Beavers may be good where drought looms
By Jim Robbins, New York Times
BUTTE, Mont. — Once routinely trapped and shot as varmints, their dams obliterated by dynamite and bulldozers, beavers are getting new respect these days. Across the West, they are being welcomed into the landscape as a defense against the withering effects of a warmer and drier climate.
Beaver dams, it turns out, have beneficial effects that can’t easily be replicated in other ways. They raise the water table alongside a stream, aiding the growth of trees and plants that stabilize the banks and prevent erosion. They improve fish and wildlife habitat and promote new, rich soil.
And perhaps most important in the West, beaver dams do what all dams do: hold back water that would otherwise drain away.
“People realize that if we don’t have a way to store water that’s not so expensive, we’re going to be up a creek, a dry creek,” said Jeff Burrell, a scientist with the Wildlife Conservation Society in Bozeman, Mont. “We’ve lost a lot with beavers not on the landscape.”
For thousands of years, beavers, which numbered in the tens of millions in North America, were an integral part of the hydrological system. “The valleys were filled with dams, as many as one every hundred yards,” Mr. Burrell said. “They were pretty much continuous wetlands.”
Beavers are cool! I saw my first one in the Truckee Marsh when I was a little kid ,(this was before the dredging started for Tahoe Keys). Years later a pair of beavers started building a dam on Trout Creek but the people living on Blue Lake ave and O’malley were afraid if the meadow flooded it could damage there homes so the dam was destroyed and the beavers were killed.
I was up at Lily lake in my canoe and a big old beaver came swimmin’ towards us, slappin his tail on the water. I guess we got a little to close to their den!
Hope to see the beavers make a comeback in our area.
OLS
Beavers are awesome! If you go to Osgood Swamp. sp.? You will see busy beavers there too. Their dam looks like a wooden igloo. The Swamp is below Flagpole Peak down the trail from the gun mount off Echo. It’s a nice fall walk.
Love the beaver… They are native and do wonderful things for the ecosystem.
Beav, I totally dig our beavers but there is some debate as to these beavers currently inhabiting the Basin being an indigenous species.
Anymore beaver tails? (Sorry could’nt resist the bad pun)! OLS
OLS, you really should have, it was a really bad one. LMAO
Another beaver tail! An old friend of mine (now,sadly, deceased) insisted beavers were not an indigenous species to this area. His claim? That they migrated here.
After thinking about all of this, I remembered speaking with an old Washoe woman who told me her elders came here to Tahoe every year to gather pine nuts, hunt and fish. One of the animals they hunted were beavers, she told me, and the pelts made for warm winter clothing when they moved back to the Carson Valley to get out of the snow here.
True? Who knows! Keep on keepin’on beavers! OLS
The North American beaver (Castor canadensis) had a historic range that overlapped the Sierra Nevada in California. Before the European colonization of the Americas, beaver were distributed from the arctic tundra to the deserts of northern Mexico.[1] The California Golden beaver subspecies (Castor canadensis subauratus) was prevalent in the Sacramento and San Joaquin River watersheds, including their tributaries in the Sierra Nevada. Recent evidence indicates that beaver were native to the High Sierra until their extirpation in the nineteenth century.