This is a very fun interview and it has the very best interview question I’ve ever heard. A very cautious interviewer asking,  “Would you say, do you think, that beavers actually create wetlands?

Water talk: Beaver hydrology and management

A conversation with California State University-Channel Islands Professor Emily Fairfax about her work studying the lives of beavers and their impacts on droughts, fires, and water quality as well as some strategies for beaver management.  (Confidential to GS: This is for you!)

Well that’s very fun to listen to. Emily is doing SUCH a great job with her new beaver spokeswoman role! Like all young scientists she under emphasizes the Herculean work that has gone on up to now to make this work possible. She doesn’t credit Glynnis or Dietrich or Lixing-Sun or Wohl. But okay, history is in the past. A great deal of good work has been done to get us to this point, but we are ready to let you move us forward. Let’s go!

There was another fine article from National Wildlife Federation this month. We are getting such good press from Montana and Sarah Bates.

Re-watering the Prairie

Prairie streams—vital ribbons of water and riparian habitat for wildlife—graphically demonstrate the power of erosion. Once, numerous beaver dams slowed water flowing through these drainages, but beavers were nearly wiped out in the heyday of the fur trade. As a result, the water runs faster, forming narrowing stream channels that become disconnected from the surrounding lands. This reduces both water availability and the riparian habitat that is essential for the survival of many prairie species, including the iconic Greater Sage-grouse.

The National Wildlife Federation, in partnership with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, is taking steps to improve riparian conditions on prairie streams in north-central Montana, using low-tech methods that include beaver dam analogs (also known as BDAs) to imitate beaver activity and expand the diversity of flora and fauna. This approach to restoration is expanding around the western U.S., sometimes combined with relocation of beavers from other areas. In Montana, where relocation is not a favored management strategy, improving stream conditions with BDAs facilitates natural recolonization by beavers already living in the area.

Ahh the BDA and its beaver building cousins! Great to see both given equal praise in this very positive article!

In short, says ecologist Amy Chadwick of Great West Engineering, who is leading the project design and implementation, “we’re putting water back on the floodplain to keep green areas green for longer.”

One project site at Cottonwood Creek, a drainage on public lands north of the Missouri River, illustrates the power and promise of this deceptively simple restoration technique. A Montana Conservation Corps (MCC) young-adult crew camps on the ridge high above the creek bottom, and is joined early each morning by field staff and seasonal staff with the Bureau of Land Management as well as the National Wildlife Federation’s staff, contractors, and volunteers.

Hi Amy! It’s great to see you still doing fantastic work for beavers! We need more like you in every state.

Results are apparent almost immediately. After just one day of BDA construction, water that previously rushed down the narrow channel is already spreading onto the surrounding floodplain, glistening under bright yellow sunflowers and drawing leopard frogs out onto newly watered ground. As team members pack up to leave the site several days into the project installation, they watch from the hill as a muskrat wanders downstream and plops from the bank into a newly formed pool, swimming large circles in a channel that didn’t provided this habitat just a day earlier.

“It’s stacking up and spilling more water than we anticipated, after just three days,” Chadwick notes. “We’re pioneering low-tech restoration approaches proven effective in other parts of the West in a new landscape. It’s very exciting to try out a lot of different things to see what works and what doesn’t.”

Ahh it’s great to see this at work. Slowly doing the good work that will change hearts and minds. It makes me happy, but if you want to see what makes me even happier spend some time with this video from the St, Louis Aquarium using children’s art to fill the tank.