Rethinking the beaver

Has there ever been a national symbol more loathed or misunderstood? Has there ever been a more important time for the beaver to flourish?

By Frances Backhouse

The beaver revival is, indeed, one of the continent’s great conservation success stories; beavers are thriving throughout their traditional territory in North America. But as beavers continue to multiply, not everyone is cheering them on. Each year, the average adult beaver cuts approximately one metric tonne of wood — about 215 trees — for food and building materials. Not only do we complain when they compete with us for timber or meddle with the scenery, we also object when their dams flood highways, farm fields and waterfront real estate. In 2010, one even killed a husky in a suburban park in Red Deer, Alta.

Yet a growing body of research suggests that we need more beavers not fewer, that beavers perform a vital service to the riparian world that will be particularly needed in the drought years ahead. It may be an argument Canadians don’t want to hear.

Be still my heart! What an unexpected treasure! Frances article appears in the December issue of the Canadian Geographic (who knew there even was such a thing?) and rewards us with two pages of history and smart ecology surrounding this keystone species. You really must go read the whole thing, but I’ll give you some highlights to get you started. A big thanks to our Ottawa friend Donna Du Breuile for passing it my direction when a friend sent it her way. I don’t know how I missed it before!

Grey Owl’s death in 1938 spared him from seeing how quickly his beloved beavers fell into disfavour once they became plentiful. The first systematic survey of Prince Albert National Park, conducted in 1935, pegged the resident beaver population at approximately 500. By the 1940s, park officials were live trapping “surplus” beavers and relocating them to other public lands in a futile attempt to curb their numbers. In 1952, with the population nearing 15,000, they switched to lethal traps and killed thousands of beavers before moving to a more benevolent management approach a few years later.

I love that the article includes Grey Owl, but if I were Frances’ editor I’d make sure she launched straight into a discussion of flow devices and how the very real problems beavers cause can be successfully managed. People need to know two things about beavers: certainly that they’re useful and good, which Frances really promotes beautifully – but also that the problems that they cause can be easily solved.

Let’s face it, we humans won’t do much that’s not easy.

Like Westbrook, Glynnis Hood, an associate professor of environmental studies at the University of Alberta, is working on addressing our ecological amnesia and determining what beavers mean to North America. Fittingly, Hood works in the Beaver Hills, just east of Edmonton.

Pocked with shallow sloughs and pothole lakes, this rolling, hillocky landscape lost its namesake in the mid-1800s and remained without beavers until 1941, when a few individuals were reintroduced to Elk Island National Park. When Hood and her co-investigator Suzanne Bayley analyzed park beaver census figures, climate data and aerial photographs for the period between 1948 and 2002, they discovered that wetlands with active beaver colonies had nine times more open water than those without, regardless of the amount of precipitation. In 2002, which was drier than the notorious Dust Bowl era of the 1930s, the beaverless wetlands were visibly more parched than the occupied sites; some were even reduced to mud flats.

“Our results,” wrote Hood and Bayley in a journal article published in 2008, “confirmed that beaver have an overwhelming influence on wetland creation and maintenance and can mitigate the effects of drought.” Citing climatechange models that predict increasingly frequent and persistent droughts, they recommended that we make more of an effort to coexist with beavers — by installing perforated pipes to regulate flow, for example, instead of removing problem dams — and even recruit them to help with wetland rehabilitation projects. While the language may be academic, the message is clear: we need to rethink our relationship with beavers and learn to appreciate them as stewards of our most precious resource.

Go Glynnis and Cherie! Smart minds using smarter research to stem the tide of beaver-stupid that is storming the land. Go read the entire article and think for a moment about the number of fronts this battle has to be fought on. Small scale wars in communities like Martinez, tribal and regional efforts focused on certain species like salmon, legislative efforts like the hard-won relocation bill in Washington state last year, and pragmatic neighbor-to-neighbor conversations like wrapping instead of trapping. It’s a mammoth, leviathan battle of epic proportions.

I see the wake first, then the wedge-shaped head and a sliver of back. The beaver’s blunt nose creases the water, but not even a ripple betrays the hidden kicks that power its smooth, forward momentum. Suddenly, the tail flicks up and smacks the surface with a gunshot crack. As the beaver corkscrews out of sight in a blur of brown, sunlit droplets explode like fireworks. Gone, but not gone for good. Smiling, I watch the expanding circle of wavelets vanish into the cattails.

But its worth it. Go read the whole thing and leave a comment about how people and beavers can coexist. I did.