Citizens deciding how to spend $1.5M in Dixie National Forest
Mark Havnes: Utah News
Cedar City • Beavers could soon be frolicking in the waterways of Dixie National Forest in southwestern Utah. Beaver transplants were just one project approved by a citizens’ groupcharged with deciding how to use $1.5 million given by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to counties for projects benefiting national forests.
I know it’s the first thing I’d spend money on! Bring back the beavers who can bring back the water who can bring back the fish and the birds and the wildlife that people go to a National Park to enjoy. Apparently a citizen group gets the authority to point these moneys in the needed direction. Part of it goes to relocating beavers and part of it goes to teaching the public how to build flow devices.
Also approved was more than $9,800 for the environmental group Grand Canyon Trust to develop public workshops on how to build flow-control devices so farmers, ranchers and others who depend on irrigation can coexist with the beavers.
With a beaver-ear to the ground I knew that something big was up when last week I heard from two well-known but as-yet-undisclosed beaver defenders that they had been approached about the contract. Moving beavers and managing beavers. Regular readers can probably fill in the names for themselves for the time being, but we’re talking good news for the beavers in Utah, and probably Arizona and Nevada too.
Beavers aren’t the only keystone species to do well in this contract
Another $20,800 will be used to relocate colonies of the threatened Utah prairie dog from Iron County to forest land and $29,500 to fight the threat of plague in existing colonies. Prairie dogs are a perpetual problem for land developers in the area.
Obviously the unwritten maestro in this symphony is the tireless Mary O’Brien of the Grand Canyon Land Trust. She has clearly made beaver pathways all over Utah and the state is lucky to have her. Rumor is she’s trekking to California this August to learn how Martinez throws a beaver festival, so maybe you can thank her yourself.
