In response to yesterdays article Melissa writes:
I hope you and your beavers are well. I had the pleasure of hearing you speak at the beaver conference this spring. I’m amazed our little Yakima paper caught your attention. We do really appreciate your comments to the editor and you really nailed what the article was lacking. Neither William Meyer, WDFW habitat biologist, nor myself were available for this interview so our crew did the best they could. Unfortunately, I think the reporter was more interested in the face value of our project instead of the big picture of what we are doing.
We always try to work with landowners to manage underappreciated beavers in place first. We’ve wrapped and painted countless trees, installed two deceivers, and three pond levelers over the last 3 years. Unfortunately our dwindling grant does not support these infrastructure supplies so unless we can convince the landowners to pony up a few bucks we resort to live trapping.
Most (if not all) of our trapping areas were lethally controlled prior to our project. We live in a primarily agricultural area where hay export is a major revenue. Changing the way beavers are viewed is a very slow process and will not happen overnight. We educate each landowner about the benefits of beaver and show them their furry neighbors up close trying to convince them to manage not eliminate the next colony that takes up residence (we’re seeing beavers move into areas in less than a year after trapping).
As was shown in the article we do still live trap and relocate which is beneficial for our headwater systems devoid of beaver. Beavers have been eradicated in many of our headwater systems which now lack the water storage or habitat essential to support endangered salmonids and wildlife. We are trying to take these underappreciated colonies that folks are not yet ready to manage and repurpose them to degraded headwater systems. We’ve seen amazing changes to headwater systems with the re-colonization of beaver.
If you are ever in the Ellensburg area please look us up we would love to give you the tour of what our beavers have done. Again, we appreciate you educating the world about the benefits of beaver.
Mel Babik
Melissa Babik
Project Manager
Mid-Columbia Fisheries Enhancement Group
421 N. Pearl Street, Suite 216
Ellensburg, WA 98926
Phone: (509)310-9274,
