Beavers on Working Lands Featuring Landowners Betsy and Michael Stapleton

[Music] Betsy Stapleton and we're sitting here at my ranch I have about 60 acres with my husband and the hay field there were a couple weeks out from harvesting and putting up enough hay to feed our cows and horses for the year my husband grew up on a ranch in community and ranching family in Nebraska and then joined the military and ended up getting a college education and natural resources but ended up being a civil engineer and I was a nurse practitioner when we retired we moved to Siskiyou County so that was a very big change for us to experience summers here where it gets very hot and very dry we bought this piece of property because there's a year-round Creek in it one of the interesting things that we discovered about our property was that it had beavers as well as all these fish the beaver sign was very sparse when we first bought the property and it was severely over grazed but all the shrubs and willow species that the Beavers really eat and thrive on were very very minimal and so one of our first restoration ant actions was simply fencing the riparian area and we believe that the beaver population has expanded significantly as a result the thing that is driving the cultural change around acceptance of beavers here with the agricultural interest is the fact that there is tremendous amount of water storage behind beaver dams when this dam was functional the water was you know that when I stepped down in there it was but it was up to here on me and you can see the results even this next season with the very luxuriant riparian vegetation there 2014 and 2015 were extreme drought here large sections of the river and creeks started drying up and what people noticed was a where there were beavers that were able to make effective beaver dams that's where there was residual pools of water and residual stream flow noticing that where beaver activity was was where there was water was really the key point where where the general community started getting interested in beaver associated restoration at the same time became clear that there was going to start being regulation around utilization of groundwater so a group of local ranchers got together and started thinking about how to address groundwater use as part of that a researcher from NOAA came down and started talking to them about the potential for beavers to significantly recharge groundwater and address the agricultural need for water and address the pending regulatory obligations that the ranchers would be under and this just opened up people's eyes so as I mentioned we have beavers on this property that we're on but they never really built effective dams people call them on their banky beavers there are different kind of beavers but as I started learning more and more about it the inability of beavers to effectively control construct dams are a result of people pushing creeks and rivers into narrow channels building dams and dikes along them so the water doesn't spread out in historic times creeks and rivers were were at the level of the flood plains and when high flows came up the intensity and velocity and force of the water was dispersed whereas if you have a beaver dam that's flowing through a narrow channel Aran water comes up it's just going to wash it out in addition watersheds used to have huge numbers of large trees that would fall in and these would provide structural anchor points for beaver dams so that kind of leads around to the next level of working with beavers that was a restoration tools where you actually put some anchor posts in the creek so that the beavers have material that they can start using to make their Dam a lot more solid and so that's a strategy that we're starting to deploy here on my property and across the valley since beavers have been being tolerated more and more dams have gone in in some critical locations some of the large agricultural producers in the area have actually noticed some decreases in their pumping costs that because of the elevation of groundwater associated with beaver dams and let me tell you that can be a big motivator just to support beavers on your property there are people that are easily paying a thousand dollars a day and pump costs to be able to sprinkle their property and produce hay and so reducing that by any percentage really makes a difference in terms of their bottom line so it this has very practical and quantifiable benefits for people who are dependent on the natural resources for their livelihood there is a place in the valley where beaver dam analogues have been installed now four or five years ago in 2015 beavers moved in because there was water they've turned them into completely natural structures there's now organic material leaves drop-in and instead of being carried out to the ocean they stay on the bottom the bugs come in and fish can grow there and thrive we raised several thousand coho salmon and similarly several thousand steelhead in that area to the Beavers keep extending the area last year we had I think estimated about three acres of prime coho habitat we estimated that we raised somewhere in the vicinity of five to six thousand coho the watershed Council started their beaver associated restoration by assisting landowners with dealing problems that beavers cause I of an irrigation ditch that trans transects my property and carries water to another property owner and the Beavers started building their dams in that ditch they also started plugging up a culvert going under the road and I can tell you my compassion and understanding for the difficulty of managing living with beaver went up dramatically when it was my problem so providing an active outreach effort to landowners that acknowledges the realistic difficulties of living with beavers rather than just saying oh no it's easy to do it is hard work though what if she Council has gone out in caged trees for landowners we have a landowner that had a very beautiful big beaver dam complex on their property and they loved it but then the water started extending too far onto their pasture so we put in a water level control device in other instances we have put up the the culvert protection devices we're starting to try and evaluate what if there was a thousand beaver dams across the whole valley how much water would we be able to maintain on the landscape how much agriculture could we support while at the same time having water in streams for fish rather than it being a you know someone win someone's lose my vision for the future here in Beaver Valley is not that we return it to complete wetland from from edge to edge that's not a realistic vision people live here people have ranches but what is possible is greatly expanding the amount of wetlands that are on the landscape the old-timers here remember a time when people were able to fish in the creeks and river and that's been the river drives there aren't fish and even if the river had a little trickle we're not allowed to fish anymore because these fish are endangered my vision is that there's Bevers Bevers dams cultural support for expanding wetlands across the landscape in areas that are appropriate to the point where Alzheimer's can take their grandkids out and return to that experience of fishing together out there one generation sharing sharing this incredible landscape that we're privileged to be given to take care [Music] you

Channel: psmfcvideo

Views: 16,949

Keywords: beavers

Id: eulioYwyr2c

Length: 9min 51sec (591 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 04 2018