Speculation

Beaver blogging is a strange pastime that often reveals the very odd and irrational underbelly of civic planning, nature awareness, and education. Over the years I’ve been doing this I’ve gotten used to reading about city engineers who think beavers should be trapped or they might flood the town, mayors who think they should be trapped before they eat all the trees, and city planners who think they’re breeding in the sewers. I’ve been through the rabid beaver scares, the beavers eat salmon scares, and the beavers ruin the water for fish scares. Heck, recently I’ve even followed a beaver murder.

But this surprises me.

In case you fainted too, I’ll recap. The beavers are chewing trees along a beautiful nature path. What if the trees falls down and hurts someone? The clip features a city council member that wants the beavers dead, and a city council member who thinks that would be wrong. IE somewhere in the world there are city council members who know a little more about nature than Martinez.

The tie breaker in this contest is the Salmon Arm Bay Nature Enhancement Society (SABNES) describes its mission thusly:

To Assist the Ministry of the Environment and the Nature Trust of BC with the development and operation of the Salmon Arm Bay, its walkways, trails and viewing facilities for scientific, educational and environmental purposes and to increase the awareness and involvement with related projects in the community

I was having a hard time thinking about a non-profit developed specifically to “Help” an already existing governmental agency, but then I thought about the ‘friends groups’ in National Parks, (of which the John Muir Associations one.) The difference of course is that the friends group exists solely because of the federal group, and all it does is things that help it. As such we have a member of NPS at every meeting and they have to approve everything that goes to press or gets communicated about them.

Of course SABNES should respond that beavers are a huge asset to the nature area. Their chewing of trees stimulates a natural coppicing that becomes ideal nesting habitat for migratory and songbirds. They should point at this study which showed that beavers increased bird count for an area specifically because of their chewing. In Martinez we have greatly enjoyed the abundance of new bird species that have come since the beavers settled. And they might enjoy this video, which shows one of the many uses birds find for beaver-chewed trees. Rookeries for Great blue heron is another. Or dead trees for wood ducks. Or lodges that make much desired swan and geese nesting locations. You get the idea.

Here’s a thought. Instead of helping the Ministry of the Environment find reasons to kill beavers (they’ve got that covered), and letting councilman Eliason think that killing them is cheaper, why not help them learn about how important beavers are for the very environment they’re charged with protecting? Maybe you can sponsor a local high school science class to do a species count, or boy scouts to sand paint trees, or appoint a few wildlife and tree monitors whose job it is to check for new nesting and dangerous trees that need city staff to remove them?

Better yet, watch this at your next council meeting or board meeting, and then we can talk.

2311salmonarmJMEdDahlatbeaverlodgesite0120col[1] — Busy beavers: Naturalist Ed Dahl looks at a tree brought down by beavers living along the Shuswap Lake foreshore. James Murray/Observer

SABNES sides with foreshore beavers

Salmon Arm’s Nature Bay Society expressed this sentiment in a Jan. 10 letter to city council, asking that beavers residing along the foreshore trail not be removed.

SABNES notes that the beavers are inhabiting the pond near the first boardwalk off the nature trail, heading east.

“We are also aware that the beavers are ‘pruning’ some trees near the pond and some people have expressed their opinion that something needs to be done to protect the trees,” states the letter.

Salmon Arm is north of Seattle in British Columbia, which is not exactly famed for treating beavers kindly. I spent yesterday trying to track down the Salmon Arm Bay Nature Enhancement Society to give them information about protecting trees and the benefits of beavers, but it turns out they are fairly hard to track down, and all the email addresses I was able to sleuth out were invalid. I wrote the city engineer instead, and in the meantime, we can just appreciate this article for all its beavery goodness.

[Naturalist Ed] Dahl sees potential for a great learning experience, particularly for children. “It is a nature sanctuary and certainly I don’t think it would be a good idea to remove them from where they are now. In the summer time, hopefully the children of the district will be able to walk down that walkway and have at look at them. I think it will be a good thing – I hope so anyway.”

Nice! I was particularly struck by the final paragraph which is an almost verbatim transcript of Martinez early response to beavers.

In response to the letter, council asked that staff provide them with information on any issues related to the beavers before taking action. Coun. Alan Harrison said he otherwise prefers to leave the animals alone and let nature take its course.

That does it. I’m mailing the entire beaver subcommittee report right now. How many pages is it? A million?

More good beaver news from Hope Valley in the Sierras. This unexpected delight from the American Rivers Website comes on the heels of our finishing up our historic prevalence paper and getting ready to send it out. Author Daniel Nylen is the Sierra Rivers Program Assistant, and even though he may not know it yet, he’s destined to be our good friend!

Can Beavers Help us Rehabilitate our Rangelands?

Here in the Sierra, meadows are our natural reservoirs – they store snow that melts in spring and become havens for fish and wildlife during the parched summer months as they slowly return cool, clean water back to the river. We want to bring this balance back to one of the most cherished and spectacular meadows in the Sierra.

Well, some critters don’t seem to want to wait around for our help. Whether they consciously plan to help the areas where they live, or they charge forward on genetically programmed cruise control, beavers and their impressive engineering feats do more than any other species (besides humans) to alter and shape their surrounding landscape – and often in a beneficial manner.

Beaver dams maintain and create wetlands, provide high quality habitat for fish, amphibians, and other wildlife, improve downstream water quality, and slow and spread snowmelt runoff, thereby reducing local flooding, recharging groundwater, and extending water levels in streams in late summer.

The reintroduction of beavers is even viewed by some as a potential climate change adaptation strategy because of the positive effects they have on streams, meadows and water levels. Their actions often mimic what one would hope to do to rehabilitate an impacted meadow like Hope Valley – raise the stream channel up closer to the meadow surface so that it can more naturally and frequently spill onto its floodplain during the spring snowmelt.

Oh, isn’t that lovely? I think I know right where this is, too. He goes on to say that there’s going to be controversy about reintroducing beavers because some folks don’t think they belong in the Sierras, and he mentions the south america fiasco as if those beavers were planted by mistake for anything other than fur harvest, BUT it’s a great article and if we can just get folks talking everything will be better soon!

One final note from the “leave it to beaver” festival they’re holding in Utah next year. I asked Mary what the “Beaver Story Corps” referred to at the bottom of the poster and she said that she’s going to have a soundbooth rigged to record statements from people about the first time they saw a beaver! How cool is that!

Uh-oh I think I’m having ‘festival envy’.

Late Breaking Beaver Stupid

Check out this photo of a ‘beaver’ from kxan in Maryland. I called the news station and suggested they might want to at least get the right continent. Sheesh.