Maybe not that chair….
Joe Cannon of the Lands Council sent me a note about this lovely article yesterday, so I would highly recommend sitting somewhere cozy and enjoying it.
Beaver Fever – How Spokane’s Lands Council is Deploying Nature’s Dam Builder to Help Save Water
by Paul K. Haeder
It’s pretty compelling to hear that a Spokane-generated and managed program is catching the notice of scientists and state agency environmental wonks. That is what is happening with a local relocation program called the Beaver Project. This is a story about nature re-invigorating the land that humanity has so deftly razed, dredged, paved over and cemented in.
“I hope people agree to look to nature for low cost and low impact solutions to manage our environment,” says Amanda Parrish, one of the Beaver Project’s aficionados and leaders. She’s had a direct hand in putting those sentiments directly to work in remote forests and soggy riparian areas in our neck of the woods.
How’s that for an overture! The article is delightful to read and, what’s more, says that beavers live for 7 years instead of 50 which is always appreciated. Never mind that it also says females are larger than males (?) — its mostly accurate and well worth your time.
With 90 percent of the animal’s number reduced, so were the dams they constructed. This near extirpation caused the first major shift in the country’s water cycle. Let’s follow the numbers—if each of those pre-Columbian beavers had built a measly acre of wetlands, then an area of more than 300,000 square miles—a tenth of total land area of the country—was once beaver-built wetland from sea to shining sea.
Now that’s a stand alone paragraph. Let’s just savor it for a moment. I wish it was included on every water bill mailed in the United States. Ten percent of the beavers we once had, and USDA still killed 28000 beavers in 2009.
The 24-year-old Parrish, who grew up in San Diego, ended up in Spokane two years ago, with a degree in environmental sciences from University of San Francisco, to try her hand as an AmeriCorps volunteer attached to the Land’s Council, the well-established Spokane-based environmental group dubbed TLC for short.
Now she’s leading the effort of live-trapping beaver families, tending to them temporarily in her South Hill yard where she fusses over mothers, fathers and their young with water and fresh cut alder and aspen branches while waiting to get an entire family unit reunited to then be “relocated” to a stream on land at four relocation sites outside of Republic, Chewelah, Newport and Valley.
Honestly, don’t you wanna go to Amanda’s house? Twenty Four. I dimly remember 24. Maybe Worth A Dam needs to pay for Amanda and Joe to spend a fortnight with Skip Lisle and Mike Callahan so they can learn first hand about installing flow devices. Hmmm with the understanding that they would do the same for other 24 year olds in ten years. Joe just posted photos of his first attempt on Facebook the other day. He couldn’t find any 12 inch pipe so he had to make do….
The Lands Council does good work, and I’m particularly happy Joe & Amanda are part of it. I’ll finish this post by suggesting you watch this video again, which was produced a few years back. It’s an excellent piece of beaver gospel.
