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THE ASTORIAN • THuRSdAy, NOvEmbER 25, 2021
Nonprofit eyes beavers to help fight wildfires
By AARON SCOTT
Oregon Public
broadcasting
The Almeda fire swept
through the southern Ore-
gon communities of Phoe-
nix and Talent in 2020,
burning thousands of build-
ings and taking three lives.
Part of the reason it was so
devastating is that it burned
right through the hearts of
the towns along the Bear
Creek Greenway, a green-
belt full of invasive black-
berry bushes and other
dried-out plants that acted
as a wick.
Seven months after the
fire, Jakob Shockey and
Sarah Koenigsberg were
searching the greenway for
a furry critter that may have
helped slow the flames.
“Oh, there’s a bunch of
nibbling over here,” said
Koenigsberg, pointing to
teeth marks in the bark of a
tree near the creek.
When you think of pre-
venting wildfires, you prob-
ably think of Smokey Bear.
But there’s another animal
that plays a much bigger
role in fighting and recover-
ing from fire: beavers.
Scientists have long con-
sidered the aquatic rodents
to be “nature’s engineers,”
because they reshape the
ecosystem around them into
wetlands. But recently sci-
entists have made a new dis-
covery: these beaver wet-
lands create emerald oases
in an otherwise charred
landscape, slowing down
the spread of wildfires and
providing refuges for ani-
mals to escape the flames.
Shockey and Koenigs-
berg help run a nonprofit
called the Beaver Coali-
tion and are part of a grow-
ing movement to transform
the way people see the big-
tailed rodents (before work-
ing with the Beaver Coali-
tion, Koenigsberg directed
a documentary about the
movement called “The Bea-
ver Believers”).
“Many folks have been
coming to beaver, as we’re
looking at water scarcity,
and as we’re looking at how
do we most impactfully
build resiliency into our
landscape,” said Shockey,
a wildlife biologist and the
executive director of the
group. “So the Beaver Coa-
lition sort of grew out of
that, and our goal — why
we exist — is to empower
humans to partner with
beaver.”
If you’re asking, “why
would humans want to part-
ner with beavers,” one rea-
son becomes clear as the
pair looked down on a dam
beavers built in downtown
Phoenix not long before
the fire. The pond it cre-
ated, along with a smaller
stormwater retention pond,
appeared to have slowed the
flames and may have even
protected the nearby Phoe-
nix Civic Center from burn-
ing, Shockey said.
And now the dam is fil-
tering ash from the water
for salmon and other ani-
mals living downstream.
“Just think about how
much toxic sludge is now
in this pond from the fire
Photos by Brandon Swanson/Oregon Public Broadcasting
Jakob Shockey floats a pond leveler out into the middle of the beaver pond in Phoenix. The device acts like a bathtub overflow drain, preventing the pond from
growing any bigger, no matter how high the beaver builds the dam.
run off,” said Koenigsberg,
pointing at the stagnant
gray-black water above the
dam, and the clear water
trickling from its base.
“Look at how nasty it is (in
the pond) and how clean
it is (below the dam). You
can’t ask for better.”
To understand what bea-
vers have to do with fire,
you first have to understand
a little more about the ani-
mals themselves.
Beavers are awkward
on land, making them easy
pickings for predators. But
they’re graceful in water.
So they build dams to cre-
ate ponds and wetlands for
self-protection.
“So if you ask someone
to imagine a healthy stream
or to draw a healthy stream,
what they think of often is
this little thin stream wind-
ing through the landscape,”
said Emily Fairfax, an assis-
tant professor in the Envi-
ronmental Science and
Resource Management Pro-
gram at California State
University Channel Islands.
“It’s cool; it’s clear. And
that, unfortunately, in most
cases is not what streams
should be looking like.”
They only look that
way now because Euro-
pean settlers trapped mil-
lions of beavers and con-
verted the wetlands they
created across North Amer-
ica into farmland. Fairfax
says the landscape used to
look much different.
“A really healthy stream,
especially in valleys, espe-
cially in sort of lowland
areas, should be really
messy,” she said. “It should
be splitting into a bunch
of different directions and
then coming back together.
There should be so much
brush and so much vegeta-
tion that it is challenging to
walk through. There should
be mud, there should be
bugs, there should be fish.
There should just be chaos
all around you. And that’s a
healthy stream.”
These messy beaver-cre-
ated wetlands slow down-
stream flow, spreading
water across the floodplain
so that it seeps into the
ground and irrigates valley
Beavers are known as ‘nature’s engineers’ because of the way they reshape the landscape with
dams and canals, turning simple streams into messy wetlands.
floors as well as any farmer,
even in times of drought.
“The earth around that
beaver pond is like a great
big sponge: it’s sucking up
water,” she said. “A wetland
is developing. All this bio-
diversity is happening. It’s
great. It’s beautiful.”
And when fire moves
through, these complex
streams act much differently
than simplified streams like
Bear Creek. That’s some-
thing Fairfax and her stu-
dents have learned by por-
ing over satellite images
before and after fire.
“I ultimately found that
these beaver-dammed areas
experience about three
times less burning than the
areas that don’t have bea-
vers,” she said. “So they’re
significantly more protected
from fire. And when fire
does go through them, it’s
much, much lower inten-
sity. And sometimes it can’t
go through them at all. It’s
just too wet to burn.”
Those wet areas also
provide a safe place for
other animals to take refuge
from the flames. “And that’s
huge, especially if you think
about some sensitive spe-
cies where their whole hab-
itat could be destroyed in a
fire,” Fairfax continued.
So if beavers can cre-
ate fire breaks and wildlife
refuges all over the land-
scape for free, you’d think
people would want them
everywhere. But they also
flood roads, fields and yards
and cut down trees, bring-
ing them into conflict with
everyone from homeowners
to farmers to timber compa-
nies. Consequently, in most
Western states, including
the Beaver State, the furry
engineers are classified as
nuisance animals, and there
are few limits on hunting
and trapping them, despite
growing attempts by beaver
advocates to convince the
state to strengthen protec-
tions (the state Legislature
didn’t vote on several pro-
posed bills during its session
earlier this year, although
the Oregon Department of
Fish and Wildlife is cur-
rently conducting a Beaver
Management Work Group
to evaluate changing regu-
lations, and protections are
proposed in a new compro-
mise developed between
environmentalists and the
timber industry).
Such was the case for
Phoenix. The last time bea-
vers moved in, the town
trapped and removed them.
So this time when they
discovered beavers in the
pond (since they’re noctur-
nal, many beavers can go
unnoticed until their dams
start to grow), the city’s
public works supervisor,
Matias Mendez, called
Shockey to help Phoenix
live with their new furry
neighbors.
Mendez was concerned
the dam could plug the cul-
vert downstream and that
the pond could grow large
enough to flood the nearby
highway and provide a
drowning hazard if some-
one were to drive into it.
So Shockey brought a team
of volunteers to install a
pond leveler — a device
that removes the flood risk
but lets the town keep the
ecological and fire benefits
of the pond.
The pond leveler is basi-
cally a long pipe that runs
over the dam out to the
middle of the pond, where
a cage stops the beaver
from clogging it. It func-
tions similarly to the over-
flow drain in a bathtub.
“We want to hide this
as far from the dam as we
can,” Shockey said, as he
swam the cage with the
end of the pipe out into the
middle of the pond. “Bea-
ver will obsess over look-
ing for that leak (in the
dam), and their leak in
actuality will be 40 feet out
into the pond.”
Shockey and the Bea-
ver Coalition have federal
funding to install several
such devices in the Rogue
basin to help humans and
beavers coexist.
Shockey’s hope is that,
if the beavers thrive in the
pond, then their offspring
will work their way back
up the Bear Creek Green-
way and reshape the land-
scape to make it more resil-
ient to fire and drought in
the future.
“We selfishly need the
beaver’s help,” he said.
“We don’t have enough
time or money or peo-
ple to help bring this
creek back to the place
that needs to be, and bea-
ver will do that for free.
Beaver are the ecosys-
tem engineer for this land-
scape. We can play at it,
but they’re the profession-
als. So we need to defer to
the professionals.”
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