Their are very few things that put me in a better mood than a headline and article like this. I’m sure you understand my ebullience. Get ready to feel it too.
Faithful readers know that I have become a beaver believer. For most of the time that the Chesapeake Bay has existed, beavers by the millions inhabited every nook and cranny of the six-state watershed (and most of North America).
By damming, digging and ponding, the rodents controlled the continent’s hydrology and shaped the landscape in ways that delivered profoundly cleaner, clearer water to streams and rivers and estuaries. Their work also created rich habitats for a host of other denizens of the air and swamps.
So the premise of a forthcoming Bay Journal film, Water’s Way: Thinking Like A Watershed, is that more beavers — virtually trapped out by the 1750s — could significantly and cost-effectively boost Bay restoration.
I am starting to think that Chesapeake bay is the Washington State of the East, Beaver Brilliance seems to shine from there and hopefully will beam across the land, The author of this article is Tom Horton who I think attended Beaver Con last year and is a good buddy of one of it’s founders. Beavers are finally getting something to be grateful for.
Still, there is immense potential. Beavers are adapting to even highly developed locales; we have filmed wonderful wetlands complexes they have built behind a Royal Farms in the pavement-clad heart of Baltimore’s White Marsh-Middle River urbanization.
And they are relentless, bundles of instinct and compulsion, constantly expanding their projects up and down every stream, always exploring around the next bend, and the next, and the next (kind of like humans).
So what ecologists term “carrying capacity” — physical habitat — for beavers to return abounds. The real question is “cultural carrying capacity”: the willingness of landowners and governments to accommodate a critter who chews trees and plugs drainageways and floods landscapes for a living.
The Bay Journal film I’m working on with Dave Harp and Sandy Cannon-Brown aims to expand that cultural carrying capacity, to show why we must champion beavers (and emulate them) and to show that there are relatively simple, cheap ways for humans and beavers to coexist. (If you can’t wait for the film, search the web for “Beaver Institute for beaver conflict resolution.”)
Here the author does a very good job of showing how people can have a hard time accepting the saviors on their land. We know that pretty dam well in Martinez, but it’s good to write about it.
Being our salvation doesn’t mean being our buddies.
When beavers move in, their flooding and chewing can initially degrade forests, creating a more open, sunny complex of braided stream channels and weedy vegetation — which to many people looks messy.
More ecologically sophisticated folks than I (The Nature Conservancy) have trapped out beavers that were ruining nesting trees for great blue herons. Post-trapping, the herons moved anyhow, for reasons known only to herons.
The beavers that Ken Staver, an ag research scientist and farmer, initially welcomed on his farm undermined a dirt roadway, causing a hauler to flip over and spill several tons of corn into the water. Ken still likes beavers, but now more guardedly and with some trapping to keep them in check.
Allie Tyler, with a large property near Easton, has made a game of it in retirement, letting his beavers plug a pond outlet every night, then during the day removing it with his backhoe.
GRRRRRRRR. The nature conservancy trapping out beavers because they ruin blue heron nesting sites? Beavers are FAMOUS for making great nesting sites for blue heron. Did they put that on a calendar and send it to your mom? Famous animals we kill to make room for better animals?
There’s a lot of evidence with salmon and beavers in the West that such fears may be largely misplaced, but no such research has been done in the eastern U.S.
On one of our filming sites, Bear Cabin Branch in Harford County, MD, neighbors were horrified at the look of a restored stream where beavers have moved in and prospered. Then their kids began playing in the pond and catching bass, and folks mostly got used to the shaggier look of the beaver landscape.
Similarly, some farmers have become aware of the superb duck hunting where beavers move in, and they see potential for their own acreage for sport and income from waterfowlers.
Sometimes I have been surprised at the tolerance for beavers. I was stopped by a farmer as I snooped around his creek looking for evidence of beavers. He had a bolt action rifle lying on the front seat of his pickup.
When I told him what I was doing, he chuckled, “Oh, yeah, they’re in here. Some people say get rid of ’em, but you’ll never do it … those animals are God’s own engineers.”
Yes they are, I cannot wait to see the film. I’m sure there’s going to be beautiful footage of canoing through beaver swamps. Here’s the last film he made with Dave and Sandy. You can see beavers fit right into the cannon.
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Scott McGill was standing beside a stream that, to many people, wouldn’t look like a stream at all. But if an explorer had been plopped down here four centuries ago, in what is now Baltimore County, MD, this is the way a stream might have looked, he said.
Beavers are coming back, even to the inimical conurbation that is most of northern Anne Arundel County. Michelsen, acting deputy director of the county’s Bureau of Watershed Protection and Restoration, is my guide to what is no less than a demonstration project, with beavers themselves doing much of the construction.
Success by 2025 is going to depend more and more on how well we can halt pollution running from the land — specifically the land that our population radically alters wherever it goes.
