I’m officially allowed to announce our good news today, so of course I’m thinking of John Muir’s friend Enos Mills, who was invited to his house and came to Martinez in 1908. One of the many books he wrote was the very famous “In Beaver World“, all about our favorite subject matter, and whose very last chapter is titled thusly.
I’m very very proud to imagine that Worth A Dam has possibly been considered as good a educational conservationist as the beaver is. Congratulations to everyone and all of Martinez who made Worth A Dam happen in the first place.
Speaking of the many species beavers assist in their award-winning Keystone capacity, here’s an awesome photo from the Tulocay Napa beaver pond taken yesterday by Rusty Cohn.
Now I think we should all write than you notes to the Scottish Goverment for being so enormously stubborn the world keeps getting headlines like this over and over again.
Give beavers permanent residence – we’d be dam stupid not to
Beaver benefits
None of this is about nostalgia. Beavers are often referred to as “ecosystem engineers” and herein lies much of the reasoning and controversy behind their reintroduction. There is extensive evidence from Europe and North America that wetlands created by beaver dams benefit everything from water plants, dragonflies and amphibians to fish and ducks to song birds and bats. In Knapdale, damming by beavers transformed a small pond into a wetland of a type and complexity probably unseen in Britain for centuries.
Beavers can also restore habitats without the need for a bulldozer or planning permission. On the Bamff estate on Tayside, we found that grazing by beavers trebled the number of wetland plants over a nine-year period. Where raised water levels saturated a meadow thanks to damming of ditches, the number of plant species increased by 49% and the multitude of habitats created increased the total diversity of aquatic invertebrates by almost 30%. Indeed the benefits were even further reaching. We found that the beaver dams also acted as a sink for agricultural pollutants, and may also help to reduce the risk of flooding. Individually these findings are not that surprising, though it is unusual to demonstrate them all in parallel.
Go read the whole thing. And thank the famously stubborn scots for needing a lot of convincing on the subject!
