Apparently all across the countr people are demanding their right to beavers. It’s about dam time. This new report is from the city of brotherly love beaverly love.
Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. In Oregon things have gotten so bad that they’re bringing in the big guns. This is a thunder-dome of an interview, with Suzanne emerging as the clear victor. I’d hate to be on the wrong side of this argument.
Oregon lawmakers are considering legislation that would prohibit beaver trapping and hunting on federally managed public land. Employees of federal land management agencies would be exempt from the restrictions. Workers would still have the power to remove beavers that are causing issues like road and campground flooding. Still, critics say the bill is unnecessary. We hear from Suzanne Fouty, a hydrologist who helped write the bill, and Holly Akenson, a wildlife biologist and member of the Oregon Hunters Association, which opposes the bill.
This is what happens when the right people are on beaver’s side.
Yesterday we got the registration update for the summit. And I am happy as I can be about the direction this is going. 607 registered in all and nearly a hundred CDFW. I have been hounding the state parks too and finally connected with someone who is going to share with their wildlife team so I expect these numbers to get better very soon.
All in all it’s turning out to be a dam fine list of attendees! Plus this morning I registered Jon for both his pfizer shots at CVS Napa! Light at the end of the tunnel baby.
Here’s how to celebrate by tuning in monday or listening here now.
On this episode of Locus Focus, we talk with Dr. Suzanne Fouty, a retired U.S. Forest Service hydrologist, about the importance of protecting the beaver who are still doing their best to survive in our forests and wetlands, despite harassing, trapping and hunting by people who do not appreciate the vast benefits they provide. Suzanne is a co-author of House Bill 2843 that would close recreational and commercial trapping of beaver on federally-managed public lands in Oregon.
I could listen to Suzanne Fouty all day and so should you.
Beavers have been called “Nature’s Engineers.” In fact, the Army of Corps of Engineers could learn a lot from beavers. Instead of re-engineering nature to serve narrow human interests, beavers engineer the natural environment to serve not just their own needs, but the needs of entire ecosystems. Before beavers were nearly extirpated from the Pacific Northwest over a hundred years ago, stream corridors were filled with beavers creating and maintaining complex, water-rich habitats that provided homes and food for a diverse array of fish and mammals, as well as humans.
Oh I wish every state had one or more Suzanne’s and say after April 9th maybe more of them will. be. Did I mention that there are now 25 states signed up for the summit? 10 in Alabama. Think about that for a moment.
Oregon Representative Brad Witt is chair of the committee that will determine by March 19 whether or not House Bill 2843 gets voted on this session. You can contact him at Rep.BradWitt@oregonlegislature.gov or call his office – 503-986-1431 – to share your concerns about protecting beavers in Oregon.
Suzanne joyfully wrote me that she got her first shot yesterday. Here we are after dinner after the State of the Beaver Conference which has been waiting for its shot too. As are all waiting in line now for our permission to disembark from HMS Covid.
Today is the day when people get together to talk about a beaver summit for California. Excited doesn’t begin to jydrolodescribe how I’m feeling. So I’ll just march on and tell you its ALSO the day that retired USFS hydrologist Suzanne Fouty will be on Jefferson Public Radio talking about beavers. I had a great chat with Suzanne and she was hopping mad about the decision by ODFW. I’m sure she’ll be amazing to listen too. Tune in at 8:00 am PST to listen live, and I’ll post the link tomorrow.
Oregon is The Beaver State, but it is not officially giving any further protection to its namesake animal. The state Fish and Wildlife Commission just voted against ending beaver trapping and hunting on federal lands in the state.
It was a second attempt by the Center for Biological Diversity to add protections for beavers, which were trapped and hunted nearly to extinction in the 19th century.
Quinn Read is Oregon Policy Director at CBD; Suzanne Fouty is a hydrologist who has studied beavers’ effects on streams. They join us with details of the effort and its disposition.
Once upon a time oregon had the crazy policy of regarding beavers as protected furbearers on public lands and classifying them as predators on private lands so they could be killed without a permit. Now its just all killing all the time. There’s lots to talk about. I’m glad it’s on at 8 am. Prime time in the radio world.
But hey, at least we have a president. And that’s feels pretty dam good.
Oregon Urged to End Beaver Trapping, Hunting on Federal Lands
PORTLAND, Ore.— Conservation groups filed a petition today asking the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission to permanently close commercial and recreational beaver trapping and hunting on the state’s federally managed public lands and the waters that flow through them. Beavers are Oregon’s official state animal, but they can be legally hunted and trapped with few limits.
Cascadia Wildlands, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Conservation Angler, Defenders of Wildlife, Northeast Oregon Ecosystems, Umpqua Watersheds, WaterWatch of Oregon and Wetlands Conservancy filed this petition along with Dr. Suzanne Fouty, a retired hydrologist with the U.S. Forest Service, who has been studying beaver influences in the West for 25 years.
The Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission discussed this request in June as part of its review of the state’s furbearer regulations. But it was rejected then as being outside the scope of that rulemaking notice. Today’s petition initiates a new rulemaking process for the commission’s consideration.
“Federal and state agencies, watershed councils, utility companies, conservation groups, and private landowners spend countless hours and millions of dollars every year to restore Oregon’s waterways, mimicking the natural behavior of beavers,” said Nick Cady, legal director of Cascadia Wildlands. “At the same time, Oregon’s Department of Fish and Wildlife permits limitless commercial and recreational trapping of beavers and does not even monitor populations. The department’s beaver trapping and hunting regulations are outdated and directly undermine the extensive, ongoing restoration of our water resources and efforts to recover imperiled salmon populations.”
Beavers are a keystone species and offer widely recognized ecological, economic, and social benefits, today’s petition notes. Beaver-created and maintained habitat improves water quality, decreases the impacts of floods, and restores natural water flows. This benefits humans and a wide variety of fish and wildlife, including highly endangered coho salmon. Beavers therefore play an important role in improving Oregon’s water security and minimizing impacts of climate change on human and wild communities.
“Beavers are our natural allies in the fight against climate change,” said Quinn Read, Oregon policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “We live in the Beaver State, and it’s appalling that beavers are still hunted and trapped. This cruel practice favors a few people and deprives other Oregonians and endangered salmon of the benefits of beaver-created habitat.”
Few people in Oregon trap or hunt beavers. But today’s petition points out that the annual culling of the species has significant negative effects on beaver populations and their corresponding social, economic and ecological benefits. The petition’s requested changes wouldn’t affect hunting and trapping opportunities elsewhere but they would allow beavers to thrive on federally managed public lands.
“Many people don’t know just how critical beavers are to functioning watersheds that, in turn, benefit hundreds of other plants and animals, including threatened and endangered species,” said Sristi Kamal, senior northwest representative for Defenders of Wildlife. “Beaver conservation on federal lands could be key to the conservation success of such species and their ability to survive and adapt to climate change impacts.”
Beaver populations have been significantly reduced from historic levels through hunting and trapping. These ongoing practices suppress population growth and expansion into large swaths of unoccupied suitable beaver habitat.
What do you know! Two days ago the US forest service published a collection of articles about riparian restoration, and guess what number seven was? The summary of Suzanne Fouty’s very beavery dissertation. You can download the whole thing online but I’m going to give you some highlights here to whet your appetite for the original.
Euro-American (EA) beaver trapping was a regional and watershed-scale disturbance that occurred across the North American continent. This concentrated removal of beavers altered drainages by creating thousands of localized base-level drops as beaver dams failed and were not repaired. These base-level drops led to the development of channels as ponds drained and water eroded the fine sediment trapped behind the dams (Dobyns 1981; Fouty 1996, 2003; Parker et al. 1985). The speed at which drainages transformed from beaver-dominated to channel-dominated varied as a function of climate, upland and riparian vegetation, and the subsequent land uses. As the drainage network pattern changed, flood magnitudes and frequencies increased and base flows decreased, creating stream systems much more sensitive to climatic variability.
Using current research and historic observations, I developed a conceptual model describing the geomorphic and hydrologic response of a drainage basin to the entry of beavers and then their removal or abandonment (Fouty 2003).
Now there are lots of parts of this research that are way over our heads, but the gist is the Suzanne used a model to systematically determine how much water was lost in parts of the US when beavers were eliminated. She challenged the work of those who said had said for years that the effect of their loss was minimal.
You know me, I can only understand the pictures to understand. This is an excellent break down of why beavers matter on the landscape. Use it to convince your hydrological skeptics. Suffice it to say that from a surface and ground water perspective beavers make things a lot more habitable and life supporting.
Separating out cause-and-effect relationships in fluvial systems is challenging because changes to their form and function are the result of many factors interacting over time and space. This chapter explored some of those factors in its examination of how EA beaver trapping altered the appearance and hydrologic behavior of stream systems and why the influence of beavers and beaver trapping were missed in the discipline of fluvial geomorphology until recently. It also examined how information gaps led to the development of relationships of process and form based on observations and measurements of channelized drainages and altered uplands that created conditions whereby water was rapidly shed from the landscape rather than stored and released slowly.
Given the magnitude of the historic changes and their hydrologic consequences, the scale of restoration and the rate at which it must occur is enormous if the impact of climate change on water availability, and the systems that depend on water, are to be minimized. Partnering with beavers to restore the water-holding capability of our stream corridors would rapidly dampen fluctuations in the abundance and scarcity of water and leave wild and human communities less vulnerable. Efforts will require broad public support and an integrated approach by State and Federal agencies given their respective areas of influence and impact. Scientists are in a position to help inform the discussions by sharing what we have learned about how past and current land uses affect the ability of the landscape to naturally store water for future use; however, our effectiveness will first require that we change the lens we have been looking through. Because the discipline of fluvial geomorphology has internalized and codified degraded systems as normal, our stream restoration efforts fall short. By placing these fluvial geomorphic relationships within their historic disturbance context, one that includes EA beaver trapping, new strategies, approaches, and partnerships emerge that are essential for restoration to successfully occur. This new lens reveals the essential role beavers play in this recovery process.
Basically the paper concludes with “you were all WRONG (And I’m looking at you Aldo & Luna) because you assumed a landscape stripped of beavers was the norm. Listen to what I’m saying because climate change is gonna knock the spit out of all of us. And beavers can help.”
Beavers have been called “Nature’s Engineers.” In fact, the Army of Corps of Engineers could learn a lot from beavers. Instead of re-engineering nature to serve narrow human interests, beavers engineer the natural environment to serve not just their own needs, but the needs of entire ecosystems. Before beavers were nearly extirpated from the Pacific Northwest over a hundred years ago, stream corridors were filled with beavers creating and maintaining complex, water-rich habitats that provided homes and food for a diverse array of fish and mammals, as well as humans.
Oregon deserves all our prayers today with 1
