Eugene weekly., January 20, 2011, Page 11, Image 11

Eager For
Beaver
Is it time to help Oregon’s state animal
dam the wild? BY SHANNON FINNELL
W
hen June Cleaver said
she was “worried about
the Beaver,” she was
talking about her son’s
disconcerting tendency
to rumple towels or his adolescent disdain
for school. Most likely Mrs. Cleaver of
Leave It To Beaver wasn’t expressing
concern about a valuable rodent that
was routinely being killed when it could
have been used to subvert environmental
disaster. But she could have been.
They fl ood streams, overwhelm
irrigation ditches and plug culverts until
roads wash away. They trim their front
teeth (which never stop growing) on
landowners’ favorite trees in a sort of
steampunk orthodontia. Oregon defames
them as nuisances and predators, allowing
them to be destroyed with impunity. There
is no mandate that humans make an effort
to live with beaver.
And yet the beaver is Oregon’s state
animal, and restoring their natural habitat
promises to dampen the effects of climate
change while also providing habitat for
species like the Coho salmon. Government
agencies and conservation groups are
coming to realize that they can use beaver to
save millions of dollars while accomplishing
complex and detailed preservation work.
Now, the Oregon Department of Fish and
Wildlife (ODFW) is rolling out offi cial
beaver relocation guidelines to improve the
success of beaver transplants.
Despite the appearance of a black
and white choice between convenience
and conservation, Pendleton hydrologist
Suzanne Fouty says that focusing on
resolutions rather than confl icts can help
Oregonians and beaver live together in
harmony, with both sides reaping the
rewards of beaver’s restorative habits.
“There are very few problems that beaver
create that cannot be creatively solved,”
Fouty says. “There’s this huge benefi t, we
acknowledge the problems, and now we
need to say ‘OK, I want them, there’s got
to be a way to fi nd a solution.’”
Beaver on the move
Oregon’s offi cial wildlife policy
classifi es beaver as nuisances and
predators (they are fi erce vegetarians that
prey on bark, twigs and leaves). Citizens
who dislike sharing their land with beaver
aren’t offi cially discouraged from killing
them.
ODFW and the Forest Service have
pointed out publicly that beaver perform
desirable watershed restoration work by
engineering the landscape to function
in its natural state, the way it did before
interference by humans drastically altered it.
In May the ODFW announced offi cial
guidelines for relocating nuisance beaver
to forest areas where they can live happy
and productive lives instead of being
killed. Now no beaver may be captured
and relocated without an application
approved by the ODFW. District biologists
must evaluate and approve all release sites,
and relocations must take place between
August and October.
Relocations in Oregon are still about
25 years behind Colorado, where one of
the most successful live beaver trappers
works as a hairdresser, not a mountain
man. Sherri Tippie heard in 1985 about
a golf course that planned on killing its
resident beaver, and the rest is history. She
volunteered to give the beaver a fi ghting
chance by moving them to the forest. In 25
years, she says, only two adult beaver have
died during her relocations. Her secret to
success? Loving beaver.
“What we need are more hairdressers
involved in wildlife,” Tippie jokes. “That’s
almost true.” She worries that biologists
assigned to live-trap beaver will have
their compassion educated out of them,
and describes in detail how she checks her
traps daily, making certain the beaver don’t
drown in submerged traps or go hungry.
To Tippie, restoring the environment with
beaver is a pleasant benefi t, but in her role of
live-trapper it’s a secondary concern to the
welfare of the animals. “You take all of the
needs of the animal into consideration with
CUT PAPER
ILLUSTRATION
BY SARAH
DECKER
the utmost respect, care and compassion,”
she says. “If they’re doing something for us,
it’s up to us to minimize stress and anxiety.”
Beaver love beaver, too. They mate for life,
and become distressed when separated from
their partner. Tippie says it’s important that
they’re always moved in pairs.
Charlie Corrarino, fi sh conservation and
recovery manager with ODFW, says the
detailed list of requirements in Oregon’s
new guidelines is meant to protect the
beaver. “What we were trying to do was
put out a set of conditions that would
provide the highest likelihood of survival
for relocated beavers,” Corrarino explains.
Armed with the ODFW’s “Healthy
Beaver Checklist,” which recommends
euthanizing beaver suffering hair loss
or excessive drooling, trappers catch
and move healthy nuisance beaver to an
approved site. After relocation, beaver
will be monitored by radio transmitters
implanted in their tails (not joking) for at
least a month while they embark on dam-
building projects long absent from the
Oregon landscape.
A violent
beaver history
Europeans had already changed the
ecology of the watersheds by the time
pioneers began arriving in the Oregon
Territory hundreds of years ago. It all
started with beaver. Trappers intent on
supplying the thick, bushy beaver pelts
for hats popular in Europe signifi cantly
decreased the population within a short
period of time, according to Fouty.
“When the Hudson Bay Company was
fi nally convinced the Oregon territory was
going to become part of the United States,
they had a policy to go into the entire
state and exterminate the beaver and kill
’em all,” Stanley Petrowski, chair of the
Douglas County Watershed Council, says.
Killing off so many beaver created
a domino effect that rapidly (on a
geographical scale) changed the landscape.
Fouty says that when dams began to fail
due to natural causes, no beaver were
there to engineer their repair. Broken dams
meant that more water headed downstream
more quickly, resulting in greater force and
more damage at the next dam downstream.
Dam loss meant that large ponds drained,
and by the time early land surveyors
arrived Oregon had become “more of a
channel-dominated system,” Fouty says.
Without ponds regulating the fl ow of
water, channels began to determine the
characteristics of the watershed systems.
Water moved faster and temperatures rose.
Settlers changed the rivers from their
natural conformation, too, by straightening
channels and through the effects of mining
and heavy grazing. As a result of these
changes, and with fewer beaver dams to
slow the water, drainage sped up and the
water table (the level at which the ground
is saturated with water) dropped. The shape
of the waterways also changed as a result of
dam loss, and the faster fl owing water caused
more erosion and cut deeper channels.
Oregon’s riparian (creek and riverside)
drainage has been unsustainable since its
natural system of beaver dams was washed
out. This has resulted in changes in water
tables. “Normally the channel would fi ll
up with water in the spring, it would fl ood
the valley fl oor, water would sink into the
ground, and water would come back to
the river in the summertime,” Fouty says.
“Because that’s not happening a lot except
in huge fl ood events now, what you have
is a very low water table, and if you go
into a drought there’s nothing to feed the
stream again.”
Beaver believers
Severe weather events would occur
even without climate change, though
climate change predicates that future water
sources will be less reliable than they are
now. In periods of both surge and scarcity,
beaver have the potential to make water a
little more predictable.
‘I think the question is: What animal doesn’t benefi t from having beaver around?’
— Suzanne Fouty, hydrologist
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EUGENE WEEKLY JANUARY 20, 2011 11