Sonoma Mountain Institute

In Glen Ellen, a colony of beavers arrives- and this time, they’re a little more welcome

Written by: James Knight

In the mid-1990s, a family of beavers found their way up Sonoma Creek and settled in Glen Ellen. Although they were the first beavers that had been seen here since the animals were extirpated decades earlier, they got the same welcome that is traditionally offered to beavers: they were trapped and killed.

But recently, dams have again been observed in Sonoma Creek, and evidence suggests that some intrepid beavers have jumped watersheds and are headed toward the Laguna de Santa Rosa. The beavers are back, and this time, they just might get a fair chance.

“Back in the ’90s,” says Brock Dolman, Watershed Advocacy, Training, Education and Research Institute director at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, “there was no functional recognition that beavers were anything but a pain in the neck.” The Glen Ellen beavers became a pain in the neck when they felled 50 grapevines—Merlot, but still—with their famously effective incisors.

The few people who protested the action could do little but complain after Fish and Game issued a routine depredation permit and the deed was done.

To the beavers’ disadvantage, they’re listed as an exotic, nuisance animal only because of a brief period from the 1920s to the 1940s when the state “planted” beavers from Oregon and Idaho. But historical accounts from ship captains, explorers and General Mariano Vallejo tell of an abundance of beavers in North Bay waterways, and of heaps of beaver pelts shipped out during the California fur rush prior to 1849.

Then in 2006, a mating pair wandered out of the Delta and constructed a dam on Alhambra Creek in the middle of Martinez. “You could sit at Starbucks and watch the kits play,” says resident Heidi Perryman. The city council, worried about flooding, first considered the quiet, business-as-usual approach. But with so many people watching and protesting, the beavers got a stay. Perryman formed the nationwide advocacy group Worth a Dam, to help people navigate similar situations. (Her next talk on the issue is Thursday, July 11, at San Francisco’s Randall Museum.)

The solution in Martinez was simple. A flow device was installed that keeps the pond at a manageable level, while concealing the sound of flowing water. “The thing about beavers,” says Dolman, “is they’re a big rodent. They are nature’s great engineers—but they’re not that bright.” In one experiment, a boom box was placed near a dam, playing a loop of running water. Sure enough, beavers soon appeared and began piling mud and sticks on it.

In Martinez, it isn’t just about beavers anymore. When the pond filled with fish, river otters returned to the area. Mink also turned up, along with a host of waterfowl and songbirds.

That kind of result could improve habitat for the North Coast’s federally endangered coho salmon, says Dolman. “Having grown up in Idaho and back East, I loved to fish in beaver ponds because there were a lot of fish in there. So I got to thinking: Why aren’t we talking about beavers?” While state agencies and landowners are trying to slow down stream flow and erosion with costly projects, “beavers can do it better, faster and way cheaper.” Dolman’s organization was invited to contribute beaver language to the 2012 Coho Recovery Plan.

If beavers pop out of the creek into another vineyard, it may not play out the same as last time. In Siskiyou County, Dolman says, the Department of Water Resources had requested a trapping permit almost annually for 30 years, because beaver activity interfered with a data collection point. “Two years ago, they were doing the same thing, and the biologist said, ‘Wait a minute, we’ve got to talk about this.’ They had a community meeting, created a beaver technical group, and for the first time the DWR didn’t get that permit.”

Beavers can be excluded from an area easily, according to Perryman, with a half-foot high, solar-powered electric fence. At Glen Ellen’s Hunter Farms, vineyard manager Chris Bowen says that trapping is something he “certainly would not be party to again. We decided that beavers aren’t great climbers, so we just improved the bottom of our fence that already existed.” It’s worked so far, Bowen says.

If beavers can provide some of the environmental services that we need anyway, Dolman suggests, we ought to allow them to. “And they’re doing it for free. In these economically restrained times, why wouldn’t we think of partnering with them, if it’s benefiting us overall?
”

If your interested in more information about Beavers please feel free to look at any of the sites listed below:

BEAVER NEWS:

• February 2013 – Kate Lundquist interviewed about beaver on KRCB Radio
• September 2012 – WATER Institute contributes beaver language to NOAA’s final CCC Coho Recovery Plan. It is significant that this agency is acknowledging the value of beaver to Coho salmon as it was not too long ago that beaver were still considered an impediment to salmonid recovery.
• September 2012 – WATER Institute co-authors beaver paper – After years of research and collaboration beaver advocates from the California Beaver Working Group have published two papers re-evaluating historic evidence of beaver in the Sierra Nevada in the California Fish and Game Journal, a major peer-reviewed scientific publication.
• March 2012 – Brock Dolman given Golden Pipe Award – the Salmonid Restoration Federation presented this award to Brock Dolman, the Director of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center’s WATER Institute for his leading role as a proponent of “working with beavers” to restore native habitat.
• January 2012 – California Beaver Meeting – A group of 22 scientists, professors and staff from non-profit organizations, state, federal and tribal agencies, citizen groups and private environmental firms gathered to discuss the current status of beaver in California. The meeting was hosted by the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center’s WATER Institute, which, as a member of the California Beaver Working Group is heading up a campaign to restore and protect beaver in California.

The OAEC WATER Institute has been working to protect beaver (Castor canadensis) in California for years. In 2011 we officially launched our Bring Back the Beaver Campaign (see full list of campaign goals). This project aims to restore and protect beaver in California through the following means:

Advocacy

• Collaborate with members of the California Beaver Working Group to bring back the beaver
• Work with local and State officials to protect and expand existing populations
• Build alliances with partner organizations whose goals could benefit from the environmental services and habitat provided by beaver
• Support the update of the seventy year old Status of Beaver in California Report (1942)
• Support the development of a California Beaver Management Plan

Training & Education

• Train landowners how to implement non-lethal beaver management solutions
• Educate landowners, ranchers, agriculturists, flood and water supply agency staff, natural resource managers, and decision makers about the benefits of beaver
• Promote the role of beaver in the mitigation of global warming and the adaptation to climate change
• Produce a California-specific publication on co-existing with beaver towards watershed health that demonstrates how to implement non-lethal management strategies and highlights the benefits of beaver to communities and other species such as salmon and birds.

Research

• Publish results of the re-evaluation of the historic range of beaver in the Sierra Nevada, the North Coast and California as a whole.
• Contribute to the mapping of current populations

To learn more, contact Brock Dolman (ext. 106) or Kate Lundquist (ext. 118) at (707) 874-1557.

HOW YOU CAN HELP:

• Educate others about the benefits to beavers and support those in conflict with beaver to implement non-lethal management strategies (Benefits of Beaver to California & Management Strategies Resource List)
• Add new beaver sighting locations to the Beaver Mapper project.
• Help us find more historic evidence of beaver occuring in the Sierra Nevada, the Coast Range south of the Klamath River, the San Francisco Bay Area and all of Southern California before 1923.

BEAVER RESOURCES:

• Benefits of Beaver to California & Management Strategies Resource List (pdf 318 KB) – Download this 2 page flier

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Beaver flag created by Brock Dolman

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency just released their first National Rivers and Streams Assessment conducted from 2008-2009 created by the EPA and their tribal partners looking at the health of nearly 2,000 sites varying from streams and rivers nationwide. The study was conducted in an effort to monitor waterways and collect scientific data on our nations water resources.  Two summers of collecting 25,000 samples that were shipped to laboratories around the country lead to the upsetting results that at least 55% of biological communities in our rivers and streams and at least 50% of our are stream length are in poor condition.  Among many of the tests conducted were: chemical stressors, physical habitat stressors, and even levels of danger to human health.  In which, “Phosphorus is the most widespread stressor in six of the nine ecoregions, and nitrogen is the most widespread in one ecoregion… Of the four physical habitat stressors assessed in the NRSA…riparian disturbance is the most widespread stressor in two of the nine ecoregions… NRSA is able to report that over 13,000 miles of rivers have mercury levels in fish tissue that exceed human health screening values.” (91-92) The EPA is hopeful that results such as these will lead to continued watershed support and management not only in the areas that experience poor conditions but on protecting the areas that still remain in good condition as well.  For more detailed information on the results and this study please visit: www.epa.gov/aquaticsurveys or go to the pdf link: http://water.epa.gov/type/rsl/monitoring/riverssurvey/upload/NRSA0809_Report_Final_508Compliant_130228.pdf

A watershed is an area of land that collects water either by running on the surface or underground to a particular body of water such as a lake or a river.  In the continental US there are 2,110 watersheds; however, a watershed is more than a map of where rain or snowfall runoff into a larger body of water, because it is also a primary link in an interdependent web of living organisms. What we do within our watersheds greatly impacts the birds, fish, other wildlife, soil, air, and communities that live within your local watershed. Since watersheds are the source of all water that we use, it is a complete understatement to say that it’s important to clean and help maintain a non-polluted watershed within your watershed area, because so much life is at stake.

To find your local watershed please visit the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s website to obtain more information within your area:     http://cfpub.epa.gov/surf/locate/index.cfm

Does this look familiar?
Luckily, awareness for protecting our watersheds is increasing.