behind the jumbles of twigs and branches. In this cool, calm water, fish — like juvenile salmon — thrive.

Meanwhile, the water percolates slowly into the ground, recharging near-surface aquifers and keeping soils hydrated through the dry season. Entire streamside meadows, Dolman says, may remain green all summer if beavers are at work nearby. Downstream of a beaver pond, some of the percolated water may eventually resurface, helping keep small streams flowing and fish alive.

A great great piece of pro-beaver writing from a big enough source to get picked up by Gizmodo and Huffpo today. (You should see the miles of beaver puns…sheesh) Perfect science from Brock and friends, and great illustrations by Rusty. I’m not sure why, if it’s using Napa photos, it doesn’t mention Napa beavers or how they’re welcomed by the city and improving habitat. Or you know that OTHER city where beavers were allowed to coexist and made a creek rich with wildlife right in the middle of town.  Ahem.

But never mind, this is a GOOD piece. In fact it has been 8 amazing great days of beaver news. What’s the explanation? Utah, Idaho, Oregon and now California. That’s got to be worth a toast. Here’s my favorite part:

“Beavers impact almost every aspect of the watershed,” says Andersen. “They lower stream temperatures, retain sediment, create refuge for fish, and create groundwater percolation that reappears downstream later in the year. When beavers disappeared, streams became channelized, we lost our flows earlier in the summer, and temperatures went up.”

While rain is sorely needed throughout California, the absence of beaver infrastructure could make the landscape less able to rebound should a more generous hydrological period resume. Dolman explains that, without woody debris in the creek gullies to slow water down, the land has less opportunity to soak it up when rain does fall. The result is raging floods in the winter and, once summer comes, a watershed that rapidly goes dry again.

“Losing beavers is a double whammy for a watershed,” Dolman explains. “You get exacerbated flooding, erosion and sediment, and reduced groundwater recharge, in the winter. Then, in the summer, you have land that dries up faster because you didn’t get that winter recharge. We’ve created a landscape much less resilient to drought.”

Amen. 

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We finally got an article about the flow device removal, which is less wonderful. In addition to dutifully reporting every bogus thing the city has to say about their bank destabilization project, it also (after ALL THESE YEARS) demonstrates it  still doesn’t understand how it worked.

Martinez: You can’t ‘deceive’ Mother Nature if heavy rains are coming

MARTINEZ — The prospect of heavy El Nio-influenced rains this winter has East Bay cities stocking up on sandbags and already monitoring storm drains to keep them clear.

But in Martinez, there’s a “beaver deceiver” to remove.

City crews worked this week to remove this device, which includes a plastic pipe that channels water under the beavers’ first main dam in Alhambra Creek, between Escobar Street and Marina Vista.

With Martinez’s famous beaver community keeping a low profile lately, and vivid memories of the damage a flooded creek created downtown in January 1998, the time to remove the pipeline seems right.

The device — essentially a pipeline with large anchoring devices — was installed in 2008 to encourage the beavers to choose that location for their dam rather than build ones in other places. The idea is that the water level behind the dam would never rise too high, with creek water instead flowing through the pipe under the dam and downstream. The beavers were convinced, at least for a while, that their dam was effective and that water was not getting through.

Sigh. Where to even start? It’s not a beaver deceiver, it didn’t encourage the beavers to build in a new place, and it wasn’t necessary to remove it. The city lies and has always lied to justify their decisions. But oh well, after 8 years I have learned that the media is like a powerful flying dragon.  You can’t teach or influence it in any way. You can’t make it better. Not really. But sometimes it travels big distances very quickly, and that’s incredibly useful. It has no harness that you can gently tug to guide them.

You can only hang on.