Beavers are Back!

Beavers are a keystone species often overlooked as pests–they change waterways and muck up people’s parks and yards. The first result you get when you look up “what to do with beavers” is a 13 step resource on natural ways to prevent them. My search already had a bias, though, so I can’t totally fault it. Still, humans have long been at odds with beavers. They move things around and prefer to occupy places best suited to building large housing complexes.

In other words, humans like building. Beavers like building. One of these is not going to win.

Either way–yes, they do. They’ll change the whole area around a stream or creek by building their dens in crucial cruxes of the water flow, causing it to divert to other paths. As my husband said; “Beavers are hyper intelligent engineers, who build according to everything from water flow to pressure to resistance. They understand in a way that we will never understand.” Which is, I think, a really cool thing.

Imagine architects and engineers studying how they construct their waterproof, underwater dens, and applying that to areas that are looking at flooding due to climate change.

–Sidebar, why has no one applied this concept to Atlantis?

I didn’t even have my camera or notebook with me, I was just going out on a little jaunt before dark to get rid of a bout of overstimulation. Hearing my own species talk for more than a few hours straight aggravates my brain, apparently. My childhood makes so much more sense. So, I hope you’re enjoying these iPhone quality photos.

When we first entered the trail, which runs alongside a perhaps 20-to-40-foot-wide creek, as deep as 6 feet with heavy rainfall, we laughed at the little boys shoving sticks into the water. Then, as we moved on, we found ourselves disappointed and mildly appalled at what we saw–countless trees downed by what looked like axe or chainsaw cuts.

Why? For what reason? This was a relatively wooded area previously, full of long grasses and two very slim paths to walk; one made by human feet and the other by creek off-shoots when it overflows, though that one is rather muddy. It’s usually left pretty well alone–there’s a cleared area just on the other side of the creek that is occupied by play sets and parking lots. Were these trees in danger of falling from storms that loosened their roots? I can hardly believe that they’d fell so many trees over that, or that so many trees would need felling from that.

It wasn’t until halfway back that we noticed something was off; the cuts were too round, too smooth.

He put it together first, and our frustration turned very quickly into excitement. On the way back to the car (we were rapidly losing light as you can see by the photos) we found more and more evidence of BEAVERS!

They were hunted once to near extinction, and our ecosystems saw the consequences. Without the beavers’ dams, streams erode deep channels that cut off other streams and tributaries, making many floodplains more susceptible to flooding and drought. Their dams also help staunch the flow of the water, allowing it to soak into the land, restoring groundwater reserves, which in turn encourages vegetation to grow on the banks. In places where wildfires run rampant, this vegetation acts as a natural fire-stopper.

The Brandywine Conservancy has a really interesting article detailing how they–despite their knee-jerk reaction to discourage the damage being done to healthy trees they themselves planted as well as ecosystems they themselves shepherded–learned to stay their hand, and they reaped the rewards of noninterference. You can find that here.

My questions now turn to; where will they build? How will they change the creek? What will happen? What will they do?

I also realized that perhaps the flooded, muddy, murky area that used to be a grassland at the head of the trail might be evidence of the beaver’s work at diverting the deep creek instead of what I thought was the result of many feet on their way to clear trees and brush out of the way.

We actually caught sight of it–one of them, I guess–on our final few feet back to the car. My husband yelled, quietly, and said that “It was huge, as big as Mira!”

I heard a large splash coming from further upstream at the same time as him seeing the other, so there must be a pair.

I wonder what they’re going to build. I wonder where they decide the water should be diverted. This is so exciting!