I don’t know how it is in the East Coast, but here in the West we’ve done a lot of harm to our streams and waterways. 90% of our wetlands destroyed and we face water crises almost every year. From trying to straighten channels to make room for more crops and polluting waters or pouring concrete – we made decisions about land use that turned into land abuse. If you doubt me go look over the fences at Alhambra Creek in the middle of town, say around Shell Ave. Deeply down cut streams with no room to meander and no alluvium left. Zero capacity to slow or retain water or allow it to seep into the banks. Just enough room to allow ‘flash’ production where when we are lucky enough to have water fall from the sky: it mostly goes where we tell it to, and then disappears into its salty cousin.
Of course you know that getting rid of all our beavers is a big, big, part of this damage. Imagine how different our streams and creeks and riverbeds would look if we had hundreds and thousands more beavers, storing water, trapping soil, re-channelizing streams, raising our water table, increasing the riparian border, preventing erosion and making deep still pools. The estimates say we are at ten percent of the population we once had.
Often now when beavers show up they are fixing such brutal conditions their dams regularly blow out – like our beavers! Think for a moment how much easier their job would be if there were 10 colonies of beaver all the way up Alhambra Creek?
All this goes to say that sometimes they benefit from a helping hand. As in this video which you may have seen from the NOAA fisheries project on Bridge Creek in Oregon.
Sometimes beavers use help that was never intended! Check out these photos from Beaver friend Mike Kossow in Plumas County, who has worked for years on streams and restoration. He was struggling to find a way to place poles in degraded streams so that a little soil could be restored. Here’s his description
The objective of the project was to push the thalweg off of the stream banks so they would reach an angle of repose and vegetate. The first year I built structures (49089 jpg), the second summer I installed bank revetments to catch stream-bank slough. To the anchor posts I pinned young pine from a highway right-of-way clearing project to t he stream-banks in-betweens the structures. I visited the project again last summer, there are some problems with vertical banks but overall the demonstration project was very successful.
Guess what he discovered anchored around his painstakingly installed posts? Beaver dams! And of course, all around the new beaver dams were lots and lots of new trout.
During the two summers of construction we saw very few trout, after construction and the arrival of beaver there were trout everywhere, especially young-of-the-year rainbow trout.
No surprise, when he came back in a year or two the beavers had been mysteriously removed.
When I toured the site last year the beaver were gone, no new cutting and most of the dams were in disrepair. There were still more trout than before construction but not as many as I observed for several years post construction and the arrival of beaver.
The very same thing happened on Gurnsey Creek, headwaters of Deer Creek, I constructed a project for the USFS in 2000. I will not install hard rock structures in alluvial settings, I stay organic. My motto is if the designed fails there will be no additional damage to the site that the pre-project condition. One of the structures was actually an engineered beaver dam, I still have the design drawings, the other structures were low head multi-log sills, all structures are still in-place but several are now buried. Beaver moved on-site one day after construction and the new colony really took off. I checked the site out two years ago and the beaver are gone. Both sites (Butt Creek & Gurnsey Creek) are near Chester, I do not think the disappearance of two healthy beaver colonies is due to natural causes. I think there is some in the area that does not like beaver or understand the role of beaver as a keystone species.
A little history on the Butt Creek Project, in the early 1960’s there was a large beaver population upstream of the project area. The meadow was irrigated by putting plastic dams in Butt Creek diverting water from Butt Creek onto Fanani Meadows using highline irrigation ditches constructed along the contours of the meadow. Irrigating the meadow reduced the flows in Butt Creek and weaken the riparian vegetation, on top of that livestock grazing was uncontrolled, livestock destroyed what was left of the weaken riparian vegetation. The beaver were considered pests because their ponds flooded the upper meadow and they also interfered with the meadow irrigation practices so they were trapped out. By the late 1980’s the stream channel, meadow, and what was left of the cottonwood, willow, and alder community was so degraded the landowner, Collins Pine became concerned because I called their attention to the condition of the meadow. Collins Pine is a very good forest steward but had not been paying much attention to the meadows on their property. Collins Pine called CDF&G and asked them for advice on how to manage meadows & stream courses. CDF&G recommended fencing, so a split rail fence was constructed to keep livestock out of the stream channel and riparian areas. The fencing project showed Collins Pine how much damaged was caused by uncontrolled grazing and the company began an internal discussion about eliminating livestock grazing from their property altogether.
Just so you’re up to date on the who’s who of beavers, Mike a fisheries biologist and the founder of Meadowbrook Conservation Services. I met him because he is a member of the California Working Beaver Group and worked with Chuck James on finding the beaver dam at Red Clover Creek which was carbon tested at 1100 years old and formed the foundation for our historic prevalence paper!
Collins Pine land has not been grazed by livestock since 2002. The stream channel has incised into the meadow and the meadow has dried out. My hope is beaver will be left alone to rebuild and raise the stream channel so it can again be connected the floodplain. It is very important to understand the role beaver play in our watersheds, I cannot say it enough; beaver are a keystone species, our meadow and riparian ecosystems will never be healthy without them. I do fear beaver management because of egos and politics, we cannot get along with each other!
Indeed Mike, we can’t seem to get along with each other OR with OUT each other!
