EcoSense for Living

ANNOUNCER: On this episode of Ecosense.

SARAH BATES: Beavers are having a moment.

[splashing] BEN GOLDFARB: Beavers are incredibly adaptable.

They're incredibly flexible.

They'll live in the Bronx River in New York City.

They'll live in downtown Seattle.

They'll live in Walmart parking lots.

TORREY: We built the United States of America on the backs of beavers and on the backs of our floodplains really.

And when we had nothing but abundant water and not that many people on the planet, it worked.

GORDON: So my dad asked me, Son, what's wrong with a dam?"

Well, nothing, if you hate rivers.

JENNIE: I met Ben Goldfarb, author of the book, Eager, to find out why beavers are having a moment.

So what do you think about the old one?

What would they have done here?

BEN: They probably right here... You see this underwater tunnel here... JENNIE: Oh, wow!

How long can they stay underwater?

BEN: Up to 15 minutes.

JENNIE: 15 minutes?

BEN: Incredible breath holders.

JENNIE: Okay.

Who knew?

Why do beavers get such a bad rap?

BEN: I'm a beaver apologist, right?

I love these animals, but I recognize that they can be challenging to live with sometimes.

You know, they change the environment in all kinds of ways, and obviously .. like the environment the way that we made it, right?

So when they build dams in road culverts and wash out roads, or clog up irrigation ditches or, you know, cut down farmers fruit trees, you know, they're just doing what they do naturally.

But, you know, it can be irritating for us as humans.

You know, I think the really important thing to recognize is that, you know, those ponds and wetlands they're creating are providing all kinds of immense benefits for us, right?

They're filtering out water pollution, and they're storing water in the face of drought, and they're capturing carbon, and they're, you know, they're just providing all of these wonderful services.

They're, you know, they're preventing the spr.. of wildfire in some cases.

So yes, they're causing some small amount of property damage in some cases, and they can be challenging to live with.

But the immense benefits they provide far, far outweigh any of those negative costs.

JENNIE: So they're helping with climate change esse.. BEN: Beavers are incredible climate change adaptation tools, right?

You think about here in the American West.

You know, so much of our water comes from snowpack, right?

We depend on all of that snow falling up in the mountains, and then that snow gradually melts all spring and summer and even into early fall, and that's what keeps water in our streams and rivers and irrigation ditches.

The problem is that as the climate warms, you know, that precipitation is falling as rain rather than snow.

So, it's running off the landsc.. and we're not getting that long-term drawn out trickle.

So, we need some way of keeping the water on the landscape, right, and that's exactly what beavers do.

They're building thousands of little reservoirs for us up in the high country, capturing that water and gradually releasing it throughout the summer.

They're spreading water laterally onto the floodplain.

They're soaking water into the ground, and they're helping to grow plants.

You know, I've talked to ranchers who say that beavers can increase the productivity of some of their pastures tenfold by spreading water.. and letting it soak into the ground and just increasing that vegetation.

They spread water out, and so they create these fire breaks and fire refugia where all of the animals can retreat during a big fire.

Emily Fairfax, this great beaver wildfire researcher, she's actually proposed that the forest service change its mascot from Smokey Bear to Smokey Beaver since, you know, beavers fight fires.

JENNIE: Genius.

BEN: Yeah.

I think Smokey Bear's cool.

I don't want to totally demote him, but he can have like, a beaver sidekick.

JENNIE: I'd vote for that.

BEN: That would be fun, yeah.

JENNIE: What is their importance, not just in the West, but in other areas of the country?

BEN: You know, beavers are doing incredibly valuable work all over the place.

Think about a stream in a very agriculturally intensive region like the Chesapeake Bay watershed, and that stream is carrying nitrates and phosphates and all kinds of pollutants from agriculture, and, you know, we need some way of filtering out those pollut.. and that's what beaver ponds do, right.

They slow down those flows, give those nitrates and phosphates and other pesticides and herbicides a chance to settle out and be captured in the bottom of the pond.

JENNIE: Would there ever be any sort of reintroduction of beavers into a habitat that really needs their engineering?

BEN: You know, there are lots of projects all over the country, especially in the American West where they're live trapping some of those animals that are maybe causing conflicts on private property and then moving them typically onto public land up in the forest, you know, sort of far from the houses and roads and other infrastruc.. where they can just, you know, build their dams and create their ponds, and do their thing relatively far from people.

That's done a huge amount of good to restore some of these beaver populations in places where they historically lived, but then we trapped them out.

JENNIE: Can you tell me about the role that beavers have played in the United States?

BEN: Yeah.

Indigenous people have had relationships with beavers going back many, many thousands of years, right?

And certain tribes, like the Blackfe.. actually sanctified the beavers and didn't kill beavers because they recognized how important they were for ecosystems and for creating these watering holes for elk and bison and other animals.

So, this idea that beavers are good and important and necessary, you know, this is something that western science is kind of rediscovering recently, but that native people have known for millennia.

The industrial fur trade really begins in the early 1600s in New England and spreads rapidly west and south.

And this relentless drive for pelts, this kind of soft gold rush, was hugely influential in early American history.

You know, practically every significant event prior to the Civil War had some kind of beaver connection.

And of course, it was those white trappers and traders who spread smallpox and other diseases that, you know, so ravaged many native tribes.

So, you know, the story of the fur trade is really the story of early American history in all of its, kind of, grandiosity and tragedy.

You know, one of the great things about beavers is how family oriented they are, right?

So, typical beaver colony, you've got the male and the female, the mating pair wh.. generally monogamous, they typically mate for life.

And then you've got three year classes of offspring, of brothers and sisters all kind of living together at times in that beaver lodge.

So you've got the kits, the baby beavers, typically two to four in a litter.

You've got the one-year-olds and then the two-year-olds.

And then those two-year-olds are the ones who disperse out looking for their own territories, like going off to beaver college.

And so, they're just wonderfully cooperative breeding animals who really work together in a cool way.

JENNIE: What would their lodge look like?

BEN: The beaver lodges come in a few different sort of forms.

You know, often you .. of a big freestanding island lodge out in the middle of a pond.

Sometimes they're bank attached lodges that are glued to the stream bank.

Sometimes, you know, they just burrow into the riverbank and live pretty inconspicuously in a den.

So, this is an old beaver tunnel.

When they do this sort of thing, there are a couple of possibilities.

One is that this may have been a bank burrow or bank lodge, at some point.

You know, there could have.. a den under our feet right now.

Another possibility is that they'll have a little hole where they pop up, and that way they can just go feed on whatever they're feeding on without having to walk over land that whole distance and risk being eaten by a mountain lion or something like that.

Inside the lodge, you've typically got an elevated nesting chamber.

There are underwater tunnels that lead up into the lodge, and the beavers just live in that little nesting chamber all, kinda huddled together.

JENNIE: So, it's a pretty complex little living scenario.

BEN: It's really complex.

It's almost like the dam creates the pond, which is the moat, and the lodge is the castle, right?

So, they build that dam, they flood that pond, and then the lodge in the middle is safe from predators.

JENNIE: What do beavers like to eat?

BEN: Beavers are totally herbivorous.

They don't eat any fish.

They're cutting down trees to eat that inner bark, which is, that's the cambium, the sugary layer of bark that does the growing.

And they eat lots of green herbaceous stuff as well.

Cattails and water lilies and wildflowers and grasses.

You know, they're pretty happy little grazers.

But that inner bark, you know, that's really kind of the beaver mainstay.

JENNIE: So, what would you like to see for the future of the beaver?

BEN: First of all, I think we just need to stop killing them, right, or certainly kill them a lot less, you know.

Are we going to get to 400 million beavers again?

Probably not.

We humans have colonized so much of the good beaver habitat, right?

We both like these low gradient stream corridors and broad fertile floodplains.

That's where they like to build their dams, and that's where we put our roads, and railroads, and power lines, and farms, and other infrastructure.

So, we're never going to restore beaver populations to exactly what they were at the time of European arrival.

But can we get from, let's say, 10 million today to 50 million or a hundred million someday?

Yeah, I think we can.

And that's incredibly exciting to me that these animals are willing to live alongside us if we let them.

JENNIE: In Montanas Lolo National Forest, the Forest Service teamed up with the National Wildlife Federation to make sure beavers could still do their valuable work without flooding the roads.

ELISSA CHOTT: So, the beavers have made their dam and its level with the road and it's pushing the water that way.

What are your concerns with the water on the road?

TRACI SYLTE: Well, we have a lot of concerns with the water on the road.

First is, road deterioration.

Any time there's water on the road, we need to get it off the road.

Once we see beavers come into an area, we see beaver are changing the vegetation back from these conifers, tall trees, back to green willow dominated valleys.

And we're seeing the moose come back and just the whole valley is just changing in the flora and the fauna.

We as humans can have a lot of influence on the systems around us and for good and bad.

And I will say, beaver can be problematic, and they can raise, as we're seeing here, water levels and flood roadways.

But as long as we take that disturbance and we use it for, mimicking what the natural ranges of variability are in our system, I would say that beaver's disturbance is probably more favorable than humans.

[Laughter] ELISSA: If this has to go slightly shallower so that we can protect the road, I don't think that's going to be a problem because the beavers, if they're still in that lodge, they'll still have plenty of time to adapt before winter comes on.

CHRIS AUSTIN: A lot of methane.

– Yeah TORREY RITTER: When I came into the department, we still sort of handled beaver complaints a certain way.

We'd give out a damage permit, trap the beavers out, or just start ripping dams out until the beavers gave up.

Just within the past five years, due to a huge coalition of people that have become more interested in beavers, we've seen a big shift towards, kind of, elevating them to one of these species that we want to be really careful about and thoughtful about how we manage them and how we deal with conflicts with them because of the benefits that they can bring to wildlife and people.

SARAH: Beavers are having a moment.

[splashing] At the National Wildlife Federation, we recognized that we needed to do work to make sure there was plenty of water to support wildlife.

And here in the West, we recognize that beaver are just an awesome partner for building climate resilience on the landscape.

We came in thinking, beavers are great.

And what we need to do is advocate for statewide policies and statewide practices to help support more beavers in all the places that they could be useful.

And especially here in places like the headwaters of important river systems.

What we ran into was people saying, Yeah, beavers are great when they're in their place, but they cause a lot of trouble, and we don't want them here. And a lot of people didn't even want to talk about them at all.

So, National Wildlife Federation, working with other partners, we recognized that we really needed to address the conflicts, and we really needed to start with building acceptance for beavers before we could advocate for more beavers all over the place.

TORREY: Beavers are really interesting to work on cause theres kind of three big categories.

They're a fur bearing animals, so there are people that, you know, trap them and sell.. And they can be a nuisance species, so they're flooding roads or they're chopping down trees in people's yards.

But then sort of the new one that's come up in the past few decades is, I guess I use the word steward,.. that they're taking care of our streams, and riparian areas, and floodplains.

And so, within those three categories, there's lots of different attitudes and opinions about 'em, depending on who you.. to and in what situation.

They're a disturbance regime.

They come and they manipulate stream systems, and they make them more diverse because of what they're doing on the landscape.

And because of that, you build up ecological niches for different species to fill.

And so, they take these fairly simplified stream channels and floodplains and turn them into these kind of biological powerho.. CHRIS: Wanna see a tadpole?

SHELBY WEIGAND: There are pools that in some of those lower areas that then can create habitat for things like salamanders and frogs who require that for some part of their lifecycle.

Or the riffles in the part that's not dammed, create habitat for fish.

We have irises and cattails and so many different willow species, and it's alive and it's booming with different bird calls.

And if you're there at night, you can hear crickets and frogs croaking, and they just create some really beautiful and diverse habitat that's required for many of our fish and wildlife species and ourselves who all exist on the landscape together.

[fire cracking distantly] Another part of riparian habitat, and how beaver influenced that, is wildfires.

So, beaver can create, kind of a buffer for wildfires that are coming through an area.

TORREY: I have seen a lot of places where it kind of acted like sort of a Noah's Ark in the flames, where it's like that's the only thing left that's still green and still looks like it's pretty much untouched, whereas everything else is gone, completely burned.

And so when we think about things like frogs and fish and stuff that might live exactly in a beaver colony, those can still breed in that area and then start to fill in the gaps where the fire went through.

ELISSA: My work involves helping landowners live with beavers, and that can be a public landowner, like the forest service or a private landowner.

Beavers build up their dams to escape from predators, be able to reach food sources and then keep their lodge and den entrances underwater for winter so that they can have food over winter.

And so once they get to a happy medium with that dam building, they're going to stop and no longer build.

It's going to go into maintenance mode.

When landowners contact us, they want a different option besides just trapping beavers out because they want them there.

They recognize their benefits.

Our three main conflicts that we get are tree cutting, culvert plugging, and freestanding dam flooding.

And so, for tree cutting, we just wrap it.

It's a simple circular fence around the tree trunk.

With culvert plugging, we put what's called an exclusion fence on, and those are just made with cattle panels and T-posts.

Every one is designed to be site specific depending on the curve of the stream, or how deep the water is, or the size of the culvert.

- Right there.

ELISSA: And then with freestanding dams, we can put in what's called a ponds leveler, and it's a pipe through the dam, and that creates a permanent leak.

And generally, you can sneak away about a vertical foot of w.. before beavers start to notice.

And then with ponds levelers, you have to cage the inlet of the culvert or the pipe that we stick through the dam because same thing with a culvert, they'll feel that pull of water going in and plug it if it's left unprotected.

TRACI: So what's the strategy here with this?

ELISSA: So on this, since this is so small, I would suggest a fence and pipe device, which is an exclusion fence around the culvert inlet there.

CHRIS: So, this is a little Intermountain wandering garter snake.

Thamnophis Elegans Vagrans.

I've caught many of these.

I've never been bit by one.

I think they are the chillest snakes in the whole world.

They love frogs, which makes sense to why they'll be over here.

This guy is probably looking for tadpoles.

And watch this, if I let it go.

Look at that go.

- Oh, he goes swimming TRACI: Definitely takes some engineering.

ELISSA: Yeah, you have to be like a beaver.

TRACI: Be like a beaver.

[Laughter] We talked about earlier how humans are engineers and beavers are just as good as engineers and if we could only talk together better, I guess that's what we're doing.

ELISSA: Yeah.

TRACI: Yeah.

SARAH: Conservation is not a solo act.

And none of this happened because of one organization or one person, but it really was a lesson in the value of partnerships, often with unlikely partners.

TORREY: We built the United States of America on the backs of beavers and on the backs of our floodplains really.

And when we had nothing but abundant water and not that many people on the planet, it worked.

Now, we're running out of water.

We have people everywhere.

We have infrastructure everywhere.

And so, getting beavers back into these headwater streams to kind of grab that snow melt, hold it, release it slow throughout the year, that's something that spans every political divide and rural urban divide, everything.

It's like we all need more water on the landscape.

And when I think about how we do that at a landscape scale, I can't think of anything more impactful than beavers.

JENNIE: You might not have heard of the Flint River, but if you've flown into Atlantas Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, you've walked right by the Flints headwaters!

GORDON ROGERS: The Flint River starts kind of in a wet spot in a persons private backyard, and then rather quickly as it moves underneath the Atlanta airport is joined by small tributaries.

By the time it emerges in a pipe from the airport property, it's a decent sized piedmont stream.

Most rivers headwaters are in more remote either rural or even wilderness type headwaters systems.

But the Flint's the opposite of that.

It starts in an urban area.

I don't know of any other river that starts in a city, but I have found that my ignorance can be legion.

BEN EMANUEL: My organization, American Rivers, along with many partners, has been part of an initiative we call Finding the Flint.

People have been surprised to learn that that stream, along that street in their neighborhood, is actually part of the source of the Flint River, and Finding the Flint is about finding ways to restore those streams to bring them back to health because all communities deserve clean water and access to a healthy river.

The Flint River from its source to its mouth at the Apalachicola is just shy of 350 miles.

Roughly, half of that is free flowing river.

So, the Flint is one of only about 40 rivers nationwide that run for 150 miles or more without a dam on the main stem of the river.

GORDON: So my dad asked me, Son, what's wrong with a dam? Well, nothing, if you hate rivers.

There's nothing wrong with it.

But it ceases to be a river.

Now, it's an impoundment.

Its a giant evaporation pan.

And so, you wind up with less total water in the river over time, with more total water locally for whatever local purpose.

But for the whole river ecosystem, you wind up with less.

They all homogenize the aquatic ecosystem.

So, instead of dozens of species of fish, you get maybe a dozen.

Instead of dozens of species of birds, crawdads, et cet -- and some species, you lose 'em entirely because they're riverine dependent.

BEN: Its character as a natural system is one that's connected up and down throughout the landscape, by that flowing water, without obstruction for animals and plants, nutrients and energy to move up and down the river.

That free flowing nature is the chief characteristic that has helped the Flint be intact and healthy, helped to be resilient to the impacts of climate change, even to..

There are impacts, of course.

Land development in the headwaters area near metro Atlanta has a significant impact on the river.

Farm water use and land use also has its impacts on the river.

There are industrial uses here and there, but for the most part, it's a healthy, intact system.

The upper reaches of the river system provide water supply to suburban communities throughout South Metro Atlanta.

The lower reaches of the river system and the underground aquifers provide water supply to a really strong farm economy in southwest Georgia.

The river does well to provide water to all those people and farms up and down its length, but there is a strain there.

The Flint River increasingly sees extremes of both flood and drought.

GORDON: Rivers are extremely dynamic things.

Droughts help dry things out, no surprise there.

And remineralize things that die and then are re-flooded again, akin to prescribed fire in a forest.

Floods, help reshape channels, help put woody debris and leaves and other things that fuel and structure the aquatic ecosystem and help clean out shoals.

That river can tolerate some human induced changes, whether it be from using too much water, or from climate change, or from too much pavement, making too much water run off too quickly, but then it kind of becomes like a car or a truck where you're just revving it too high or you don't have enough lubrication in it, and eventually you can kill the damn thing.

A good example of that's the Colorado River.

There are plenty of years where the Colorado River, a major river system out west, never makes it to the Gulf of California.

So, the trick for a river like the Flint is don't ever push it that far.

Which begs another question is, how in the world could we push something that far east of the Mississippi where we have between 40 and 80 inches of rain?

And the answer is, when you put too much use on something, you can do that.

BEN: There's important collaboration going on between public water suppliers and conservationists to keep the river flowing during drought, while maintaining a secure water supply for communities throughout the area.

Most of us in the United States live within a mile of a river or stream, and I think the most important thing we can do for our local river is simply, don't take it for granted.

Recognize that it probably works hard for you and your community, providing water, taking away wastewater, absorbing floodwaters, keeping wildlife healthy and happy.

GORDON: Get out on it, enjoy it.

Swim in it.

Get up with your local watershed group, whether that's a river keeper or otherwise, and fall in love with your river because your lifestyle is based on the existence of that water.

There is no such thing as economic activity on this planet without water.

To me, the most important thing I can do is show up for work every day, but also get out in nature and enjoy it so I can remember what I'm working for.