Be One with Your Inner Beaver

During the Opium Wars, in the middle of the nineteenth century, Chinese found little in the way of goods they desired from the West. Addicted to tea and facing a massive balance of payments deficit, the British screamed to find something that China found valuable other than gold and silver. But the only thing dem Chinese wuz wantin’ wuz beaver pelts – for coats and hats – imported from the United States. The British went to war – hollerin’ “free trade” – to foist a huge stash of surplus opium stored in India on the hapless Chinese, hopelessly out-gunned by England and her allies (which included us, until our forces withdrew to deal with our own Civil War). The Chinese lost, giving up territorial concessions in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Macau. I guess we took our beaver exports back with us as well.

Beavers have been hunted and trapped over the centuries in North America, until their numbers have crashed and burned. “Varmints,” we called them. Big rodents with a proclivity to dam waterways, promote flooding, a part of the ecosystem that often clashed with the best laid plans of mice (ooops) and men. We blasted and bulldozed those beaver-life-affirming dams, and hunted the architects as if they had wronged the universe. But to nature, those dams were an essential part of the hydrological ecosystem. They stored water, holding it for other wildlife to drink or live in.

Tens of millions of beavers and hundreds (millions?) of thousands of dams. To man, they just got in the way of irrigation systems, farming and controlling water flow. By 1930, there were fewer than an estimated 100,000 beavers in North America, mostly in the vast tracts of land in Canada.

 Enter global climate change – dry, drier and driest. New Priority: The need to retain and store water on a massive scale, to curtail runoff and conserve what has become our most precious nature resource, our dwindling water supply, particularly in the West and the Southwest. “Beaver dams, it turns out, have beneficial effects that can’t easily be replicated in other ways. They raise the water table alongside a stream, aiding the growth of trees and plants that stabilize the banks and prevent erosion. They improve fish and wildlife habitat and promote new, rich soil.

“And perhaps most important in the West, beaver dams do what all dams do: hold back water that would otherwise drain away… ‘People realize that if we don’t have a way to store water that’s not so expensive, we’re going to be up a creek, a dry creek,’ said Jeff Burrell, a scientist with the Wildlife Conservation Society in Bozeman, Mont. ‘We’ve lost a lot with beavers not on the landscape.’” New York Times, October 27th. Indeed these rather cute if somewhat toothy critters have become the new aqua-heroes. Government-sponsored programs are slowly reintroducing such furry construction workers back into the environment.

 “‘We can spend a lot of money doing this work, or we can use beavers for almost nothing,’ Mr. Burrell said…Beavers are ecosystem engineers. As a family moves into new territory, the rodents drop a large tree across a stream to begin a new dam, which also serves as their lodge. They cover it with sticks, mud and stones, usually working at night. As the water level rises behind the dam, it submerges the entrance and protects the beavers from predators.

 “This pooling of water leads to a cascade of ecological changes. The pond nourishes young willows, aspens and other trees — prime beaver food — and provides a haven for fish that like slow-flowing water. The growth of grass and shrubs alongside the pond improves habitat for songbirds, deer and elk… Moreover, because dams raise underground water levels, they increase water supplies and substantially lower the cost of pumping groundwater for farming.

 “And they help protect fish imperiled by rising water temperatures in rivers. The deep pools formed by beaver dams, with cooler water at the bottom, are ‘outstanding rearing habitat for juvenile coho salmon,’ said Michael M. Pollock, a fish biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle, who has studied the ecological effects of beaver dams for 20 years.” NY Times.

Attracting beavers to work the land has become a new arena of expertise for government naturalists. Let ‘em make the cover of Rodent Track Magazine? We seem to be learning all the time how it’s really not nice or prudent to mess with Mother Nature. Try and stop or kill these critters? Gnaw! I mean naw! We need them!

I’m Peter Dekom, and dam, I like dem’ beavers even more!