S.7 Ep.7: Beaviculture

WEBVTT
00:00:08.080 --> 00:00:11.919
Welcome to Silvicast, the podcast about all things silviculture.
00:00:12.080 --> 00:00:17.199
I'm Greg Edge, retired silviculturist with the Wisconsin DNR Division of Forestry.
00:00:17.519 --> 00:00:25.760
And I'm Brad Huntnick, a Wisconsin DNR Silviculturist still working until DBH doesn't also stand for Dream, Believe, and Hope.
00:00:25.920 --> 00:00:28.320
And we're your hosts for today's show.
00:00:31.440 --> 00:00:34.640
Well, Greg, welcome to Bluegill Shangri-Lab.
00:00:35.039 --> 00:00:38.320
Uh, Brad, can I take this blindfold off yet?
00:00:38.640 --> 00:00:39.280
Oh, yeah.
00:00:39.359 --> 00:00:40.640
Sorry, forgot about that.
00:00:40.880 --> 00:00:41.679
Take a look.
00:00:41.840 --> 00:00:45.759
We have arrived at my one of my top secret fishing spots.
00:00:45.840 --> 00:00:49.119
And it wasn't easy paddling with this blindfold, I'll tell you.
00:00:49.359 --> 00:00:50.960
Well, you you did okay with that.
00:00:51.200 --> 00:00:53.439
So, okay, okay, let's take this off.
00:00:53.520 --> 00:00:55.359
Let's take a look here, see what we see.
00:00:55.600 --> 00:00:56.560
This is it?
00:00:57.039 --> 00:00:57.759
This is it.
00:00:58.000 --> 00:00:59.840
This is your fish nirvana.
00:01:00.320 --> 00:01:00.799
Brad.
00:01:01.200 --> 00:01:04.159
This looks like a muddy old beaver pond.
00:01:04.480 --> 00:01:06.640
You know, you're a downer, aren't you?
00:01:06.719 --> 00:01:12.319
You we haven't even cast a line, and you're already casting aspersions at one of my good spots.
00:01:12.560 --> 00:01:14.719
There probably won't be any fish.
00:01:14.959 --> 00:01:20.799
You know, sometimes you need to look beyond, Greg, because this isn't just any old beaver pond.
00:01:20.959 --> 00:01:29.120
This is a beaver pond in the lower Wisconsin River, which is known for in its backwater, some beautiful big plate-sized bluegills.
00:01:29.280 --> 00:01:31.359
And my friend, wait, wait for it.
00:01:31.519 --> 00:01:33.359
This one is gonna be full of them.
00:01:33.599 --> 00:01:34.799
So we just have to give it a chance.
00:01:34.879 --> 00:01:37.519
And oh hey, check out, there's a beaver right over there.
00:01:39.280 --> 00:01:40.159
And you know what?
00:01:40.239 --> 00:01:42.319
I think you scared it with your negativity.
00:01:42.640 --> 00:01:45.599
Probably scared all the fish, is what you're you'll say as well.
00:01:45.840 --> 00:01:48.400
Well, I'm I'm just I'm gonna shut up now.
00:01:49.439 --> 00:01:54.799
I'll say beavers might be ecosystem engineers, but it works both ways, doesn't it?
00:01:55.040 --> 00:02:03.599
You know, your pond full of plate-sized bluegills might be someone else's flooded road crossing, their plugged culvert.
00:02:04.239 --> 00:02:06.799
Why are all my trees dying in this area?
00:02:06.959 --> 00:02:07.840
You get the drift.
00:02:08.080 --> 00:02:11.120
Well, it I get yeah, I know what you're saying.
00:02:11.360 --> 00:02:14.719
There is a lot to consider when we add beavers to the equation.
00:02:15.120 --> 00:02:18.319
Luckily for us, on this episode of Silvacast, our guest is Dr.
00:02:18.400 --> 00:02:19.680
Emily Fairfax.
00:02:19.840 --> 00:02:20.159
Dr.
00:02:20.240 --> 00:02:27.919
Fairfax is an associate professor of geography at the University of Minnesota and an internationally renowned ecohydrologist.
00:02:28.159 --> 00:02:33.520
Her research uses remote sensing to analyze how beaver-constructed wetlands alter vegetation.
00:02:33.759 --> 00:02:50.159
For foresters, her work offers a direct connection to forest management and provides actionable insights on how optimizing these natural riparian corridors can serve as strategic firebreaks, protect timber resources, and maintain critical forest ecosystems.
00:02:50.639 --> 00:02:55.840
Okay, but in the meantime, let's just hit the water and see what we got here.
00:02:56.159 --> 00:03:00.879
Whoever catches the first bluegill doesn't have to buy the beer.
00:03:04.240 --> 00:03:06.080
Hey, wait, you got one already.
00:03:06.400 --> 00:03:09.120
Hey, Brad, I've been a busy beaver.
00:03:14.479 --> 00:03:20.400
Thank you to our seasoned sponsors, the Family Forest Carbon Program and the Nelson Paint Company.
00:03:20.560 --> 00:03:23.199
You make the Silvicast world go round.
00:03:28.319 --> 00:03:28.639
Dr.
00:03:28.800 --> 00:03:31.360
Emily Fairfax, welcome to Silvicast.
00:03:31.599 --> 00:03:42.800
Now, Emily, you don't you don't remember, but I'm part of the the Beaver Management Plan Committee that kind of saw a presentation that you did a little while ago, and I was really impressed.
00:03:42.879 --> 00:03:44.080
It was really, really good.
00:03:44.240 --> 00:03:46.159
And I can't I told Greg about it afterwards.
00:03:46.240 --> 00:03:51.520
I'm like, Greg, we got to get Emily Fairfax on Silvicast because I was really impressed.
00:03:51.759 --> 00:03:55.120
But I'm guessing that some of our listeners might not have heard of you before.
00:03:55.199 --> 00:03:59.039
So tell us a little bit about yourself, like where you are, what you do, things like that.
00:03:59.520 --> 00:04:00.000
For sure.
00:04:00.159 --> 00:04:02.800
So I'm an associate professor at the University of Minnesota.
00:04:02.960 --> 00:04:05.599
I'm in the Department of Geography, Environment, and Society.
00:04:05.680 --> 00:04:07.840
And by training, I'm an eco-hydrologist.
00:04:07.919 --> 00:04:12.000
So I'm really focused on the interactions between water and living things.
00:04:12.240 --> 00:04:17.839
And it just so happens that has become quite intensely focused on beavers over the last decade or so.
00:04:18.079 --> 00:04:22.560
So I researched them, I studied them all across North America, many different biomes.
00:04:22.800 --> 00:04:29.839
And recently I've really started focusing my efforts on understanding the relationship between beavers and climate change.
00:04:30.160 --> 00:04:30.560
Cool.
00:04:30.720 --> 00:04:34.000
And as far as I know, Greg, you can correct me if I'm wrong here.
00:04:34.240 --> 00:04:34.560
I will.
00:04:34.959 --> 00:04:36.800
But you're you're the thank you, Greg.
00:04:37.040 --> 00:04:39.839
Yeah, that's I you're there for me, Greg, right?
00:04:40.480 --> 00:04:41.360
Yeah, there you there you go.
00:04:41.519 --> 00:04:42.800
I got your back, Brad.
00:04:43.040 --> 00:04:44.399
Yeah, that's what I'm afraid of.
00:04:44.480 --> 00:04:46.160
You know, keep you in front of me.
00:04:46.319 --> 00:04:46.639
Okay.
00:04:46.959 --> 00:04:51.600
But as far as I know, you're our first guest who's been on NPR Science Friday.
00:04:51.839 --> 00:04:57.040
Our first guest who's been on All Things Considered, which I don't know, makes you a rock star, like on this show.
00:04:57.199 --> 00:05:01.920
Uh, and you recently served as a scientific consultant on the Pixar film Hoppers.
00:05:02.079 --> 00:05:02.480
It's true.
00:05:02.720 --> 00:05:03.680
Which was really cool.
00:05:03.920 --> 00:05:05.279
Yeah, which is really cool.
00:05:05.439 --> 00:05:07.120
But how do you get a gig like that?
00:05:07.360 --> 00:05:08.720
That's definitely a first.
00:05:09.519 --> 00:05:11.600
You just never stop talking about beavers.
00:05:11.680 --> 00:05:12.720
That's how it all came about.
00:05:12.800 --> 00:05:13.279
All of these.
00:05:13.519 --> 00:05:24.079
The Pixar ones started because they had heard me talk about beavers in a webinar and saw a little stop motion video I'd made about beavers fighting fires and asked to talk more about beavers.
00:05:24.160 --> 00:05:28.959
And then that rapidly escalated into being the science consultant on hoppers.
00:05:29.279 --> 00:05:29.680
Wow.
00:05:29.839 --> 00:05:31.199
Oh, that's cool.
00:05:32.000 --> 00:05:36.240
Why has Pixar never contacted us, Brad, to talk about silviculture?
00:05:36.480 --> 00:05:41.439
I guess uh, you know, it's it's a mystery, Greg, that we'll have to think about that one over a couple of beers.
00:05:41.680 --> 00:05:42.639
Yeah, yeah.
00:05:43.199 --> 00:05:53.600
So, Emily, many of us, I think, including me, may not be familiar with maybe some of the historical context of beavers in North America.
00:05:53.920 --> 00:05:59.680
So I thought it would be a good place to start, kind of go back and uh recognize that.
00:05:59.839 --> 00:06:04.879
So beaver populations in North America were historically different than they are today.
00:06:04.959 --> 00:06:05.600
Is that correct?
00:06:05.839 --> 00:06:06.720
Yeah, very different.
00:06:06.879 --> 00:06:23.120
We used to have somewhere between 100 and 400 million beavers across this continent, which translates to about a billion beaver dams, just absolutely widespread, coast to coast, mountains to prairies to estuaries, to forests, to grasslands, to deserts, everything in between.
00:06:23.279 --> 00:06:24.480
They were genuinely everywhere.
00:06:24.560 --> 00:06:27.040
It was like a beaver for every kilometer of stream.
00:06:27.279 --> 00:06:39.600
And so I I take it that that many beaver dams had a significant impact on not only our landscape, but we as foresters, what the forests and uh forested wetlands looked like.
00:06:40.000 --> 00:06:40.480
Absolutely.
00:06:40.639 --> 00:06:47.199
I work in river restoration a lot, and sometimes people want to get a permit to build a small pond or to build a little dam.
00:06:47.360 --> 00:07:00.160
And just getting that permit for one little dam takes so long, like a year, two years, as it should, because we know that even just one dam can have a huge impact on the landscape around it and on the delivery of water downstream.
00:07:00.399 --> 00:07:05.920
So we would never get a permit to build a billion beaver dams, but that's what shaped this continent.
00:07:06.000 --> 00:07:10.399
And so when we think about restoration, we can't accomplish all of it on our own.
00:07:10.560 --> 00:07:21.360
We need these little fuzzy engineers that don't pull permits and that don't draw blueprints and that just go about naturally creating wetlands and resilience all across their historic range.
00:07:21.759 --> 00:07:24.480
You know, this kind of maybe this is that philosophical part of it then.
00:07:24.560 --> 00:07:35.279
So would you say if you were looking, and I'm just thinking, so we're a forester, you're a fisherman, you're anyone, you're out there on the stream, they're kind of looking at a fundamentally degraded condition.
00:07:35.920 --> 00:07:41.759
Basically, we're we're kind of looking at something assuming it's natural, but then it's because we don't really know what natural looks like.
00:07:42.079 --> 00:07:42.720
Absolutely.
00:07:42.879 --> 00:07:55.839
One of the most disturbing moments, but also insightful moments that I've had in my career was when I really started looking at the timelines of when my discipline, hydrology, ecohydrology, river science, came to be.
00:07:56.000 --> 00:08:07.040
A lot of the laws of physics and math that we apply to rivers, a lot of our understanding of what they are and what they should be, came almost immediately after the continental extirpation of beaver.
00:08:07.279 --> 00:08:09.120
And just this massive change.
00:08:09.279 --> 00:08:25.279
You lost all this structure from the streams, all of this wood was now going out to sea, the dams were degrading, the wetlands were draining, and then we get Strawler and Horton and Hack and all of these people going out on the river saying, aha, this is how a river flows, this is the shape it should be.
00:08:25.680 --> 00:08:27.040
So that's what we still think.
00:08:27.120 --> 00:08:31.040
That's what the PhDs in my field studied was this disturbed state.
00:08:31.199 --> 00:08:35.600
We didn't get to see that predisturbance state and write the laws of physics for that.
00:08:35.759 --> 00:08:37.200
We destroyed it pretty quickly.
00:08:37.440 --> 00:08:46.879
And then we now are trying to maintain this disturbed state by removing beavers and uh trying to continue to force streams back into a shape they actually don't naturally want to be in.
00:08:47.440 --> 00:08:54.080
And then kind of focusing a little closer here in the lake states, you know, we had the cutover period of the 1800s.
00:08:54.240 --> 00:08:58.799
So they used all those streams for log driving year in and year out.
00:08:58.960 --> 00:09:05.840
So you not only lost the beavers, right, then you degraded the streams with using it for that transportation.
00:09:06.240 --> 00:09:19.039
And I do like to point out that I think somewhere along the way we were inspired by beavers with our log driving techniques, because beavers do the exact same thing when they go harvest a tree, they put it in their little canals and they float that log where they want it to go.
00:09:19.360 --> 00:09:24.080
Big difference is that the beavers don't remove every single log jam in their way to do so.
00:09:24.480 --> 00:09:24.960
It's amazing.
00:09:25.039 --> 00:09:28.720
And I think about Greg, and you, you know, being in lacrosse, you'd be familiar with this too.
00:09:28.799 --> 00:09:42.879
But like, think about the driftless, where for flood control, basically we had to reintroduce or put small check dams on the streams in order to check the flow of that water coming because it was pretty catastrophic coming out of some of the coolies or valleys that we have here.
00:09:43.039 --> 00:09:47.919
And I'm just imagining what would that have looked like with beavers in the situations would have been completely different.
00:09:48.240 --> 00:10:00.960
So so maybe we can go back and maybe just think about some basics because we you know we're we're just like yeah, I I always think of you remember, Greg, there was a saying that Vince Lombardi he would start every football season by saying, This is a football.
00:10:01.120 --> 00:10:05.120
And so you'd take everybody back to the very beginning and kind of build them up from there.
00:10:05.360 --> 00:10:05.759
Yeah.
00:10:06.000 --> 00:10:10.559
So maybe here we'll just start with what and wasn't uh somebody taking notes on that?
00:10:10.639 --> 00:10:11.440
That was part of the joke.
00:10:11.759 --> 00:10:17.440
Well, yeah, the joke is that uh who was it, Paul Horning would say, Slow down, coach, Nitschke's taking notes.
00:10:17.759 --> 00:10:22.080
So, anyways, that's for the Packer fans in the uh in the audience.
00:10:22.240 --> 00:10:22.960
But yeah.
00:10:23.440 --> 00:10:28.639
So we're foresters, we cut down trees, and and you were just saying before, beavers cut down trees.
00:10:28.879 --> 00:10:32.559
So, what are the fundamental reasons that they're removing trees along streams?
00:10:32.960 --> 00:10:35.120
Beavers use trees for two main purposes.
00:10:35.360 --> 00:10:37.840
They want that wood to be able to build with.
00:10:37.919 --> 00:10:42.399
So they'll build dams with that wood, they'll build their lodges with that wood, but they also eat the bark.
00:10:42.559 --> 00:10:47.440
And bark, especially the cambium, that inner layer of bark, is one of their favorite foods.
00:10:47.519 --> 00:10:48.720
It's like sugar to them.
00:10:48.960 --> 00:10:57.360
So they're gonna cut down their favorite trees: willows, aspens, dogwoods, sometimes maples, pretty much anything in the poplar family, cottonwoods, et cetera.
00:10:57.519 --> 00:10:58.000
They love it.
00:10:58.080 --> 00:10:58.960
It's their candy.
00:10:59.120 --> 00:11:03.279
They're gonna cut it down, scrape as much bark as they can off to get that nutrition.
00:11:03.360 --> 00:11:09.759
And then they will process that whole fallen tree into pieces that are manageable for them to drag around and to build with.
00:11:10.000 --> 00:11:18.159
And all of this is a behavior that's been really fine-tuned by evolution to get them the maximum benefits for the least amount of work.
00:11:18.320 --> 00:11:21.919
So for them to be able to eat and build with the same material is ideal.
00:11:22.080 --> 00:11:24.879
That's what they want, but they don't actually need it.
00:11:24.960 --> 00:11:26.960
And so we can come back to this whenever.
00:11:27.039 --> 00:11:33.519
But beavers live in deserts, beavers live in forests made of trees they can't eat, and they still dam and they still thrive.
00:11:34.320 --> 00:11:43.039
So they like those species that you listed, uh, but they'll adapt uh to other species uh when those aren't available.
00:11:43.919 --> 00:11:46.799
They will within uh within reason and constraints.
00:11:46.960 --> 00:11:56.559
So in Arizona, where the beavers are damming down right on the Mexico border, they are primarily eating cattails and herbaceous aquatic perennials.
00:11:56.639 --> 00:12:01.519
So they are almost exclusively eating green stuff that's soft.
00:12:01.679 --> 00:12:04.559
And they will build their dams with mud and stones.
00:12:04.639 --> 00:12:12.879
And if they can get their paws on some thicker, breedier cactus or cattail or invasive giant breeds, they'll use that as well.
00:12:12.960 --> 00:12:14.080
They'll use garbage.
00:12:14.320 --> 00:12:17.919
They don't like to have to split a difference between what they eat and what they build with.
00:12:18.000 --> 00:12:22.720
It's twice as much effort, but they can do it and they will do it, and they have done it many times before.
00:12:23.039 --> 00:12:24.799
And I live along the Mississippi.
00:12:24.879 --> 00:12:29.600
Sometimes I notice them chewing on swamp white oak trees, actually.
00:12:29.679 --> 00:12:34.159
And I thought, well, that seems like a really harsh thing to chew on.
00:12:34.480 --> 00:12:36.480
Yeah, it's definitely not their favorite.
00:12:36.559 --> 00:12:38.480
I've seen them chew on oak before as well.
00:12:38.639 --> 00:12:41.840
Sometimes the chewing is not necessarily to take down the tree.
00:12:42.000 --> 00:12:43.440
Their teeth are ever growing.
00:12:43.519 --> 00:12:50.960
And if they're in a place where there's not a lot that they can really wear those teeth down on, they'll go to something that they don't actually care about eating.
00:12:51.200 --> 00:13:05.759
Another behavior that we've just started to observe that I find very fascinating and confirmed with some of my colleagues in Europe that the Eurasian beaver does this too, is in the shoulder seasons, they will scrape the bark off of some of the trees and then lick the sap that's coming out.
00:13:05.919 --> 00:13:09.360
They don't necessarily want that bark, but they will take the sap.
00:13:10.240 --> 00:13:11.279
They want that energy.
00:13:11.519 --> 00:13:11.919
Yep.
00:13:12.320 --> 00:13:18.879
And these are just maybe some specifics too, but they I think they impact maybe the impact on the forest around them.
00:13:19.519 --> 00:13:24.399
Do uh beavers always build dams, or in some cases, do they not build dams?
00:13:24.480 --> 00:13:30.320
And like how far then will they also venture from that stream to impact that forest?
00:13:30.879 --> 00:13:32.639
Beavers do not always build dams.
00:13:32.879 --> 00:13:38.000
It is something they like to do, and sometimes they'll do it even if they don't truly have to do it.
00:13:38.080 --> 00:13:43.759
So we'll see beavers living in lakes that have an inlet and an outlet, but the lake provides plenty of water depth to keep them safe.
00:13:43.919 --> 00:13:51.519
There's plenty of food around, they're not trying to stimulate more growth, and we'll still see a little dam at the entrance or at the exit.
00:13:51.759 --> 00:13:55.519
And I honestly think they're just bored and they need to build.
00:13:55.600 --> 00:14:00.320
Because on some of these sites, I've also seen three lodges right next to each other, and only one is active.
00:14:00.480 --> 00:14:04.799
So it's just too much time on their paws, a little over the top there.
00:14:04.960 --> 00:14:06.000
But they don't have to.
00:14:06.080 --> 00:14:09.120
So in big rivers, you they're not damming the main stem Mississippi.
00:14:09.200 --> 00:14:10.159
That would be ridiculous.
00:14:10.320 --> 00:14:13.120
But they do live in the Mississippi and they'll bank burrow there.
00:14:13.279 --> 00:14:18.080
They'll still build their lodges with that dome of wood if they can, but they don't even always do that.
00:14:18.159 --> 00:14:27.039
So when I raft the Colorado and the Green Rivers out west, we often see them just denning straight into the bank, and there's not enough wood for them to try to build these structures.
00:14:27.120 --> 00:14:30.399
They're focused a lot more on these reedy things that keep them going.
00:14:30.639 --> 00:14:33.600
When they do chew, though, they can go quite far.
00:14:33.759 --> 00:14:37.200
A beaver's territory is typically one to two kilometers of stream length.
00:14:37.279 --> 00:14:40.240
So anything within that range they consider to be theirs.
00:14:40.399 --> 00:14:46.799
Even if their dam is up here and then they have to travel a kilometer to get to their favorite food stash, they'll do that.
00:14:47.039 --> 00:14:49.840
In lake systems, their territories are defined a little bit differently.
00:14:49.919 --> 00:14:52.159
It's more like a quarter mile of lakeshore.
00:14:52.399 --> 00:14:56.399
And these are not hard and fast rules, these are preferences that the beavers have.
00:14:56.639 --> 00:15:00.720
So you can see them going along waterway quite far to get their food.
00:15:00.879 --> 00:15:05.200
In terms of venturing up onto land, beefers are very awkward.
00:15:05.360 --> 00:15:08.320
They are anywhere from 40 to 110 pounds as an adult.
00:15:08.480 --> 00:15:12.080
Wisconsin does have the record of the 110 pounder, so congratulations.
00:15:12.320 --> 00:15:14.240
But they're not built for overland travel.
00:15:14.399 --> 00:15:19.360
Their body is like a bowling ball, paddle tail coming out the rear end, webbed feet on back, hands on front.
00:15:19.519 --> 00:15:19.840
Nice.
00:15:20.080 --> 00:15:22.080
Every predator can get a beaver on the land.
00:15:22.159 --> 00:15:24.240
They're quite vulnerable in that state.
00:15:24.399 --> 00:15:29.519
So they would prefer to go less than 30 meters inland from their water source.
00:15:29.840 --> 00:15:43.600
So just kind of tip putting that all together, kind of what you were just talking about, it sounds like if we had an area where we're either trying to encourage or discourage this as foresters, we could concentrate on different compositions of forest that would have impacts.
00:15:43.679 --> 00:15:49.679
And we may either we do it, either we recognize that we're doing it for a purpose, or we could do it inadvertently in some situations.
00:15:50.080 --> 00:15:50.559
Absolutely.
00:15:50.639 --> 00:15:58.720
And I've worked with places where they've had beavers building their dams and doing their engineering where they're not exactly wanted, but elsewhere on the property was more acceptable.
00:15:58.960 --> 00:16:10.320
And we've worked with forest managers who are already doing thinning projects to take some of that aspen that they'd cut, put it in a pile to attract the beavers, and then put some cuttings in to try to get them to start growing there.
00:16:10.480 --> 00:16:21.279
And if you create an ideal beaver habitat, they'll choose that over some slightly subpar beaver habitat, especially given that on today's landscape, there's not that much ideal beaver habitat.
00:16:21.360 --> 00:16:31.600
There's quite a bit of degradation in our streams, and any step we take towards restoration, we feel great about, but also does improve the chances that beavers will show up, whether you want that or not.
00:16:32.000 --> 00:16:34.639
And would that impact the overall population too?
00:16:34.799 --> 00:16:49.840
So if you had, and I'm just imagining, say you're in northern Wisconsin, you have an aspen forest versus a like a mixed northern hardwood, they both have that stream going through, there would be a different population or a different number of beavers that would grow in those or you could support in those areas?
00:16:50.240 --> 00:16:58.399
To an extent, the biggest determination of how many beavers are in an area, assuming that it is all acceptable habitat, is just the territory size of beavers.
00:16:58.559 --> 00:17:02.639
They will fight each other to keep each other out of the other one's space.
00:17:02.799 --> 00:17:12.240
So if you have a family that set up shop and this mile is their stream, and then some new beaver starts to come in, they will chase it, they will bite it, they will maim it, they will kill it.
00:17:12.400 --> 00:17:16.079
They do not want to share their resources, which a lot of people don't think about.
00:17:16.240 --> 00:17:19.440
Beavers are rodent, and you imagine the lot of rodents if you get rodents.
00:17:19.519 --> 00:17:23.279
You let one in, and instead of one mouse, you have 25 mice, and then it's a thousand mice.
00:17:23.359 --> 00:17:25.200
It's like a classic biology problem.
00:17:25.440 --> 00:17:35.039
But with beavers, they are so persnickety about knowing how many trees they have access to and knowing exactly where their good food groves are and the ones that need a break are.
00:17:35.200 --> 00:17:39.119
They will not accept the randomness and chaos that a beaver they don't know brings.
00:17:39.279 --> 00:17:48.240
You can have more habitats for more beavers up to an extent, but at some point it's one beaver family per one to two kilometers of stream.
00:17:48.559 --> 00:18:02.160
I think one of the things Brad and I were just when we were going through questions and thinking about was this idea that foresters are often encouraged to manage for long live species in riparian management zones.
00:18:02.319 --> 00:18:03.599
And for good reason, right?
00:18:04.000 --> 00:18:10.640
We talked about a lot of those corridors were degraded, they've they're lacking some of the, especially the larger wood within them.
00:18:10.960 --> 00:18:16.559
But because of these species preferences, you know, is that maybe too simplistic, I guess.
00:18:16.720 --> 00:18:17.519
Am I asking?
00:18:17.680 --> 00:18:21.680
Like diversity is really the key in many situations.
00:18:21.839 --> 00:18:42.000
Is there cases where, oh, we may want to manage for short-lived species like aspen, cottonwood, and willow in some areas close to riparian corridors and other areas managed for long live species within them that may be less preferential beaver food?
00:18:42.480 --> 00:18:43.200
Absolutely.
00:18:43.440 --> 00:18:52.160
With all management with a goal of resilience, generally the more patchiness, the more of a mosaic, the more diversity you have, the more healthy that system is going to be.
00:18:52.319 --> 00:18:54.720
We don't want to do restoration with monoculture.
00:18:54.799 --> 00:18:57.359
It shouldn't be all willow, it shouldn't be all aspen.
00:18:57.680 --> 00:19:07.200
But having pockets here and there does help ensure that no one section of your stream will go through these really dramatic shifts of over-extracted, under-extracted, over-extracted, under-extracted.
00:19:07.440 --> 00:19:17.440
The one thing about beavers, though, uh, that I think is fascinating when it comes to exactly how you manage for the different species is that beavers are also managing for their preferred species quite heavily.
00:19:17.680 --> 00:19:20.640
And there was a paper, I want to say it was from 1929.
00:19:20.720 --> 00:19:21.359
It's old.
00:19:21.599 --> 00:19:26.640
There's a quote from it that I absolutely love that says the beavers do not mind the landscape, they farm it.
00:19:27.119 --> 00:19:30.079
Because it was posing this question of do beavers overextract?
00:19:30.160 --> 00:19:32.000
Do they cut down a forest and leave?
00:19:32.160 --> 00:19:37.279
And what they found through these observational studies was the beavers are just constantly going back and forth.
00:19:37.359 --> 00:19:40.079
And that you don't typically see them completely clear-cut.
00:19:40.319 --> 00:19:44.880
You'll see them heavily thin an area and then leave it for the time it takes for it to grow back.
00:19:45.039 --> 00:19:47.599
Many of their preferred species have defense against beavers.
00:19:47.759 --> 00:19:50.799
Those new shoots taste very bad to them, they're difficult to digest.
00:19:50.960 --> 00:19:52.319
And so they'll chew it.
00:19:52.480 --> 00:19:55.039
A lot of these trees are coppiced and new shoots are coming out.
00:19:55.200 --> 00:19:58.480
The beavers don't like those, so they start foraging upstream a bit.
00:19:58.640 --> 00:20:05.359
When that downstream area returns to a more well fully grown state, the beavers come back, they start chewing it again.
00:20:05.680 --> 00:20:13.519
We actually tend to see more living stems in beaver-managed forests than uh in forests without beavers when you're counting their preferred food species.
00:20:13.759 --> 00:20:22.880
They also are messy, and so they are clipping all these little branches off and they're dragging them around and they get distracted when they're eating, so they'll strip part of the bark off and then they'll drop it.
00:20:23.039 --> 00:20:29.759
And there's so much water that a lot of these little clippings then put down roots and create new plants.
00:20:29.920 --> 00:20:47.119
And one of my favorite things to see in sites that had beavers for hundreds and hundreds of years and then were overextracted, and the beavers were killed, is you get these big grasslands or these big meadows, and there's just this sinuous line of willow growing right across the meadow.
00:20:47.200 --> 00:20:50.079
And you take a shovel and you dig into that, and it's an old beaver dam.
00:20:50.160 --> 00:20:53.599
Because even when they build with this wood, it will re-sprout and grow.
00:20:53.680 --> 00:20:59.039
And then those tree roots bind the dam together and hold it in place even when the beavers are gone.
00:20:59.359 --> 00:21:00.400
Oh, that's cool.
00:21:00.799 --> 00:21:06.000
Somewhere a fisheries biologist is listening to this and uh just coughed up his coffee and said, What?
00:21:06.079 --> 00:21:08.000
You want aspen next to the stream?
00:21:08.960 --> 00:21:09.920
The panic.
00:21:10.480 --> 00:21:11.039
Yeah.
00:21:11.359 --> 00:21:19.440
Well, I'm just thinking that, you know, sometimes I think that our concept of riparian management zones is a little oversimplistic.
00:21:19.519 --> 00:21:24.400
And and in a system that had beavers in it is just what you're saying, Emily.
00:21:24.640 --> 00:21:26.720
They would be the disturbance factor, right?
00:21:26.799 --> 00:21:32.400
They would create those pockets that would keep early successional species in areas of the stream.
00:21:32.720 --> 00:21:42.400
You know, Greg, we don't, just you saying that, we don't have any silviculture that models beaver impact as in forest management as a disturbance, not that I'm aware of.
00:21:42.640 --> 00:21:47.920
Like small gaps, I guess, but we've used all more like wind for stuff like that, or like a medium adjacent to streams.
00:21:48.000 --> 00:21:49.599
I don't know of anybody who's modeled it.
00:21:49.839 --> 00:21:59.680
Yeah, other than that silviculture trial that Brad had looked up and pointed out, and that they were doing like group selection, so small areas.
00:22:00.160 --> 00:22:06.880
Is a a forester would consider that like uh a half acre to say an acre in size.
00:22:07.359 --> 00:22:13.279
And part of their justification was emulation of beaver extraction in those areas.
00:22:13.440 --> 00:22:18.079
So but yeah, not commonly in something in silviculture we talk about.
00:22:18.240 --> 00:22:19.599
That's why we're talking about it today.
00:22:19.920 --> 00:22:20.240
Yeah.
00:22:20.640 --> 00:22:29.119
You know, one thing that I was kind of intrigued with, and you mentioned it in the presentation I saw, and I read about it in some other places, were these ideas of beaver canals.
00:22:29.359 --> 00:22:36.880
And so not only are they working in the stream, but they're kind of we're building access to the stream, which and so it was kind of interesting.
00:22:37.119 --> 00:22:38.400
So what are these?
00:22:38.480 --> 00:22:43.039
And I think you talked about it even as expanding wetlands, which I was like, oh, this is so cool.
00:22:43.359 --> 00:22:43.839
Yeah.
00:22:44.079 --> 00:22:49.599
So if you imagine what a beaver looks like, from the waist down, it's a very aquatic animal.
00:22:49.680 --> 00:22:52.000
It's got the webbed back feet, it's got the pedal tail.
00:22:52.160 --> 00:22:57.680
From the waist up, it is a terrestrial rodent, and they pretty much don't have a neck.
00:22:57.839 --> 00:22:59.839
Their head goes straight into their shoulders.
00:23:00.079 --> 00:23:07.279
And that's because they have extraordinarily strong neck, shoulder, and back muscles because they are expert excavators.
00:23:07.440 --> 00:23:11.200
A lot of their ancestors, way back in deep time, couldn't build dams.
00:23:11.279 --> 00:23:12.160
They could only dig.
00:23:12.240 --> 00:23:14.720
And so the top half of them has retained that.
00:23:14.880 --> 00:23:17.359
And beavers use that to their maximum advantage.
00:23:17.519 --> 00:23:26.160
So once they've got that pond behind the dam, they're going to excavate these little tiny streams that radiate outwards from their ponds across valley bottoms.
00:23:26.319 --> 00:23:29.759
They go from in stream to uplands, they go from upstream to downstream.
00:23:29.839 --> 00:23:32.960
It's not one direction, it's more like a spider web of water.
00:23:33.119 --> 00:23:36.000
And the beaver does this because it doesn't want to walk on land.
00:23:36.240 --> 00:23:38.319
These are their highways, these are their city streets.
00:23:38.400 --> 00:23:43.519
They swim these to escape predators, they float their trees down these to bring them home instead of hulking it overland.
00:23:43.759 --> 00:23:54.319
But the consequence of this is that the beaver's area of influence goes from being the pond to being kilometer-wide buffers of wetland habitat, of varying levels of wetness.
00:23:54.480 --> 00:23:57.599
As water level rises and the canals fill, everything gets refilled.
00:23:57.680 --> 00:24:03.680
The earth is like this huge sponge, sucking up water, putting it in the ground where all the plants can access it during your dry periods.
00:24:03.839 --> 00:24:07.359
But then during your summer and the water level drops, those canals start to drain off.
00:24:07.440 --> 00:24:11.519
And so you get these sort of ephemeral bits of wetland in and out, wet, dry.
00:24:11.599 --> 00:24:17.599
And that's what creates so many different habitat niches, which is one of the main reasons why beavers are a keystone species.
00:24:17.759 --> 00:24:23.279
A lot of animals depend on the habitats they create because it is spanning so much.
00:24:23.359 --> 00:24:27.359
There's warm spots, cold spots, deep spots, shallow spots, fast spots, low spots.
00:24:27.519 --> 00:24:32.559
There's no other wetland type that I'm aware of that intentionally has that much diversity in it.
00:24:33.039 --> 00:24:38.640
So their footprint can get quite large then within those forested wetlands in terms of their influence.
00:24:39.200 --> 00:24:40.400
Absolutely massive.
00:24:40.559 --> 00:24:47.920
They the impact that beavers have, I consider to be more like a geological force than an ecological force.
00:24:48.079 --> 00:24:58.559
You don't need that many beavers to truly reshape a watershed and to put strong enough controls on that hydrology that they are equal or stronger than the slope at controlling the hydrology.
00:24:59.119 --> 00:25:15.839
And is is that kind of expansion of the wetland that sort of I think we've read you call it a sponge effect where the water impacts the hydrology in a much bigger footprint, impacting the drought resilience of those lowlands?
00:25:16.319 --> 00:25:22.960
Beavers exert quite a bit of control over the hydrograph, so the delivery of water over the course of the year.
00:25:23.200 --> 00:25:34.559
When you have your high flow events, whether that's spring snow melt or a big thunderstorm or one of our own dams breaking and releasing a ton of water downstream, that water needs somewhere to go.
00:25:34.640 --> 00:25:40.400
And what beaver wetlands do is they spread it out over a very large area, they push it through a very rough landscape.
00:25:40.480 --> 00:25:46.880
There's lots of vegetation there, there's lots of downedwood, there's lots of debris that helps give it time to sink into the soil.
00:25:47.119 --> 00:25:54.960
Then you enter these dry periods, and because the beaver wetlands were so good at slowing down water during the wet periods, it's now available during your dry period.
00:25:55.039 --> 00:25:57.599
And that's what keeps your plants healthy during drought.
00:25:57.839 --> 00:26:05.599
And especially for our tree species that can feel droughts from many years past, where it takes more than one rainy summer to reverse the effect of drought on them.
00:26:05.839 --> 00:26:09.279
You really want to have just this consistency of water availability.
00:26:09.440 --> 00:26:16.079
Don't let the whiplash from an El Nino to a La Niña and back and forth drive just incredibly unstable forests.
00:26:16.319 --> 00:26:20.319
Give them that constant water supply through the soil water, which is what beavers do.
00:26:20.559 --> 00:26:28.000
And then when you have lightning strikes, when you have campfires, when you have back sparking ignitions, you won't have wildfires burning catastrophically.
00:26:28.079 --> 00:26:32.000
There will be a lot of natural resilience already baked into that landscape.
00:26:32.400 --> 00:26:51.920
I really like the the name of the paper you had for that Smoky the Beaver, which for all of our, and it feels to me like that's like we should give that paper out to like all of our Western listeners because especially this year, you know, with the low snowpack and just you know, they're gonna be there's gonna be some interesting times ahead this summer, I think, for a lot of them.
00:26:52.160 --> 00:26:58.160
But having that diversity or those green veins kind of running through the landscape would really be interesting for that.
00:26:58.480 --> 00:27:02.720
It seems to me like it's just a critical piece missing in the the landscape.
00:27:03.119 --> 00:27:03.680
For sure.
00:27:03.839 --> 00:27:09.279
And when I first started studying beavers and fire and talking to people about it, there was a lot of what?
00:27:09.519 --> 00:27:10.400
This is a beaver.
00:27:10.480 --> 00:27:12.640
Why would it have anything to do with wildfire?
00:27:12.880 --> 00:27:15.279
But then you think about what the beaver is actually doing.
00:27:15.440 --> 00:27:21.519
It's widening the wet area, it's connecting a lot of wet pockets together along the stream network.
00:27:21.759 --> 00:27:24.960
It's basically creating a huge fire break the same we do.
00:27:25.119 --> 00:27:36.480
It's adding something that makes it fire retardant, it's thinning the fuels around this area that's already a little bit more fire resistant, basically just slowly building up kilometers and kilometers of unburnable landscape.
00:27:36.720 --> 00:27:38.880
So if lightning strikes there, it's not going to start.
00:27:38.960 --> 00:27:45.119
But if it struck the uplands and it did start a fire, at least there's something to slow it down, give it pause, take a little bit of energy out.
00:27:45.200 --> 00:27:55.839
So we don't hit this ramp into these absolutely out-of-the-natural fire regime, catastrophic megafires that are currently plaguing the West and every year creeping eastward.
00:27:56.160 --> 00:27:56.720
Yeah.
00:27:57.039 --> 00:28:06.160
On the flip side of that, it seems like wow, here are some natural fire breaks that we could implement or encourage as a part of prescribed burning for a number of different purposes.
00:28:06.480 --> 00:28:10.799
Do you know are anybody thinking of that or doing that on a at any kind of level?
00:28:10.880 --> 00:28:12.319
Because I'm kind of just curious.
00:28:12.640 --> 00:28:14.640
Yeah, I work a lot with the Forest Service.
00:28:14.720 --> 00:28:16.559
I work a lot with the Bureau of Land Management.
00:28:16.720 --> 00:28:23.119
I've worked a lot with nonprofit organizations that help just spread the word about this is a new tool in the toolbox.
00:28:23.200 --> 00:28:27.359
We're not saying that we should replace any of our existing firefighting or fire mitigation measures.
00:28:27.519 --> 00:28:33.440
But what if when we're trying to create a defensible space, we incorporate these wet patches into that plan?
00:28:33.680 --> 00:28:45.519
And we've talked to a number of folks that do wildland firefighting and just ask, what do you think of when you see a beaver pond, when you get dropped into the wilderness and you need to get this fire under control and you see a bunch of beaver ponds, what are your thoughts?
00:28:45.759 --> 00:28:48.960
And most of them say, Oh, good, don't have to worry about that spot.
00:28:49.119 --> 00:28:52.400
Yeah, which feels like a pretty simple statement, but it says something.
00:28:52.559 --> 00:28:54.640
We know these kinds of habitats don't burn.
00:28:54.799 --> 00:28:56.480
We know that we need more wetlands.
00:28:56.720 --> 00:28:59.680
There's a lot of ways that we could get more wetlands.
00:28:59.839 --> 00:29:03.759
Across the United States, we've lost somewhere between 50 and 90 percent of our wetlands.
00:29:04.000 --> 00:29:10.640
You think about somewhere like Minnesota, where I am, it's a very wet state, but Minnesota's lost half of its historic wetlands.
00:29:10.799 --> 00:29:14.799
Those are the patches of our fire-resistant natural infrastructure that are gone.
00:29:14.960 --> 00:29:16.000
We need to rebuild them.
00:29:16.240 --> 00:29:20.319
People can do it to the tune of about a million dollars a mile when we do it ourselves.
00:29:20.640 --> 00:29:26.000
Or we can let beavers do some of it and focus our dollars and our time on the things the beavers can't do.
00:29:26.240 --> 00:29:28.799
Beavers really don't manage a lot of the upland forests.
00:29:28.880 --> 00:29:30.559
They manage the valley bottom forests.
00:29:30.640 --> 00:29:33.359
So work together, not on top of each other.
00:29:33.680 --> 00:29:44.960
Yeah, it seems like that should be an element of consideration in planning, both kind of on a landscape scale planning, but also, as Brad said, on a prescribed fire.
00:29:45.200 --> 00:29:56.799
I mean, we talk a lot about the need for increased use of prescribed fire and a lot of forest systems, but how could you integrate those two together to help you?
00:29:57.359 --> 00:29:59.279
Seems like some area to be explored.
00:29:59.759 --> 00:30:00.400
Yeah, for sure.
00:30:00.480 --> 00:30:01.279
Put them next to each other.
00:30:01.440 --> 00:30:02.880
Do you have a nice band of beaver wetlands?
00:30:02.960 --> 00:30:03.920
Prescribe burn next to it.
00:30:04.000 --> 00:30:06.720
Now you've got a huge defensible area instead of just ribbons.
00:30:12.240 --> 00:30:18.480
Season seven of Silvicast was made possible thanks to sponsors like the Family Forest Carbon Program.
00:30:18.880 --> 00:30:26.240
The Family Forest Carbon Program pays landowners to improve the health of their land and increase the long-term value of their property.
00:30:26.720 --> 00:30:39.920
The program equips landowners with the resources and support to implement sustainable practices that help them reach their own goals for their woodlands while also improving the health of their forests and our planet.
00:30:40.240 --> 00:30:47.839
To learn more about how you can access these benefits for your forest, visit Familyforestcarbon.org.
00:30:53.039 --> 00:30:58.960
Emily, we recently had a silvercast episode which we named Morticulture.
00:30:59.119 --> 00:31:02.079
It wasn't our name, it was our guest's name.
00:31:02.319 --> 00:31:10.240
But the idea was to talk about the importance of managing for dead wood as much as managing for live wood.
00:31:10.720 --> 00:31:15.839
But here we have a species that creates dead wood on the landscape.
00:31:16.079 --> 00:31:26.240
Like, is there anything known about sort of the impact beavers have on the addition of dead wood, not only to streams, but into that surrounding area as well?
00:31:26.799 --> 00:31:32.559
Yeah, there's been outstanding research on this topic coming out of Colorado and a bit out of Utah.
00:31:32.880 --> 00:31:48.720
And overall, what we see is that beavers add a ton of dead wood, especially onto the floodplain, when they cut down trees and they leave bits behind, when they have stumps, when those stumps then catch larger pieces of woody material that are being carried by a flood wave and initiate small log jams.
00:31:48.880 --> 00:31:52.160
All of this is storing a huge amount of deadwood in your floodplain.
00:31:52.240 --> 00:31:55.759
Some deadwood in the stream channel, like beaver dam is mostly deadwood as well.
00:31:56.000 --> 00:32:04.000
But it's that deadwood that's one of the main mechanisms that beavers also store extraordinary amounts of carbon in the soil and they get it buried.
00:32:04.079 --> 00:32:05.200
They get it under the sediment.
00:32:05.279 --> 00:32:13.279
In addition to having the ability to catch all that deadwood and to create deadwood through the flooding, there's also extremely high aggregation rates.
00:32:13.440 --> 00:32:16.400
They capture a lot of material and it just gets buried.
00:32:16.559 --> 00:32:24.720
So there's this very cool study where they took ground penetrating radar across a big mountain meadow and they were looking to see what the subsurface profile looked like.
00:32:24.799 --> 00:32:28.559
And they saw this weird honeycomb-like structure of woody pockets.
00:32:28.720 --> 00:32:37.359
And what they realized they were looking at was a matrix of old beaver dams as the meadow continued to agrade and to lift up and build up with new soil and new sediment.
00:32:37.519 --> 00:32:51.440
The beavers just kept building more dams on top of it and essentially created the meadow, which was the original beaver meadow hypothesis that said that the two main things that make your mountain meadows in the mountains are beavers and glaciers.
00:32:51.759 --> 00:32:56.400
And they also are creating standing dead wood in those ponds, right?
00:32:56.559 --> 00:33:07.599
So, I mean, I've seen lots of areas that had flooded out, and you have the standing dead snags, seem to be really important pockets for a lot of habitat.
00:33:08.000 --> 00:33:11.119
Yeah, we see those pretty heavily used by a lot of different birds.
00:33:11.279 --> 00:33:19.519
We also, the number of woodpeckers I saw at a site I was just sat up in the boundary waters on the dead trees around the beaver ponds was extraordinary.
00:33:19.759 --> 00:33:24.000
But then also eventually those do fall into the water in some orientation.
00:33:24.079 --> 00:33:28.160
And then that's your habitat for trout, and that's your habitat for juvenile frogs and turtles.
00:33:28.319 --> 00:33:35.039
So this deadwood continues to live on in many different stages from when it's first standing to when it's partially fallen, to when it's all the way in the water.
00:33:35.279 --> 00:33:45.119
And unlike some of the other creators of deadwood, bark beetles that are killing the trees, this doesn't create incredibly dense thickets of standing wood that's all dead and dry together.
00:33:45.279 --> 00:33:48.640
This is very wet deadwood that is spatially spread out.
00:33:48.960 --> 00:33:52.000
What I do like, and Greg, going back to that idea of the morticulture.
00:33:52.079 --> 00:34:02.960
So one of the things behind that was that you don't have these pulses or just events of dead wood, but you have this regular supply of them that are always available to the things that need them.
00:34:03.200 --> 00:34:09.199
And I never thought of that until, you know, like preparing for this episode, that beavers kind of do that naturally.
00:34:09.280 --> 00:34:11.840
They may not distribute them all across the forest, right?
00:34:11.920 --> 00:34:22.400
You they're going to be close to the to the stream itself in that area of influence that you've talked about, but but I hadn't thought about them as being one of those agents of morticulture that we could actually plan for.
00:34:22.719 --> 00:34:24.320
Yeah, add that to their list of jobs.
00:34:24.400 --> 00:34:29.039
They're nature's engineers, there's nature's tree morticians, they're just all sorts of things for us.
00:34:29.440 --> 00:34:31.679
They're constantly changing that supply, right?
00:34:31.760 --> 00:34:39.119
As as you said, Emily, they're moving around, reconstructing, abandoning areas and shifting.
00:34:39.440 --> 00:34:40.239
That's cool.
00:34:40.559 --> 00:34:52.639
I know there's a forester somewhere out in the truck right now listening to this, going, all right, this is all good, but all well and good, except I can't get across that road now, or that culvert is gone.
00:34:52.800 --> 00:34:56.400
And then so they're kind of they're probably swearing at us, Greg, right now.
00:34:56.559 --> 00:35:11.119
But but that being said, you know, I I think that's been part of that conflict, at least in what we see is like, okay, and I think our our good friend Nolan, a hydrologist, said, you know, beavers are kind of like mice, because you see them in the where they are, and they're like, oh, this is so cute, it's fantastic.
00:35:11.280 --> 00:35:14.159
And then you open your pantry and you see a mouse and go, what the hell?
00:35:14.320 --> 00:35:21.119
You know, and so when you have one on the road or blocked up the culvert, then it's like, all right, now we got to deal with something completely different.
00:35:21.440 --> 00:35:29.599
But it sounds like maybe I'm guessing that there is a big discussion too about like, so how do we get those to coexist, right?
00:35:29.679 --> 00:35:33.119
Like, how do beavers and roads and infrastructure coexist?
00:35:33.199 --> 00:35:35.599
And so I know you've done a lot of work on that.
00:35:36.000 --> 00:35:38.400
Yeah, there's a few pieces of that question.
00:35:38.480 --> 00:35:43.679
So there's first just the idea of beavers being something that's difficult and frustrating for a lot of people.
00:35:43.840 --> 00:35:44.400
And that's true.
00:35:44.480 --> 00:35:48.320
And that is often true even when the beaver is not actually doing anything to someone.
00:35:48.480 --> 00:35:55.599
They just see it and they see their dam and they feel nervous because this is a large amount of water stored behind a structure we didn't build.
00:35:55.760 --> 00:35:59.519
And we, a society, don't generally trust beavers.
00:35:59.840 --> 00:36:03.840
We don't have designs from them, they don't tell us what they're planning.
00:36:04.000 --> 00:36:10.159
We didn't watch them build that dam, and we see them as a big goofy rodent without a degree in civil engineering.
00:36:10.320 --> 00:36:13.280
So we can't trust that they'll hold that water back.
00:36:13.519 --> 00:36:14.480
But we really should.
00:36:14.639 --> 00:36:17.440
Beavers have been doing this for seven and a half million years.
00:36:17.599 --> 00:36:20.239
People have been building dams for maybe 10,000.
00:36:20.559 --> 00:36:25.440
So we are kindergarteners, they have their doctorates, at least in this.
00:36:25.519 --> 00:36:28.559
I'm not going to trust a beaver to drive my car or to do my taxes.
00:36:28.639 --> 00:36:31.760
They aren't experts at everything, but they are experts at dam building.
00:36:32.000 --> 00:36:38.239
So I think some of this people just need to take a step back and say, okay, this animal actually has specialized in building this wetland.
00:36:38.320 --> 00:36:39.840
I trust this wetland will stay.
00:36:40.000 --> 00:36:43.519
Then that moves on to the next question, which is can this wetland stay where it is?
00:36:43.679 --> 00:36:44.800
Is it right next to a road?
00:36:44.880 --> 00:36:46.400
Is it flooding someone's house?
00:36:46.639 --> 00:36:53.599
And when those conflicts happen, a lot of times we just want to kill the beaver, remove the structure, the dam, whatever it is, and move on.
00:36:53.760 --> 00:36:56.000
But beavers are so stubborn.
00:36:56.159 --> 00:37:04.400
And once a beaver has decided this is good habitat, it will be good habitat for every other beaver that has ever existed and will ever exist in your watershed.
00:37:04.639 --> 00:37:07.039
They will continue to come and set up shop there.
00:37:07.280 --> 00:37:13.119
The only way you can guarantee you're not going to get beavers is to destroy the habitat, which is not what we want.
00:37:13.280 --> 00:37:14.400
We don't want to pave it.
00:37:14.559 --> 00:37:19.199
You can make a parking lot, beavers don't damn parking lots, but that's often not our goal.
00:37:19.519 --> 00:37:26.800
So you will be on this treadmill of forever killing the beaver, removing the dam for the rest of your life, if that's your management strategy.
00:37:26.960 --> 00:37:29.199
And for some folks, that's what they will choose.
00:37:29.440 --> 00:37:32.880
But we can also do things like put a fence around the culvert.
00:37:33.119 --> 00:37:39.280
And if you shape it like a trapezoid, the beaver's brain can't wrap itself around that and they can't damn it.
00:37:39.440 --> 00:37:41.599
We have found some of their Achilles eels.
00:37:41.760 --> 00:37:43.119
They don't understand pipes.
00:37:43.280 --> 00:37:47.519
We can put pipes through the dam, take that water level down just enough so it's not flooding the road.
00:37:47.760 --> 00:37:59.360
Beaver can't figure out how to plug it up, conflict solved, the beaver either accepts that water level, and it is what it is, everybody's happy, or the beaver doesn't accept it and it leaves, and then it's not good enough habitat.
00:37:59.440 --> 00:38:02.559
So future beavers will also be irritated by this and leave.
00:38:02.719 --> 00:38:08.239
We should give ourselves more credit with our engineering that we can outsmart this incredibly clever rodent.
00:38:08.480 --> 00:38:17.840
There's also the topic of relocation, which comes up a lot, and I think it's this middle ground between lethal removal of the beaver and doing an in-place coexistence strategy.
00:38:18.000 --> 00:38:18.960
You'll have that same issue.
00:38:19.039 --> 00:38:23.199
If you pick up that beaver family and move it somewhere else, you will still get another beaver family.
00:38:23.360 --> 00:38:31.599
But for some folks, they would much rather pick it up and put it somewhere where it is wanted, often on public lands or sometimes on private land where landowner just wants this creature back.
00:38:31.760 --> 00:38:34.559
But it doesn't change that it's not really fixing the problem.
00:38:34.639 --> 00:38:35.599
It's just a band-aid.
00:38:36.159 --> 00:38:37.519
Do you know of examples?
00:38:37.679 --> 00:38:40.400
And I think as foresters, that's we're kind of built for this, right?
00:38:40.480 --> 00:38:42.239
We're built for thinking long term.
00:38:42.559 --> 00:38:49.360
Have they had to readjust, like, say, roads or think about where infrastructure goes to accommodate that kind of thing?
00:38:49.519 --> 00:38:51.440
Or have you seen it successfully done?
00:38:51.840 --> 00:38:52.239
I have.
00:38:52.639 --> 00:38:55.440
Some of the more successful things I've seen are culvert replacements.
00:38:55.599 --> 00:39:05.679
So taking out an undersized culvert and either putting in a double wide or switching to a bridge form can make a huge difference for places that are consistently being blocked up by beaver damming.
00:39:05.920 --> 00:39:10.000
I've seen in park systems, they just move the trail if they can.
00:39:10.159 --> 00:39:14.800
Maybe your trail was already in a low spot that was flooding every spring, anyways, and now the beavers made it worse.
00:39:15.039 --> 00:39:17.920
Maybe that's the time to just invest in moving your trail.
00:39:18.159 --> 00:39:21.440
I love when they put in boardwalks, which is my favorite thing.
00:39:21.599 --> 00:39:22.800
They're so fun to walk through.
00:39:22.880 --> 00:39:31.440
And then you're in the wetland and you get this double benefit of being able to expose people to a habitat that is quite difficult for us to actually just be in without that boardwalk.
00:39:31.679 --> 00:39:36.320
And the beaver's not going to flood the boardwalk as long as you don't build it right at the exact water level.
00:39:36.400 --> 00:39:39.920
And that is something that we can build our design plans around.
00:39:40.159 --> 00:39:42.480
I've also seen more extreme examples of that.
00:39:42.559 --> 00:39:47.840
I've seen people who farm land just decide I'm not going to farm these 60 acres anymore.
00:39:47.920 --> 00:39:49.599
It's a constant struggle with these beavers.
00:39:49.679 --> 00:39:50.639
I'm tired of it.
00:39:50.880 --> 00:39:51.760
I'm not winning.
00:39:51.840 --> 00:39:53.119
This is a waste of my time.
00:39:53.360 --> 00:39:57.280
I'm going to make this a wetland and I'm going to pursue this as a mitigation bank.
00:39:57.440 --> 00:39:58.639
I'm going to be paid that way.
00:39:58.719 --> 00:40:03.679
Or I'm going to put this into conservation easement because I want something good to come out of this and I'm done.
00:40:03.920 --> 00:40:05.599
And I think that's also fantastic.
00:40:05.760 --> 00:40:18.239
I advocate constantly for more financial compensation for landowners that accept beavers back because that animal does provide a benefit to the greater community, not just the individual, but it is the individual that bears the burden of the conflict.
00:40:18.639 --> 00:40:46.800
Is there any ways for a forester who is, you know, maybe trying to design some of that infrastructure for timber sales to, I don't know, to predict where beavers are going to be along that corridor or, you know, or places where they'll have the best likelihood of success of maybe when they do have to do a crossing or place a road that is close to a riparian zone.
00:40:47.119 --> 00:40:51.760
Yeah, there's lots of models that can give you estimates of how good of the habitat it is for beavers.
00:40:51.840 --> 00:40:54.000
And theoretically, how many dams could it support?
00:40:54.239 --> 00:41:01.519
The better the habitat, the more dams it could support, the higher likelihood you're going to get beavers there, especially if you know where your nearest beavers are in a watershed.
00:41:02.000 --> 00:41:08.480
The juvenile beavers stay home with their parents for two to three years, then they get kicked out to go start their own lives and find their own habitat.
00:41:08.719 --> 00:41:13.920
They would prefer to travel less than 10 kilometers, but they can go up to 100 miles if they have to.
00:41:14.079 --> 00:41:16.159
They're going to stop at the next best habitat.
00:41:16.320 --> 00:41:22.320
So if you know you have beavers three kilometers upstream and you have great habitat, you should expect beavers this year.
00:41:22.559 --> 00:41:30.000
If your nearest beavers are 100 kilometers upstream and there's lots of good habitat between you and them, you probably have more time until your beavers arrive.
00:41:30.239 --> 00:41:47.920
The other thing that I've started to see some of the timber companies think about out west is when they're modeling the future of their sales and these trees need to grow for X years in order to be profitable, they've had to really start thinking about what is the likelihood my entire forest burns down before I can sell these trees.
00:41:48.079 --> 00:41:52.400
And what can I do to decrease the likelihood that my entire forest burns down.
00:41:52.639 --> 00:42:10.239
And more and more I'm finding timber companies and greenery companies having beavers stay in place on their land to be firebreaks and also to be a source of water so that when there is firefighting, there's a video from an old documentary that I've seen of a helicopter coming in, scooping water from a beaver pond.
00:42:10.400 --> 00:42:14.719
The ridiculous little beaver comes out and slaps its tail to tell the helicopter to leave.
00:42:15.039 --> 00:42:18.960
Doesn't change that the helicopter now has water to do its backcountry firefighting.
00:42:19.119 --> 00:42:24.719
Many of these timber operations are in places that are fairly remote and you don't necessarily have water right next door.
00:42:24.960 --> 00:42:31.760
So get that pond on your land and trust that the beaver will keep it there because that's been their number one goal for millions and millions of years.
00:42:32.239 --> 00:42:48.800
Brad, I was thinking even in our temperate forests, especially with larger properties uh that that managers work, maybe some of that beaver dams and beaver impacts, it's worthwhile to include that in the inventories.
00:42:49.280 --> 00:43:03.039
So as you were saying, Emily, to kind of know historically along a stream stretch where the habitat is that they're likely to impact might be a way to think about those considerations with infrastructure.
00:43:03.360 --> 00:43:05.840
And Emily, weren't you guys I remember right?
00:43:05.920 --> 00:43:16.800
It was you guys are working on software to kind of help with some of that too, which the more I hear anytime I see something with AI on it, I'm like, oh, this is just you got to tell me about it, it's gonna be good.
00:43:16.880 --> 00:43:18.880
But but you guys are actually using it for good here.
00:43:18.960 --> 00:43:20.719
And it's basically helping.
00:43:20.960 --> 00:43:30.559
And correct me if I'm wrong, but I think like if we were thinking about for the future, where are we gonna put skid trails or we're gonna put roads or stuff like that, this might be a really big, a big use or a big help.
00:43:30.880 --> 00:43:31.119
Yeah.
00:43:31.280 --> 00:43:36.800
So we I developed in collaboration with some engineers at Google a model called the Eager Beaver model.
00:43:37.119 --> 00:43:38.800
And eager is a backronym.
00:43:38.880 --> 00:43:40.639
We came up with that after the fact to make it work.
00:43:40.800 --> 00:43:49.840
It is the Earth Earth Engine Automated Geospatial Elements Recognition Model, which is a huge amount of jargon to say you give it a satellite image and it finds your beaver ponds.
00:43:49.920 --> 00:43:58.639
So it can help you figure out where in your watershed are there beavers that are building ponds and building dams so that you can plan around them and think about I've got beavers here and I've got beavers here.
00:44:00.159 --> 00:44:02.480
Between, probably going to have beavers here.
00:44:02.639 --> 00:44:04.159
Is this something I need to manage for?
00:44:04.239 --> 00:44:08.079
Whether that's preparing for a conflict or encouraging them if that's somewhere you want.
00:44:08.320 --> 00:44:12.400
We don't have it rolled out entirely to the public yet in a nice software package.
00:44:12.480 --> 00:44:14.320
The code is publicly available.
00:44:14.559 --> 00:44:35.199
But we just are wrapping up right now a statewide application of it in California so that they can know where every single beaver pond is in California and think about it in the context of drought and fire and utilize that information just like they would a map of groundwater springs or of previous prescribed burning areas when they're trying to understand what our future of drought, fire, and flood looks like.
00:44:35.760 --> 00:44:37.920
That's kind of really right up that alley.
00:44:38.079 --> 00:44:44.800
That would be really cool to be able to, you know, precisely map that out across your property.
00:44:45.280 --> 00:44:45.599
Yeah.
00:44:45.760 --> 00:44:49.760
One thing that we're working on now is we're working with a platform called Zooniverse.
00:44:50.159 --> 00:44:57.119
This is the same platform that Snapshot Wisconsin is on, where you can go in and try to identify animals that are seen in game camera footage.
00:44:57.360 --> 00:45:00.639
This fall we'll be rolling out a Zooniverse beaver mapping project.
00:45:00.719 --> 00:45:08.159
So there's going to be images, and we will train you to see and find beaver dams from aerial images, and you will check yes or no.
00:45:08.239 --> 00:45:15.360
And that's helping us expand the training data set so that we can roll out this model in the Great Lakes region where it has not been previously validated.
00:45:15.440 --> 00:45:16.559
So keep an eye out for that.
00:45:16.639 --> 00:45:20.400
We are always looking for community folks to help us improve our data set.
00:45:20.800 --> 00:45:22.480
Well, we'll keep watching for that when it comes out.
00:45:22.559 --> 00:45:23.679
That's going to be really cool.
00:45:23.920 --> 00:45:25.760
We'll be singing praises of it here.
00:45:26.320 --> 00:45:26.639
Good.
00:45:27.199 --> 00:45:38.639
Finally, Emily, that's a really interesting tool and probably something that our foresters in the field would be interested in.
00:45:39.199 --> 00:45:55.280
Are there other tools out there that you would recommend for them or even just like for our foresters and land managers managing these forests, what would be your advice to them in terms of working with beavers?
00:45:56.000 --> 00:46:14.159
I guess the overall advice is really genuinely consider working with beavers in whatever capacity you can, because when you protect a beaver, when you allow it to be on the land and to build its wetland, the benefits of that are so far beyond so many other actions that we can take.
00:46:14.480 --> 00:46:15.599
It feels ridiculous.
00:46:15.679 --> 00:46:18.480
And like I'm just trying to be beaver spangirl sometimes.
00:46:18.639 --> 00:46:21.519
But you read the research, on it, and beavers store carbon.
00:46:21.679 --> 00:46:23.679
Beavers remove heavy metals from the water.
00:46:23.760 --> 00:46:27.440
They sink out zinc and lead and cadmium and sometimes arsenic.
00:46:27.599 --> 00:46:31.599
Beavers remove nitrates and phosphates from the water and help prevent alkal blooms.
00:46:31.760 --> 00:46:33.760
Beavers improve habitat and biodiversity.
00:46:33.840 --> 00:46:36.320
They create the best duck hunting and the best deer hunting.
00:46:36.480 --> 00:46:41.599
Beavers just have this suite of benefits that don't even touch the climate change benefits.
00:46:41.920 --> 00:46:44.960
And if you protect that one beaver, it does them all.
00:46:45.119 --> 00:46:48.719
It's not like there's a biodiversity beaver that's separate from a fire beaver.
00:46:48.960 --> 00:46:54.159
So really think if I can leave this here, like that could have so many knock-on effects.
00:46:54.239 --> 00:46:55.920
And it doesn't have to be all or nothing.
00:46:56.079 --> 00:47:02.320
If you can protect beavers on a quarter of your property and three-quarters is not acceptable for them, protect that quarter.
00:47:02.400 --> 00:47:03.199
That still matters.
00:47:03.280 --> 00:47:06.079
You don't have to be either all in or all out on beavers.
00:47:06.239 --> 00:47:14.239
And there's lots of tools out there to help you understand where you're going to have beavers, where you do have beavers, where you might want beavers, where you might not want beavers.
00:47:14.400 --> 00:47:22.880
My lab uses a version of a model that's called the beaver restoration assessment tool to figure out what habitat is the best for beavers out there and where would they be?
00:47:23.039 --> 00:47:25.119
How many dams per kilometer might they build?
00:47:25.519 --> 00:47:36.400
It's a big geospatial model that's not always the easiest to run, but there's also a paper version of it, which asks the exact same questions the model does, but you can do it when you're doing a forest survey or a stream survey.
00:47:36.639 --> 00:47:38.559
How deep is the water in this creek?
00:47:38.719 --> 00:47:40.079
What plants do you see growing?
00:47:40.239 --> 00:47:41.760
Do you see their preferred food species?
00:47:41.840 --> 00:47:42.320
Is it a lot?
00:47:42.400 --> 00:47:43.199
Is it not a lot?
00:47:43.360 --> 00:47:47.760
And you count up all these points and it tells you, surprise, you're in great beaver habitat.
00:47:47.840 --> 00:47:50.079
If you don't already have them, you're probably going to soon.
00:47:50.239 --> 00:48:00.880
So there's a lot of versions from paper to phone app to a full bulky code that folks can use depending on their skill sets and interests to figure out exactly where the beavers will be and where they are.
00:48:01.360 --> 00:48:03.119
This has been a great conversation, Emily.
00:48:03.199 --> 00:48:04.880
I really appreciate you coming on today.
00:48:04.960 --> 00:48:09.280
I I hope everyone else gets as much out of this as I got, because this was fantastic.
00:48:09.760 --> 00:48:34.559
I think from us as foresters, silviculturists, it gives us something to think about about a species that is having maybe you know, you mentioned it right in the beginning, Emily, that they're basically forest managers also and trying to work with that within the system so that kind of our mutual goals are achieved.
00:48:34.639 --> 00:48:42.800
It's just uh gave me a lot to think about in terms of that management and that planning aspect uh along with this species.
00:48:43.280 --> 00:48:43.599
Yeah.
00:48:43.920 --> 00:48:46.079
They can for sure be a difficult colleague sometime.
00:48:48.880 --> 00:48:56.559
They are not always the easiest to work with, but usually they're that kind of colleague where once the project's done, you're like, all right, I'm I am glad we work together.
00:48:56.880 --> 00:48:57.039
Yeah.
00:48:57.199 --> 00:49:01.599
Well, they're no they're no more difficult than the colleagues I work with on a regular basis.
00:49:01.920 --> 00:49:06.000
I've already got a nickname for a colleague of mine, so this is gonna be great after this episode.
00:49:06.639 --> 00:49:07.599
Life is good.
00:49:07.920 --> 00:49:11.679
Thanks, Emily, for joining us today and for this conversation.
00:49:11.840 --> 00:49:12.559
It was really good.
00:49:12.800 --> 00:49:13.440
Yeah, of course.
00:49:13.519 --> 00:49:15.039
I'm always happy to talk about beavers.
00:49:15.440 --> 00:49:16.400
Take care.
00:49:21.599 --> 00:49:23.760
Greg, that conversation was fantastic.
00:49:23.920 --> 00:49:26.880
I hope everyone else got as much out of it as I did.
00:49:27.039 --> 00:49:29.199
And it made me think of a term.
00:49:29.440 --> 00:49:29.840
Hmm.
00:49:30.079 --> 00:49:31.760
Uh, what term is that, Brad?
00:49:32.079 --> 00:49:35.360
Well, uh, this is oh, can I say it now?
00:49:35.519 --> 00:49:37.280
We're riding the Silvasaurus.
00:49:37.519 --> 00:49:40.400
Okay, we're on the Silvosaurus Silvictionary here.
00:49:42.000 --> 00:49:43.360
We are in the Silvasaurus.
00:49:43.599 --> 00:49:46.480
So today it made me think of ramicorns.
00:49:48.159 --> 00:49:49.039
Pardon?
00:49:50.000 --> 00:49:56.400
Because you know, ramicorns are fuzzy little beasts, they run around to have you do you remember?
00:49:56.480 --> 00:49:59.039
Like, we've seen a lot of ramicorns and we've been out late at night.
00:49:59.280 --> 00:50:02.320
Yeah, they're so fuzzy, they're so fuzzy.
00:50:02.880 --> 00:50:04.400
Just just like a beaver.
00:50:04.639 --> 00:50:06.239
Yes, yeah, kind of like that.
00:50:06.719 --> 00:50:08.480
No, I don't I don't get it, Brad.
00:50:08.559 --> 00:50:10.000
You're gonna have to explain further.
00:50:10.639 --> 00:50:11.039
Whatever.
00:50:11.199 --> 00:50:14.320
It's you know, it's you don't question how the mind works, Greg.
00:50:14.480 --> 00:50:15.840
Just go with the flow, right?
00:50:15.920 --> 00:50:17.199
Just let it flow over you.
00:50:17.440 --> 00:50:18.400
I do it every day.
00:50:18.639 --> 00:50:24.639
But I read the term recently and I was like, well, that's a term that I was not familiar with, and so I had to look it up.
00:50:24.800 --> 00:50:29.920
Yeah, ramicorn is a term that's found in the dictionary of forestry, and let me read it for you.
00:50:30.159 --> 00:50:38.960
A ramicorn is a large high-angled branch that often results when one member of a fork is partly suppressed by a more dominant member.
00:50:39.119 --> 00:50:44.719
So if you have two branches, one takes the lead and the other is off to the side.
00:50:45.039 --> 00:50:46.960
But it's an angled lead.
00:50:47.039 --> 00:50:48.960
So it's it's an angled lead.
00:50:49.039 --> 00:50:56.239
And oftentimes when you get a board sawn where that stem comes off, that knot is called a sucker knot.
00:50:56.480 --> 00:51:09.039
What's usually interesting about it is they can be abnormally large branches, and so it's not just any branch, and they're usually at sharp angles and acute angles from the bull, and they're there for a long time.
00:51:09.360 --> 00:51:15.920
You know, and I think I've seen these like in white pine where you see like from a beaver or a weevil attack, and you've kind of seen that coming through.
00:51:16.320 --> 00:51:24.400
Kills the terminal branch, and then a real uh aggressive or vigorous side branch sort of takes over.
00:51:24.719 --> 00:51:30.719
Yeah, and I've never used that term to refer to them, but I kind of like the idea that we have a term that refers to them.
00:51:30.960 --> 00:51:32.719
So I'm gonna start using this.
00:51:33.119 --> 00:51:38.000
Does it have anything to do with like a ram's horn?
00:51:38.480 --> 00:51:40.880
Like it's a big thing sticking out to the side?
00:51:41.199 --> 00:51:42.960
That's a great question, Greg.
00:51:43.360 --> 00:51:44.159
Well, come on.
00:51:44.239 --> 00:51:48.320
If you're coming up with terms, you gotta have the background on this.
00:51:48.719 --> 00:51:51.280
Well, that will be a mystery that we will have to solve.
00:51:51.440 --> 00:51:54.159
We'll talk about it in the next beaver dam that we're fishing in.
00:51:54.400 --> 00:51:54.719
Okay.
00:51:54.960 --> 00:51:58.559
Hey, did you and actually did you see the size of the bluegills that I caught?
00:51:58.800 --> 00:51:59.519
Uh I did.
00:51:59.599 --> 00:52:00.639
Yeah, those were nice.
00:52:00.800 --> 00:52:01.440
Those were nice.
00:52:01.679 --> 00:52:02.239
It was pretty cool.
00:52:02.480 --> 00:52:09.920
I didn't understand why you gutted them rather than filleted them, but yeah, well, we'll it yeah, we'll talk about want and waste another day.
00:52:10.079 --> 00:52:12.480
Yeah, well, want and waste comes at a later episode.
00:52:12.719 --> 00:52:15.760
I can't wait to be out in the woods and go, look at that ram a corn.
00:52:16.000 --> 00:52:19.519
Yeah, that's I bet there's a big sucker knot behind that.
00:52:19.760 --> 00:52:22.079
Yeah, you can thank me when it happens.
00:52:22.960 --> 00:52:26.000
Thanks for listening to today's episode of SilvaCast.
00:52:26.239 --> 00:52:31.280
If you have ideas for future episodes or a question for the drop box, please let us know.
00:52:31.440 --> 00:52:34.559
Hey, and a shout out to Ellie and Nepal.
00:52:34.960 --> 00:52:36.400
We got your message.
00:52:36.719 --> 00:52:37.920
Thank you for listening.
00:52:38.079 --> 00:52:42.400
You may be our only listener in Nepal, but we truly appreciate you listening.
00:52:42.480 --> 00:52:49.679
So wherever you are in the Himalayas, looking at a glacial mountain stream, we really appreciate you listening.
00:52:49.920 --> 00:52:55.760
Anyone else, you can all send in your stories to, but we really appreciate hearing from Ellie.
00:52:56.000 --> 00:53:04.559
You can reach us at UW Stevens Points Wisconsin Forestry Center by emailing wfc at uwspoted.
00:53:05.599 --> 00:53:11.119
Feel free to include a sound file of your question or the any kind of comment if you like.
00:53:11.360 --> 00:53:16.159
Remember, we learn best when we wrestle with questions, so please keep them coming.
00:53:16.480 --> 00:53:17.760
And take care, everyone.
00:53:17.840 --> 00:53:33.280
And as always, thanks to our team, Susan Barrett, our executive producer, Joe Rogers, editor, and IT Jedi Master, theme music by Paul Freder, and of course, UW Stevens Points, Wisconsin Forestry Center.