Gardening for Health
Be Kind To Beavers
By Maria Price
Growing up on the property surrounding Beaver Creek, I never saw a beaver.
Then, a couple of years ago, walking along the banks of the creek, I noticed sweet gum trees chewed down to a foot in height. The more I walked, the more I noticed saplings chewed down and many sticks with the bark meticulously chewed off were in the stream. The wonderful beaver pond formed in the floodplain below my house. And oh, did it bring the waterfowl.
Canadian geese with their babies in tow, white egrets, mallards and black ducks, great blue herons and the lesser heron. Wetland grasses have grown in the rich overflow that helps feed the waterfowl. My first sighting of a beaver was one that stood up on a tussock of grass, and for a moment I thought it was a small bear. Schools of baby fish appeared in the deeper pools in the stream. I hadn’t seen fish in the stream for years.
This year I discovered a book I highly recommend, called Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter by Ben Goldfarb.
Beavers have been systematically destroyed or trapped since the 1500s thanks to the fur trade. They are a keystone species upon which many other flora and fauna depend on.
“Beavers are like an entire ecosystem capable of tackling just about any landscape scale problem,” writes Goldfarb. “Trying to mitigate floods or improve water quality? There’s a beaver for that. Hoping to capture more water for agriculture in the face of climate change, concerned about sedimentation, salmon populations, wildfires? There’s a beaver for all that.”
The zero-tolerance mentality about beavers must change in the United States.
Goldfarb invites us to “reach into the past to imagine what streams were like before global capitalism purged our continent of these dam building water storing, wetland creating engineers. Beaver dams existed in all streams, ponds and rivers in the United States.”
Wetlands were part of this system that looked “swampy” to the observer. The weight of the ponds created by beavers presses water deep into the ground and recharges aquifers for use by downstream farms.” Sediment and pollutants filter out, cleansing flows. Floods dissipate in ponds, wildfires hiss out in wet meadows,” writes Goldfarb.
Wetlands capture and store water for dry summers. “The disappearance of beavers dried up wetlands and meadows, hastened erosion, altered the course of streams and imperiled water loving fish, fowl and amphibians-and aquatic Dust bowl,” states Goldfarb.
Beavers are extraordinary ecosystem engineers. The story of beavers is how North America was colonized and why are landscapes look like they do. I like this passage in Goldfarb’s book, if we make beavers our allies maybe we can “forestall the deterioration of our rivers, the disappearance of our biodiversity and the ravages of climate change.”
We have continual flooding in the southern tier of the United States and wildfires ravaging the West. When could we learn from these small creatures?