Because the beaver isn't just an animal; it's an ecosystem!

Tag: Sarah Koenigsberg


For the past week every SINGLE beaver headline that rolls across my desk has been about beavers ruining the tundra and causing climate change, I guess we like blaming beavers a hell of a lot more than blaming Chevron or Shell. Well seeing this headline was a welcome relief and I was happy to watch the film again.

Unleashing Beaver to Restore Ecosystems and Combat the Climate Crisis

While indigenous communities, farmers, and those living close to the land have known for generations the role that beavers play in maintaining healthy ecosystems, more and more scientists have been experimenting and gathering data on just how essential these animals are. Through their actions, beaver (and humans mimicking their actions) can help restore river-based ecosystems, improve wildfire resilience, bring fish & other animals back to habitats, and fight drought.

Beaver should be our national climate action plan because connected floodplains store water, store carbon, improve water quality, improve the resilience to wildfire, and what beaver do play an enormous role in controlling the dynamics of those systems. So, yeah, it sounds really trite to give a national climate action plan to some rodents. But if we don’t do that directly, we should at least be trying to mimic what they do.

Now I can’t find a thing to argue with in those paragraphs. I know I posted this when it came out but it’s very worth a second look.

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“Across North America and Europe, public agencies and private actors have reintroduced beavers through “re-wilding” initiatives. In California and Oregon, beavers are enhancing wetlands that are critical breeding habitat for salmonids, amphibians, and waterfowl. In Nevada, Utah, and New Mexico, environmental groups have partnered with ranchers and farmers to encourage beaver activity on small streams. Watershed advocates in California are leading a campaign to have beavers removed from the state’s non-native species list, so that they can be managed as a keystone species rather than a nuisance. And federal policy is shifting, too. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service sees beavers as “partners in restoration,” and the Forest Service has supported efforts like the Methow Beaver Project, which mitigates water shortages in North Central Washington. Since 2017, the USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service has funded beaver initiatives through its Aquatic Restoration Program.”

Just to be clear. Not in California because beaver relocation isn’t legal in California. In the golden state we can only kill them.

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Yesterday was crazy good for beavers with the article in Bay Nature, and three new donors to Worth A Dam because of it. Today looks even better with a great new edition of Oregon Field Guide about fires and a segment about our furry friend. Every is in it, Jakob Shockey, filmaker Sarah Koenigsberg and Emily Faifax,  Send it to your non believing friends and make sure eveyone shares it on their phone or fb page.

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Happy birthday to a new beaver nonprofit on the block, I asked Jakob to introduce it himself and I’ll be turning the reins over to him. Let me say as an aside that his new logo wins the award for the VERY BEST BEAVER LOGO I have ever seen. The designer, Gregg Payne, even got the teeth right. So of course I had to congratulate him too. Jakob and friends have burst on the scene this year and is going to make a huge difference to our friends in the beaver state.

So without further ado…

Guest post by Jakob Shockey, Cofounder and Executive Director

Back when “novel coronavirus” was a phrase most of us had yet to hear, Rob Walton and I ate lunch in a dingy bar in Portland, Oregon. Earlier that day we’d spent hours in a windowless conference room deep in a grey cinderblock building, talking beaver policy. Rob had recently retired as a senior policy advisor with NOAA Fisheries, where he was the primary author of the Oregon Coast Coho Salmon Recovery Plan. After 5 years of installing nonlethal beaver coexistence devices with my business Beaver State Wildlife Solutions, I was suddenly mired in new permitting challenges. We were tired, we were frustrated, we were driven, and we needed lunch. The beer was thin, the fries were clammy, but we were hooked by the thin tendrils of an idea that would become The Beaver Coalition.

 

 

The valley I grew up in, where I now raise my children, was called “Sbink,” or “place of the Beaver” by the Takelma People. And it was a place of beaver, until Peter Skene Ogden led his Hudson’s Bay Company trappers through on his quest to create a fur desert. Even when the fur was gone, the valleys of the Siskiyous still bore treasure.  Waves of men would straighten the braided streams into single channels, moving them back and forth across the narrow valleys as they sluiced out the gold that had settled over thousands of years, captured in the complexity of a “beavered” landscape. While the gold is gone a few beaver remain, but their families now occupy the banks of incised riverbanks, the remnants of their past kingdom. As our late season snowpack slips into memory, each summer my children play with dry, powdery stones where I used swim in deep pools. Healing the land, paying back and paying forward, this is why I am focused on partnering with beaver.

While each of us on The Beaver Coalition team came to our work from different backgrounds, we are united by a drive to empower humans in partnering with beaver for abundant water and resilient, functioning streams. Rob brings an expertise in salmon recovery, an understanding of policy and a mastery of bureaucracy. Sarah Koenigsberg, producer/director of the award winning film The Beaver Believers, brought an awareness of these humble ecosystem engineers to tens of thousands of people as her film screened in film festivals worldwide. She brings the ability to unite people of different walks of life with a compelling story and a knack for helping scientists remember to talk like normal people. Andrew Schwarz brings his skills and passion as a restoration practitioner. Jason Strauss brings a lifelong commitment to wildlife and a background in business. Mike Rockett brings a deep dedication to the environment, a skillset in the law and a history setting up nonprofits. Chris Jordan brings the tools of scientific inquiry, including his work in the team that developed the Beaver Dam Analog and the Beaver Restoration Guidebook to this effort as the chair of our Science and Technical Information Committee. We live throughout the dark shadow of the Hudson’s Bay Company “fur desert” and have formed this partnership to leverage each other’s skills and passion.

 

Why The Beaver Coalition? Simply put, this is our effort to carry forward the legacies of those we have learned from in a strategic bid to help beaver change the world. Our mission is to empower humans to partner with beaver through education, science, advocacy, and process-based restoration. To borrow a term from biology geek-speak, we will address the “limiting factors” that prevent beaver from doing what they do within our landscape. Through a strategic focus on building an effective coalition, clarifying and advancing policies, promoting the best available science, developing education and outreach, and implementing beaver-based restoration, we will help beaver repair our planet. As with so many in this community of “beaver believers,” we are simultaneously pragmatic and dreamers, facilitating a paradigm shift in society’s relationship with beaver. We hope that by building The Beaver Coalition as a resilient nonprofit organization that works with and supports others, our community will have another useful tool in advancing this vision.

 

Please visit our newly launched website at www.beavercoalition.org to read more about our approach and sign up for our mailing list to stay abreast of what we’re up to. We’re excited about our upcoming projects and will be announcing them soon through that list. Perhaps most importantly, we want engage in conversations about how we can best be of service in this effort. Please let us know what opportunities The Beaver Coalition should consider to empower humans in partnering with beaver. What important lessons have you learned that you think we might benefit from? Please reach out to us or leave us a comment on our blog or social media platforms.

We take inspiration and have sought advice from the scientists and biologists working in federal, state and local agencies, tribes, and the people behind organizations including: Beaver Solutions LLC, Worth a Dam, Beavers: Wetlands and Wildlife, The Beaver Institute, Methow Beaver Project, The Beaver Ecology and Relocation Center, Anabranch Solutions, The Beaver Advocacy Committee of the South Umpqua Rural Community Partnership, Beaver Deceivers LLC, Cows and Fish, the Miistakis Institute, Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, Beavers Northwest, National Wildlife Federation’s Montana Beaver Working Group, Beaver Works Oregon, Muse Ecology Podcast, Sierra Wildlife Coalition, Defenders of Wildlife and Ecotone Inc. as well as so many key individuals including Glynnis Hood, Michael Runtz, Sherri Tippie, Suzanne Fouty, Mary O’Brien, Ben Goldfarb, Derek Gow, Gerhard Schwab, Duncan Haley and Valer Austin. This effort is only possible because of the foundational and continued work of these people and organizations. As 4H youth across rural America have pledged for generations, we’re eager to continuing to work together and be of service, with our heads, hearts and hands for a better community, country, and world.

Welcome to the beaver-hood Jakob and friends! I’m so happy that you are on the scene, Go check out their swanky new website designed by Sarah Koenigsberg herself. Something tells me your going to like it.


That was a fairly bizarre day. I started it with a 2 hour interview with grad student Zane Eddy about the beavers in Martinez and I finished it with a live viewing of Beaver Believers hosted by BeaverWorks in Oregon.

Did I ever do anything else with my life? I can’t remember,

Anyway there interview with Zane was fun, just a little PTSD inducing. Mostly interesting to think about why Martinez turned out differently than most beaver tales. He wonders whether its something to do with John Muir’s influence on all our emerging spirits. I don’t know. I guess its as good a theory as any. This is what the “Human Dimension’ page has to say about the project at Humboldt State.

Zane Eddy

Project: On the management of urban beavers in Martinez, CAeddy

  • Beavers provide a myriad of ecosystem benefits that can help to mitigate the damaging effects of climate change, but when they come into contact with humans, they are often viewed as a nuisance. In California, the most common management solution is lethal management, but in 2007, Martinez, CA, decided to coexist with a family of beavers that had moved into the Alhambra Creek that runs through town. My research examines the various management decisions considered by city managers and how these management decisions relate to statewide policy.

Nice to talk to someone who had watched the meetings and could comment “Public comment just kept coming like a wave!”. And also agree that Mary Tappel’s cardboard presentation at the april meeting was kind of bizarre. Anyway, he’s off to talk to others now, Fro and Igor and Cassy Campbell. Let the beaver story be told. He had a phrase for what I was in the story. I was struck by it and immediately forgot it after we talked. Something that means I was a key mover of information and the story. It’s a little overwhelming to think about it,, which is why it probably fell right out of my hear.

Speaking of key movers, this clip is from Jim and Judy Atkinson of Port Moody BC. I had told her that one thing I had never seen was a flow device doing its job underwater. And she braved lots and lots of cottonwood fluff to give it a try with the go pro.

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Isn’t that cool? Don’t you just expect to see a mermaid swimming by?

At the end of the day I got to go to the movies on my couch and attend the zoom Beaver Works meeting meeting folks involved in beaver restoration in East Oregon and watching Sarah’s great film: The Beaver Believers, I had forgotten how soon after the stark fire it was filmed in Washington and Kent Woodruff comes across much more alarmed and heartbroken than I’ve seen him. There is a wonderful healing clip though of him watching beavers emerge in their beautiful pond that survived the fire and it is just so beautiful to watch him watching them. Been there done that, you know?

Mary Obrien and Suzanne were awesome in their roles and of course Sherri  stole the show. Martinez was a tiny admirable segment at the end, and I didn’t suck, so that was a relief. All in all I was really happy that its making the film festival rounds and getting itself seen far and wide.

Now I have three days left to finish four more slides and get ready for the meeting monday, Hearts and minds baby. Lets hope we win some over.


 How did I miss this? A fantastic interview with Jakob Shockey and Sarah Koenigsberg gearing up for the recent film festival in preparation for the Siskiyou Film festival last weekend. They both do an excellent job and deserve your listening time.

What Beavers Can Do For The Landscape

Wasn’t that excellent? Jakob has gotten to be such an wonderful speaker that I can only dream how awesome his presentation will be at BeaverCon in a few weeks.

Coming soon to the deep-benched Nehalem Watershed is this fine presentation:

Lower Nehalem Watershed Council Speaker Series: “Beaver Dam Analogues” w/Steve Trask Feb. 13

On February 13th, 2020 at 7 pm the Lower Nehalem Watershed Council will host Steve Trask for a presentation about Beaver Dam Analogues. In this talk, Steve will talk about the importance of Beavers as ecosystem engineers and keystone species, the watershed impacts of not having enough beavers, and finally what beaver dam analogues are and how they can help! This is an exciting opportunity to learn about an unusual technique for habitat restoration.

Don’t you wish you could be there? I certainly do. Steve is a new name to us but one I bet we’re going to hear again.

Steve Trask is the Senior Fish Biologist for Biosurveys Inc. He has over 25 years of experience surveying river and stream habitat on the Oregon Coast. In collaboration with the Mid Coast Watershed Association and ODFW, he created the Rapid Bioassessment process that is currently being used to map juvenile salmon distribution in the Nehalem Watershed. He also is currently working with the Upper Nehalem Watershed Council to install beaver dam analogues.

I think we talked about Biosurvey’s once with some footage that showed beavers swimming with the salmon. I’m sure we’ll hear more fro this Senior Fish Biologist that thinks beavers are good news.

I came across this yesterday and thought how many historic ways there are to draw beavers wrongly. Let’s call this the beaver-mountainlion.

 

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