Urban Beavers and Ecological Resilience

[Music] beavers are a great piece of the urban wildlife landscape they can be in an urban environment and do really good work having these urban green spaces is huge my name is lisa kerr and i am the executive director of beavers northwest hi little cuties magnuson park is a really interesting place where we are now um it's a big park in the city of seattle so they decided to create this series of wetland areas that helps treat stormwater runoff and so they dug all these channels made these beautiful wetlands that then drain out to lake washington planted a bunch of beautiful willows and other native species and then the beavers moved in and were like wow thank you so much this is beautiful so of course if you're a landscape architect designing these wetlands you've got really distinct things that you want them to do and beavers just totally mess with those plans folks are frustrated with beavers with good reason the big thing that beavers do is they build dams but we as people tend to build near waterways we you know build our homes we build our roads we do all kinds of stuff near waterways including agriculture and we built these things these structures after beavers had been nearly extirpated from this area historically it's estimated that there were upwards of potentially 400 million beavers throughout north america and then they were trapped extensively for the fur trade we built all this infrastructure once beavers had already been removed and now beavers are coming back you can kind of see the water level is coming up they've got a dam on this pond that was one of the earliest ones they built water levels coming up and getting close to trails and starting to threaten trails so seattle parks was nervous about that but luckily they have some really good advocates for wildlife and they decided to try to live with the beavers where they belong but also keep those interests of people recreating in this space keep your eyes open for a little beef out in the world little urban beavers they've just been mowing down these cottonwoods so they've been really active around this area chewing down some of these trees and so this is a chewed cottonwood so you can see where they chewed it and it broke but the really amazing thing about a lot of this tree species that beavers like to chew is that they re-sprout so obviously this was a big tree like some of the ones around us that then fell and is dead but it's not quite dead because it's re-sprouting and it's sending up these you know 20 new shoots i think a lot of people panic and say oh my god they're killing all of the trees but really they're just changing that vegetation and so instead of getting these big tall beautiful cottonwoods we get this kind of shrubby different monster that is really good for songbird habitat beavers can continue to come chew this and eat these like fresh new shoots and so they've just got this sustainable food source that they've created for themselves without having to chew down every single cottonwood in the area i have way too many pictures on my phone of trees that are re-sprouting because i'm like oh look at that they're really awkward on land so they tend to spend as much of their time as possible in water which is part of why they're trying to create these big ponded areas it's like okay the more access i have the more perimeter i have to food without having to climb out the better primarily by creating these ponded areas these wetlands they're creating just more space for water right we want to hold more water on the landscape especially in the face of climate change where we're experiencing lots of drought as they're holding that water on the landscape it pushes more water into the ground recharges groundwater it helps to attenuate floods you know if we get a big rain event that beaver wetland can hold on to a lot of water and help prevent floods downstream wetlands also have huge abilities to clear up nitrogen and phosphorous levels and then there's a huge habitat benefit so wetlands created by beavers tend to have higher biodiversity than systems without beavers around here in washington we get a lot of our water from our mountains and from the snowpack you know we're seeing less and less snow in the mountains which means less water throughout the year we we really depend on that snow melt to come through our systems through the summer and into early fall even by having beavers on the landscape they have the ability to potentially hold on to some of that water for us certainly there's no way that beavers can replace our loss of snowpack but they can help hold on to a portion of it and help us mitigate a little bit of that loss okay so water levels are low essentially this is a drain it really allows water to continue moving we can set the level of where we want that water to be with the pipe but it's really a compromise we want to help the people and make sure their infrastructure isn't flooding but also keep the beavers around because of all these benefits we've talked about we're not doing this because beavers are cute and fuzzy we're doing it because they have all these benefits for people and fish and other wildlife if you've got beavers in your area and they have decided wow this is really good beaver habitat they will be back and so finding ways to manage them where they're at learn to live with beavers is really what we're all about fish and beaver dams go hand in hand um there's all these kind of benefits beyond just creating this awesome wetland that beavers do that benefit fish a lot of parts of america people have been realizing the values of a value of having beaver on the landscape people have been going out and mimicking them by building these structures called beaver dam analogs such that you you know these intertwined slash creates a semi-permeable ephemeral dam a lot like a beaver dam that still holds back water um to kind of recharge the aquifer keep water in the stream for longer but also create you know more volume of habitat for fish here we have 14 dams we're trying to assess the effect of temperature and habitat but also just the general fish population response do we see an increase in fish population because of this increase in habitat a lot of people say that beaver taught salmon how to jump they were you know they existed together naturally so you'd think they wouldn't be a problem but again as we have these effects of climate change invasive species land use um you know we're not living under that same paradigm anymore and so as managers and stewards of the land we need to be have a better understanding about these different factors that um create a stream and so beaver dam analogs might be doing more harm than good in a place like the intermountain west where those effects of climate change are are a little more accelerated and protracted than say the pacific northwest where they're in lower lands and have you know more fish and things like steelhead and salmon that are able to go to the sea whereas our trout stay here and are affected severely by things like warmer temperatures and invasive species that's kind of what science is about is kind of pulling in all these perspectives and contexts and replicating experiments you know across the landscape so that we can get make better generalities um than just from one one place the restoration's truly gonna be ephemeral it's gonna they're gonna blow out in the high water year the wood's gonna rot and so ideally you put in a place that you know you can put these beaver dam analogs in they'll help recharge that aquifer recharge the floodplain in such a way that you start recruiting more willows downstream more bieber food and then maybe some beavers will come in and become the restoration specialists themselves and so we won't have to keep coming out here and fixing these dams [Music] you

Channel: Local Motives

Views: 4,684

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Id: roLn0EK05aM

Length: 8min 16sec (496 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 24 2021