Practical Engineering recently did an episode comparing human dams to beaver dams. Not really an apples to apples comparison because we build dams for very different purposes, but beaver dams are not only less disruptive to the environment - they are often a net positive. Although they do sometimes create a nuisance for human infrastructure.
My youtube feed gets a decent amount of recommendation from channels such as Mossy Earth, Plant Wild, etc. that showcase some nature restauration project. While I cannot help myself to be a bit skeptical of those efforts (how really sustainable is all of this; isn't that just a tiny drop in the ocean, etc.), I really like to have positive and hopeful news like the one of this article amidst all the ambient negativity and pessimism.
The way I see it, yeah it's a drop in the ocean, but these individual sites will act as "seeds", safe havens for wildlife that, from there, can spread out far and wide. Like these fish, they don't stay there, they go far and wide and become part of a much bigger ecosystem. Part of the reason why these restoration projects are important is because at the time, people weren't aware (or didn't care) of the scale or impact their efforts in hunting beavers had. I'm sure the individual hunters also figured their hunting was a drop in the ocean.
This is a good way to look at it. The more and more complex life survives the anthropocene, the better off the biosphere when this Age has passed. Many times in the past life survived in small pockets (an evolutionary bottleneck event), so making small pockets is more than just a symbolic gesture.
At the very least they give us real-world experiments for what works, and honestly I will take the occasional bit of ecological good news over another article explaining how doomed everything is
And new techniques for future efforts. I forget which groups are doing what but they're doing things like pulling over trees in old plantations to increase diversity, and designing(and iterating on) coral-reef-promoting structures that can be locally manufactured and installed where restoration is needed.
Next up - if human manipulation of the world makes it so that these animals stay animals or if we're just setting things up to be the next padded safe room and their behavior changes. (as if it hasn't already)
There's a really good book about a homesteader that did something similar to this in the 1930's in British Columbia, "Three Against The Wilderness". Basically he restored the dams that had been dynamited by the ranchers, and that restored all of the wetlands in the area.
Later on, the government brought him some beavers from elsewhere, and they flourished.
Funny how much of "ecological restoration" sometimes turns out to be undoing a change we made decades ago and then letting the original ecosystem resume doing the maintenance for us
I think their point was that, instead of trying to reengineer and rebuild an entire ecosystem, you fix one or two things that were preventing nature from restoring itself.
I believe this is called "Process-Based Restoration".
I love this. Especially the part where you can ask the Government of Canada for beavers.
But it feels like there’s a bit of surprise to the idea that the environment takes on the form it takes on. And if you take away a part of it, it’ll take on a different form. And if you put that part back, it can take on the earlier form. There is no correct or canonical form.
Yeah, what is the right form of nature here - wetlands, or a road for humans. There is likely no cosmic right answer - but personally I believe we have lot's of roads and too little wetlands left.
I will chose to make a bridge or detour a road once via collective effort, over rebuilding the entire burnt village every ten years. Beaver territories stop wildfires, and they take care of the forever maintenance of the firewalls for free, releasing tax money that can be spent in better things.
They also provide an invaluable service slowing floods, creating fisheries for humans, and increasing touristic appeal from a location (we are naturally attracted by the aesthetics of watching water). Ponds also create relatively safe sanctuaries where wildlife, cattle and humans can retreat in case of wildfires.
So, yes, there are many cons, but also many pros. Beavers compete with us for low places and shouldn't be allowed everywhere, but to eliminate them from every place is also a mistake.
While its true that there are no correct or canonical forms for the environment, there are states with large biodiversity and states with comparatively small biodiversity. Generally we regard the former more valuable than the latter.
Restoration can sometimes imply there is one true historical state we're supposed to recreate, which is probably the wrong mental model. In this case it seems more like restoring a missing process than restoring a particular landscape. Put the ecosystem engineer back and let the ecosystem decide what comes next
I wrote a while back about some coho fry populations I found which would have benefitted tremendously from dams. Each day I returned I would find more and more empty pools along the river, picked clean of fish where I’d previously seen dozens or hundreds of fry. Beavers used to live here in great numbers, but these days it’s fairly uncommon to see them. I bet they saved a lot of coho back in their day.
It was an interesting, but counterintuitive result that water temperatures went down after artificial beaver damming. Their theory is that the water is able to permeate more into the ground and exchange heat with the ambient underground temperature [1]
Imho wetlands and beaver dams increase median water flow in the creeks. Without them you get a spikes of flash floods in extreme cases and a dry/just trickling stream for the dry periods. The other benefit of a higher water table and less violent water flow is the riparian vegetation shading the water.
Armchair theory: larger water surface from beaver lakes means larger evaporative surface means things cool down. Depends on the ambient temperature and amount of sunlight as well, of course.
I’m rather partial to beavers myself and was sad to learn about their demise in North America. At one point their pelts were referred to as “the coin of the realm” https://youtu.be/8XToPq9lsOM?si=DJKedkQXuzJhSmf7
I'd recommend Leila Philip's Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America. It's a great work of narrative science writing.
I think we deeply underestimate the profound impact beavers had on the landscape in North America. We truly live in a post-beaver geography. The beaver hat fad in Europe was the primary driver of their population going from hundreds of millions to less than 100,000.
Yes it's heartening to see the rebound but the population reaching as low as 100k will forever place a genetic hurdle on restoration efforts. Not to mention beavers have been found to be highly cultural animals with local nuances in social interactions and even how they build their dams. There are tons of skills that beavers pass down through culture rather than genetics that have already been lost
off-topic: I've made a habit of removing all those `si` or `igshid` or `unique_share_id` (thanks airbnb for making it obvious, I guess) and I wish I'd have a "middleware" that removes them when I copy something, but I'm too lazy and it would not be cross-platform.
some apps have gotten sneaky though and made every shared URL an apparently unique one :/
It's not the same, as it only works on the receiving end, but I use the ClearURLs addon for stripping that out. At least it somewhat helps, and ensures that any URL I copy from my browser doesn't have tracking IDs.
Yeah the best policy is to avoid using a "Share" button as much as possible and always just copy the URL bar. I have a browser extension that strips them automatically too but I don't think it always works. I wish my extension, instead of just stripping it, would mangle it randomly just to add some data poisoning to websites that do this
>I have no idea why I am so obsessed by aquifer recharge.
Maybe humans have an instinct for water management like beavers do.
>There’s a fair number of greening the desert YouTube channels using Beaver Dam analogues funded by the state.
I enjoy some of these too. There's also water management focused regenerative agriculture projects that are cool like food garden pond systems in Hawaii[0]
There's a wetland near where I live where beavers have reached saturation, with a web of dams that has turned a valley into prime beaver habitat. (1:45 short video)
They are doing that in a few places in the UK. It's working really well and they can rapidly transform the landscapes they are in. The flip side of course is that a lot of residential areas and farmland is in what used to be wetlands that are now drained on purpose. If you introduce beavers there, it tends to be a bit disruptive as they would cause issues with flooding areas that people would prefer to keep dry.
But done right, they help restore wetlands that absorb and retain water rather than causing lots of issues with flooding downstream when it rains. Wetlands have a lot of bio diversity, insects, birds, plants, predators, and all the rest. They also capture a lot of carbon All good stuff. Mostly the beavers take care of all of the heavy lifting of building dams and maintaining them. It's a lot cheaper than trying to emulate what they do with a lot of human labor. But of course keeping beavers confined to where you want them is maybe a bit hard. So, artificial dams are a good alternative.
The beavers are still there, just not in high numbers like they used to be. Right now the ecosystem can only support the population that is already there. Maybe eventually it will support more and then the number will increase naturally.
It is not so much the eco-system, it is the need for a full food-chain of animals to keep populations in-check. We like deer but without wolves or large cats, the deer become a pest but we don't like wolves and large cats because we are all taught as children that they are scary and dangerous - although more children die from car accidents and stabbings than wild animals so whatever!
So natural predators for small rodents keep their numbers in check but that will be a long time because "won't somebody think of the children"..."and the farmers"
> it is the need for a full food-chain of animals to keep populations in-check
The error you make is that there is only one, global ecosystem, and it sorts itself out. We won't be matching the power of the dinosaur comet anytime soon, and even that gave rise to mammals and eventually space travel so just chill... We dont need to do a thing
Which they never will on their own, so surely conservation regulations need to be enforced, too bad the US is moving backwards right now in that regard
Then you get people (understandably) upset that just about any work they want to do to improve their own private land needs to involve the EPA and/or a local wildlife commission.
The two meanings are not synonymous. One can certainly destroy land through improving or developing it, one can also do improve it responsibly and minimally.
Building one or two small permanent structures on many acres of forest is not destroying it by a long shot.
Everything you do to waste land area by "lightly" touching it further increases sprawl because it increases the land required to do things.
Environmentalism is in direct conflict with densely packing "stuff" onto land whether that's people or industry. If you want to preserve nature embrace the "concrete jungle" and the density it brings.
Look at historical small towns vs modern build outs of the same population. Despite building maybe four stories high at most 50k people in some New England or Midwest mill town fit on a tiny fraction of the developed area of the same modern population simply because environmentalists weren't around to mandate engineered drainage ditches and green spaces and setbacks and require every podunk business have fire lanes a drunk could back a lowboy into and all planters in their parking lot and the other stuff
High density development leaving as much pristine nature as possible is vastly superior to sprawl for the environment, but the comment you replied to didn't seem to describe a density issue.
Regardless we'd do a lot more pinprick development and develop fewer acres and there'd be less pressure to do greenfield development if not for the rules adopted at the behest of half baked 20th century environmentalism.
The alternative is we drive ourselves ever closer to the brink.
It is entirely possible that our current way of living, including the idea of “private land” as it exists today, may not be conducive to our long-term survival.
The forces of nature care not for our political and philosophical debates.
Someone, definitionally, owns all the privately held land in the US. Large landowners in rural areas are on average more politically connected and wield more political power in their communities.
Telling them that any sort of work on their own land—no matter how small—requires extensive oversight might be well-intentioned but pisses off a lot of people who will then become bitter opponents of even well-designed environmental legislation. Telling them they should have made better purchasing decisions just motivates them even further.
What actually ends up happening is these people then do it anyway with zero oversight, because the amount of land involved is too vast to enforce these things on. You also get large concerted efforts to overturn any and all environmental protection.
You act like it is impossible to use land that beavers live on without destroying the beaver dams or removing the beavers, and yet there are plenty of people that do that very thing their entire lives without a problem.
I didn't say they can't do anything with their land, but if you live on land with beavers you should know how beavers and beaver dams work so you don't do something stupid, like building a structure in the flood path of a stream or river full of beavers, or killing the beavers so that you can and then complaining about the beavers coming back.
Complaining about how beavers work and what beavers are doing on your land is the same as building on a historic floodplain and then complaining about it flooding. Or building in hurricane territory and complaining about hurricanes. Or building in the woods and complaining about deer eating your plants and trees falling on your driveway. One person's lack of foresight is not and should not be everybody and everything else's problem.
Do your research before you buy things. Only an asshole buys and/or builds next to an area with long established feature X and then complains about feature X existing and how its "unfair" they can't have it taken down or destroyed at will.
No, but I do believe that the people who actually own these lands almost universally think that the government unnecessarily interferes with their ability to make small improvements that don’t meaningfully impact wildlife.
I agree with this kind of oversight. But as someone with a friend who is both an environmentalist and does own land adjacent to a river and land managed by the national forest service, the latitude for what you can actually do without serious oversight is essentially nothing. Luckily what he wants to do is essentially nothing, but even the very minimal bits he does want to do—which includes making fire breaks in a populated area which is wildfire-prone—is questionable.
It’s been eye opening to see the lengths he’s had to go to in order to stay on the right side of things. And it’s given me a decent perspective on the burden it puts on even those who want do to be responsible landowners.
It’s also been interesting to learn about the perverse incentives it does put on those who own this kind of land. One example is that new paths generally can’t be cleared, except when a wildfire happens, if you can justify it as part of firefighting or fire prevention efforts. So if and when there is a fire nearby, bulldozers come out in droves. I’ll leave you to connect that to what might be the root cause of some of these fires.
The problem isn't the beavers. The beavers bring water with them. With water comes wetland rules and regulation and setbacks and, and, and, and.... and all your plans for whatever you were gonna do with the land go up in smoke. Doubly so if you were planning something cheap and minimal impact. A couple cabins in the forest don't justify huge regulatory expenses to fight this stuff. Whereas BigCo's development can absorb that cost. Bonus points if the locals show up to the planning meeting for the BigCo project and say things like "we don't want things like this here, we want rustic cabins and campgrounds and agriculture and small business".
Wetland regulation also acts like a ratchet. The soil will change from being underwater and so land that would have been considered upland before the beavers will be considered wetland after them even if the plants go back to how they were before the beavers.
Pretty much all the "hey, that's obviously dumb and non-optimal why the F does that make financial sense" stuff you see in land development comes from the massive third rail that is wetlands.
We live in a society. I can’t build a helipad on my roof in the middle of Seattle. Technically that’s a limitation on my personal liberty. We accept it because of the cost to the people around me.
I actively allow beavers to exist. They have two dams on my property.. Previous owners a long time ago actively exterminated them. The county also actively exterminates them instead of simply putting in simple flood/beaver control devices where necessary.
As a pre-teen I had my first encounter with the law when they figured out that I was triggering the town traps to save the beavers. My parents had to haul me down to the station so the police chief could lecture me on vandalizing town property.
We had a beautiful set of beaver ponds, but the town won. Now it's just underbrush with a stream running through it. I'll never forget though: don't let your laws get in the way of doing the right thing.
Beavers can be incredibly difficult to live alongside of.
My parents have 100+ acres of bush in central Alberta. When they bought the property it was logged out and mostly in a bad abused state and mostly dry. Over a few years, beavers moved in and transformed a formerly semi-marshy spot into a full pond. And then another. And another.
Eventually though, without a lot of predators around (there's some skittish bears, coyotes, that's it) they begin to overpopulate. And any efforts to keep the water level at a certain point starts to get tricky. In order to keep access to some parts of the property my dad ended up having to put in some sneaky culverts with various tricks to stop them from plugging them. (I forget, but he eventually figured out a beaverproof trick).
Even then, every few years the need to "remove" some of the beavers, because they just get to be too many, they run out of poplars near their lodge and start to cause more problems for downstream and upstream neighbours.
They've done amazing things for the property. But when my parents pass it's going to be hard to maintain this property with the beavers actively trying to transform it constantly.
They will continue to breed, expanding territory unless there are predators. When they come across a culvert (or bridge), they will block it, eventually overtopping roads and washing them out.
Thanks for the good faith reply. I can see that this would require regular maintenance.
It is interesting that we see our infrastructure as 'valid' or correct, but the work these engineers (beavers) put in as a nuisance. In an ideal world, the benefits to local biodiversity and ecosystem health should be balanced with the cost of relocating roads when necessary.
There are many ways to prevent blockage of culverts and even control the water level behind beaver dams it's just that people don't want to bother, are ignorant, or just don't care.
You'd be amazed at how ingenious they are. It's a constant war at my parent's place to stop them from blocking the culverts. It drives beavers absolutely mad to hear the sound of free flowing water from an area they've colonized. They will work themselves into a fit trying to plug it up.
My dad is a crazy old German retired machinist/tool&die maker. I think he enjoys the challenge. Not everyone would.
My dad shoots one or two every couple years to keep the population down. But leaves them dumped because actually there's lots of scavengers that appreciate the meal. No free food lasts long out in the woods.
> They will continue to breed, expanding territory unless there are predators
Maybe part of the problem is that humans in North America are largely not hunting beavers anymore?
We're very capable of being the predators that keep animal populations in check, and plenty of people do still hunt, but I don't think I've ever heard of anyone hunting beavers in my life
I do believe people still hunt beaver, but they usually trap them instead of shooting.
When I got my hunting license, part of the safety course was about trapping. The impression I got from that was that trapping is basically torturing animals to death and infinitely worse than shooting them with rifles.
Because the government makes the water that comes with them a huge liability.
Tons of vacant land owners would be happy to allow beavers and everything else if not for the fact that it destroys any prospect of doing anything on the land.
That's a an oversimplification since beavers don't obviously adhere to property boundaries and the areas that are good for beavers are more then likely to have originally been flooded to begin with before the beavers were killed off.
His freeform, not-too-serious libertarianism can easily be mocked, but PJ O’Rourke did have a very good point about well-intentioned but counterproductive environmental legislation like the laws governing wetlands: imagine that, should an Old Master painting be discovered on your property, you were required immediately to cease all other use of the property and protect that Old Master painting against damage or theft, under penalty of law, but without any compensation for the expenses this might incur. You can imagine that any new ones found would simply be burned immediately, not protected. And wetlands laws work a bit like that.
Regardless of specific political ideology it only takes a room temperature IQ to realize that copy pasting the concept of Royal Forests from Norman England to today is probably gonna cause all the same perverse incentives and hardship and stunt wealth accumulation/progress in the affected areas and so on. What did we spend the last few decades of the 20th century doing? Basically that.
The other real fucked up thing is that most of it is state/local implementations of federal rules but that's insane because California has a completely different relationship with swamps and water than the Carolinas.
The worst of it will probably get unwound when the courts adopt a "no you idiots, a fractional taking is still a taking pay the F up" doctrine but that might be a century from now. There's sooooo much money tied up in it though.
The latter. You are basically English, and look at us... Not a single wild predator larger than a rat. No bears, wolves, wild dogs, wild cats, not even snakes or spiders or hornets cos we killed them all. I'm just not sure it's possible cos America is so vast and has land borders
We need a professional approach there, able to see the whole picture. Amateurism can be really expensive.
Sometimes beavers are a big mistake. Hazelnuts and willows can be chopped to the ground and just will return stronger and more dense. Poplars will regrow from the roots at some distance. Argentinian trees they will vanish instead. This happens because temperate South American forests never evolved with beavers. On this places they may done more harm than good.
So obvious, but Argentinian government didn't see it coming. Thousands millions of dollars in damages caused by amateurs with power in Argentinian government.
Another example: Beavers are native from Sweden, but beavers on Sweden should be removed.
The temperature is cooler? That can't possibly be the only reason to explain such a dramatic change in survival rates. We definitely need more research on this topic.
If you do even a moment of reading about salmon, you will find that they are extremely sensitive to warm temperatures. Even a couple degrees F above their "normal" will allow disease to run rampant.
I give the salmon a little more credit because the entire river can't be a beaver dam. That's their theory and I think will more research we're going to learn more about what's happening here.
There's more food, less energy wasted fighting excessively strong current, and more places to hide from predators. Water quality goes up downstream of a beaver(-ish) dam.
With freshwater increasingly being a problem, being able to slow down tributaries and allow the water to percolate and help rebuild aquifers is something that should be happening everywhere possible.
Lost cost, high reward. Not sexy enough to get the attention it deserves.
Loads of projects being done for that (at least in Europe) after droughts have become more and more common. Netherlands especially, worldwide experts in water management because for hundreds of years they tried to actually get rid of the water; the whole country is full of infrastructure for managing the water table.
This year was bad in terms of drought, yet it seems it wasn't as bad as the one we had a few years ago (2018 or 19? I don't remember exactly) because they allowed the water table to go higher a bit, used the ijsselmeer as a giant fresh water reservoir, closed / limited locks, etc. After this year and the rapidly accellerating / worsening effects of climate change, like the drying out (ok, low water levels) of the Rhine, I'm sure they're working hard to do more. They can for example choose to allow the flood plains to flood even when there's no flooding, to (locally) add to the ground water. Granted, it takes (iirc) decades or hundreds of years for that to end up in the aquifers but better now than never.
Other projects I've heard of involve allowing rivers and streams to meander again, undoing the work of straightening them to get rid of water faster and / or optimize shipping traffic.
Sadly, not amazed. Flooding is a natural concern (but not natural enough to not build in a freaking flood plain), and most communities are not forward-looking enough to look upstream for solutions likely because it may be out of their township and "not my worry".
Cattail tubers and bark from smallish hardwood trees that they embed underwater for winter food. Hidden affect of that is the cattail is not particularly good habitat or food source for waterfowl so then you have one more item pushing down on waterfowl populations.
That was my thought too. Nothing in an ecosystem exists in isolation. Change a single variable, especially a dramatic change like going from 8% to 60% on a single variable, and there will be ripple effects throughout the local ecosystem. The Law of Unintended Consequences is one of those unchangeable, eternal laws that when you forget them, the Gods of the Copybook Headings limp up to explain it once more*.
I am sick of underachieving beavers. Go us! Seriously, that would require statutory change here in Washington state. I live in a rural area with salmon waterways all over. Farmers just quietly clear the way for them, because it's illegal to make any changes to the waterway even if it's trash thrown out of cars.
I just... don't like comments like these; it's so much cheaper, easier and better to either have humans build one (out of biodegradeable materials like in the article) or reintroduce beavers. But instead of allocating some money for that, people allocate millions/billions to build robots that can't do the job as well.
Practical Engineering recently did an episode comparing human dams to beaver dams. Not really an apples to apples comparison because we build dams for very different purposes, but beaver dams are not only less disruptive to the environment - they are often a net positive. Although they do sometimes create a nuisance for human infrastructure.
https://practical.engineering/blog/2026/8/18/are-beavers-act...
My youtube feed gets a decent amount of recommendation from channels such as Mossy Earth, Plant Wild, etc. that showcase some nature restauration project. While I cannot help myself to be a bit skeptical of those efforts (how really sustainable is all of this; isn't that just a tiny drop in the ocean, etc.), I really like to have positive and hopeful news like the one of this article amidst all the ambient negativity and pessimism.
The way I see it, yeah it's a drop in the ocean, but these individual sites will act as "seeds", safe havens for wildlife that, from there, can spread out far and wide. Like these fish, they don't stay there, they go far and wide and become part of a much bigger ecosystem. Part of the reason why these restoration projects are important is because at the time, people weren't aware (or didn't care) of the scale or impact their efforts in hunting beavers had. I'm sure the individual hunters also figured their hunting was a drop in the ocean.
This is a good way to look at it. The more and more complex life survives the anthropocene, the better off the biosphere when this Age has passed. Many times in the past life survived in small pockets (an evolutionary bottleneck event), so making small pockets is more than just a symbolic gesture.
With how low many wildlife populations are, surprisingly small areas can be ecologically important
At the very least they give us real-world experiments for what works, and honestly I will take the occasional bit of ecological good news over another article explaining how doomed everything is
And new techniques for future efforts. I forget which groups are doing what but they're doing things like pulling over trees in old plantations to increase diversity, and designing(and iterating on) coral-reef-promoting structures that can be locally manufactured and installed where restoration is needed.
Next up - if human manipulation of the world makes it so that these animals stay animals or if we're just setting things up to be the next padded safe room and their behavior changes. (as if it hasn't already)
There's a really good book about a homesteader that did something similar to this in the 1930's in British Columbia, "Three Against The Wilderness". Basically he restored the dams that had been dynamited by the ranchers, and that restored all of the wetlands in the area.
Later on, the government brought him some beavers from elsewhere, and they flourished.
Funny how much of "ecological restoration" sometimes turns out to be undoing a change we made decades ago and then letting the original ecosystem resume doing the maintenance for us
isn't that pretty much the definition of ecological restoration?
What else could "restoration" mean?
I think their point was that, instead of trying to reengineer and rebuild an entire ecosystem, you fix one or two things that were preventing nature from restoring itself.
I believe this is called "Process-Based Restoration".
I love this. Especially the part where you can ask the Government of Canada for beavers.
But it feels like there’s a bit of surprise to the idea that the environment takes on the form it takes on. And if you take away a part of it, it’ll take on a different form. And if you put that part back, it can take on the earlier form. There is no correct or canonical form.
There are lots of people looking to relocate beavers as their dams flood out roads etc. I can get you about 6 a year
Yeah, what is the right form of nature here - wetlands, or a road for humans. There is likely no cosmic right answer - but personally I believe we have lot's of roads and too little wetlands left.
I will chose to make a bridge or detour a road once via collective effort, over rebuilding the entire burnt village every ten years. Beaver territories stop wildfires, and they take care of the forever maintenance of the firewalls for free, releasing tax money that can be spent in better things.
They also provide an invaluable service slowing floods, creating fisheries for humans, and increasing touristic appeal from a location (we are naturally attracted by the aesthetics of watching water). Ponds also create relatively safe sanctuaries where wildlife, cattle and humans can retreat in case of wildfires.
So, yes, there are many cons, but also many pros. Beavers compete with us for low places and shouldn't be allowed everywhere, but to eliminate them from every place is also a mistake.
Send them all my way. I could start a company. A company down by The Bay.
You want a toe? I can get you a toe.
With nail polish?
By three o’clock?
While its true that there are no correct or canonical forms for the environment, there are states with large biodiversity and states with comparatively small biodiversity. Generally we regard the former more valuable than the latter.
Restoration can sometimes imply there is one true historical state we're supposed to recreate, which is probably the wrong mental model. In this case it seems more like restoring a missing process than restoring a particular landscape. Put the ecosystem engineer back and let the ecosystem decide what comes next
I wrote a while back about some coho fry populations I found which would have benefitted tremendously from dams. Each day I returned I would find more and more empty pools along the river, picked clean of fish where I’d previously seen dozens or hundreds of fry. Beavers used to live here in great numbers, but these days it’s fairly uncommon to see them. I bet they saved a lot of coho back in their day.
https://steve-adams.me/coho.html
Thank you for posting this.
And also for your simple, matter-of-fact tone.
It was an interesting, but counterintuitive result that water temperatures went down after artificial beaver damming. Their theory is that the water is able to permeate more into the ground and exchange heat with the ambient underground temperature [1]
1. https://www.science.org/content/article/beaver-dams-without-...
Imho wetlands and beaver dams increase median water flow in the creeks. Without them you get a spikes of flash floods in extreme cases and a dry/just trickling stream for the dry periods. The other benefit of a higher water table and less violent water flow is the riparian vegetation shading the water.
Armchair theory: larger water surface from beaver lakes means larger evaporative surface means things cool down. Depends on the ambient temperature and amount of sunlight as well, of course.
I’m rather partial to beavers myself and was sad to learn about their demise in North America. At one point their pelts were referred to as “the coin of the realm” https://youtu.be/8XToPq9lsOM?si=DJKedkQXuzJhSmf7
Here's your link without the surveillance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XToPq9lsOM
I'd recommend Leila Philip's Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America. It's a great work of narrative science writing.
I think we deeply underestimate the profound impact beavers had on the landscape in North America. We truly live in a post-beaver geography. The beaver hat fad in Europe was the primary driver of their population going from hundreds of millions to less than 100,000.
https://www.leilaphilip.com/beaverland
Current North American beaver population is estimated to be in the range of 10 to 15 million.
Yes it's heartening to see the rebound but the population reaching as low as 100k will forever place a genetic hurdle on restoration efforts. Not to mention beavers have been found to be highly cultural animals with local nuances in social interactions and even how they build their dams. There are tons of skills that beavers pass down through culture rather than genetics that have already been lost
I don't know about that; 100K is still a pretty big population.
Yeah they have rebounded a lot and we should celebrate that.
off-topic: I've made a habit of removing all those `si` or `igshid` or `unique_share_id` (thanks airbnb for making it obvious, I guess) and I wish I'd have a "middleware" that removes them when I copy something, but I'm too lazy and it would not be cross-platform.
some apps have gotten sneaky though and made every shared URL an apparently unique one :/
It's not the same, as it only works on the receiving end, but I use the ClearURLs addon for stripping that out. At least it somewhat helps, and ensures that any URL I copy from my browser doesn't have tracking IDs.
https://github.com/ClearURLs/Addon
Yeah the best policy is to avoid using a "Share" button as much as possible and always just copy the URL bar. I have a browser extension that strips them automatically too but I don't think it always works. I wish my extension, instead of just stripping it, would mangle it randomly just to add some data poisoning to websites that do this
> off-topic: I've made a habit of removing all those `si` or `igshid` or `unique_share_id` […]
Also `pp`.
Nice.
But beaver dams also capture sediment, one of the problems is that rain on loose soil forms deepening gullies.
Another big part is the wetlands, which helps water refill aquifers if the soil is permeable. And a charged aquifer provides springs.
I have no idea why I am so obsessed by aquifer recharge.
There’s a fair number of greening the desert YouTube channels using Beaver Dam analogues funded by the state.
>I have no idea why I am so obsessed by aquifer recharge.
Maybe humans have an instinct for water management like beavers do.
>There’s a fair number of greening the desert YouTube channels using Beaver Dam analogues funded by the state.
I enjoy some of these too. There's also water management focused regenerative agriculture projects that are cool like food garden pond systems in Hawaii[0]
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24uCCr3KjCI
> Maybe humans have an instinct for water management like beavers do.
We absolutely do. For both water and fire management.
There's a wetland near where I live where beavers have reached saturation, with a web of dams that has turned a valley into prime beaver habitat. (1:45 short video)
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/k_OZqbrMJGY
I really thought this 'Artificial Beavers' thing would be different.
For reals though, the straightening of rivers has led to less habitat, less lost curves that host the most important animals.
Maybe I missed it, why didn't they just reintroduce beavers?
They are doing that in a few places in the UK. It's working really well and they can rapidly transform the landscapes they are in. The flip side of course is that a lot of residential areas and farmland is in what used to be wetlands that are now drained on purpose. If you introduce beavers there, it tends to be a bit disruptive as they would cause issues with flooding areas that people would prefer to keep dry.
But done right, they help restore wetlands that absorb and retain water rather than causing lots of issues with flooding downstream when it rains. Wetlands have a lot of bio diversity, insects, birds, plants, predators, and all the rest. They also capture a lot of carbon All good stuff. Mostly the beavers take care of all of the heavy lifting of building dams and maintaining them. It's a lot cheaper than trying to emulate what they do with a lot of human labor. But of course keeping beavers confined to where you want them is maybe a bit hard. So, artificial dams are a good alternative.
Give it a few more dry years and Europeans will learn to love their beavers, again.
Wouldn’t reintroducing beavers be cheaper in the long run if the main problem is maintaining the artificial dams?
The beavers are still there, just not in high numbers like they used to be. Right now the ecosystem can only support the population that is already there. Maybe eventually it will support more and then the number will increase naturally.
It is not so much the eco-system, it is the need for a full food-chain of animals to keep populations in-check. We like deer but without wolves or large cats, the deer become a pest but we don't like wolves and large cats because we are all taught as children that they are scary and dangerous - although more children die from car accidents and stabbings than wild animals so whatever!
So natural predators for small rodents keep their numbers in check but that will be a long time because "won't somebody think of the children"..."and the farmers"
> it is the need for a full food-chain of animals to keep populations in-check
The error you make is that there is only one, global ecosystem, and it sorts itself out. We won't be matching the power of the dinosaur comet anytime soon, and even that gave rise to mammals and eventually space travel so just chill... We dont need to do a thing
> We won't be matching the power of the dinosaur comet anytime soon, and even that gave rise to mammals
Great, biodiversity will be restored in 100 million years, just in time for my great-great-great-great......grandchildren to enjoy.
TFA implies the issue is land owners won’t allow it:
> But beavers can only thrive if landowners allow them to.
Which they never will on their own, so surely conservation regulations need to be enforced, too bad the US is moving backwards right now in that regard
Then you get people (understandably) upset that just about any work they want to do to improve their own private land needs to involve the EPA and/or a local wildlife commission.
The modern phrasing of "improve" and "develop" for destroy is pretty upsetting to me.
My environment was improved to an unliveable asphalt/gravel sprawl from edge of city with woods with frog and birdsong...
The two meanings are not synonymous. One can certainly destroy land through improving or developing it, one can also do improve it responsibly and minimally.
Building one or two small permanent structures on many acres of forest is not destroying it by a long shot.
Everything you do to waste land area by "lightly" touching it further increases sprawl because it increases the land required to do things.
Environmentalism is in direct conflict with densely packing "stuff" onto land whether that's people or industry. If you want to preserve nature embrace the "concrete jungle" and the density it brings.
Look at historical small towns vs modern build outs of the same population. Despite building maybe four stories high at most 50k people in some New England or Midwest mill town fit on a tiny fraction of the developed area of the same modern population simply because environmentalists weren't around to mandate engineered drainage ditches and green spaces and setbacks and require every podunk business have fire lanes a drunk could back a lowboy into and all planters in their parking lot and the other stuff
High density development leaving as much pristine nature as possible is vastly superior to sprawl for the environment, but the comment you replied to didn't seem to describe a density issue.
Regardless we'd do a lot more pinprick development and develop fewer acres and there'd be less pressure to do greenfield development if not for the rules adopted at the behest of half baked 20th century environmentalism.
environmentalists well-known for instituting fire lane policies
Just another flavor of short sighted do gooders.
The alternative is we drive ourselves ever closer to the brink.
It is entirely possible that our current way of living, including the idea of “private land” as it exists today, may not be conducive to our long-term survival.
The forces of nature care not for our political and philosophical debates.
If you don't want to deal with swampy land full of beavers, don't buy swampy land full of beavers.
They should of done a better job purchasing land.
This is the opposite of a useful perspective.
Someone, definitionally, owns all the privately held land in the US. Large landowners in rural areas are on average more politically connected and wield more political power in their communities.
Telling them that any sort of work on their own land—no matter how small—requires extensive oversight might be well-intentioned but pisses off a lot of people who will then become bitter opponents of even well-designed environmental legislation. Telling them they should have made better purchasing decisions just motivates them even further.
What actually ends up happening is these people then do it anyway with zero oversight, because the amount of land involved is too vast to enforce these things on. You also get large concerted efforts to overturn any and all environmental protection.
You act like it is impossible to use land that beavers live on without destroying the beaver dams or removing the beavers, and yet there are plenty of people that do that very thing their entire lives without a problem.
I didn't say they can't do anything with their land, but if you live on land with beavers you should know how beavers and beaver dams work so you don't do something stupid, like building a structure in the flood path of a stream or river full of beavers, or killing the beavers so that you can and then complaining about the beavers coming back.
Complaining about how beavers work and what beavers are doing on your land is the same as building on a historic floodplain and then complaining about it flooding. Or building in hurricane territory and complaining about hurricanes. Or building in the woods and complaining about deer eating your plants and trees falling on your driveway. One person's lack of foresight is not and should not be everybody and everything else's problem.
Do your research before you buy things. Only an asshole buys and/or builds next to an area with long established feature X and then complains about feature X existing and how its "unfair" they can't have it taken down or destroyed at will.
No, but I do believe that the people who actually own these lands almost universally think that the government unnecessarily interferes with their ability to make small improvements that don’t meaningfully impact wildlife.
I agree with this kind of oversight. But as someone with a friend who is both an environmentalist and does own land adjacent to a river and land managed by the national forest service, the latitude for what you can actually do without serious oversight is essentially nothing. Luckily what he wants to do is essentially nothing, but even the very minimal bits he does want to do—which includes making fire breaks in a populated area which is wildfire-prone—is questionable.
It’s been eye opening to see the lengths he’s had to go to in order to stay on the right side of things. And it’s given me a decent perspective on the burden it puts on even those who want do to be responsible landowners.
It’s also been interesting to learn about the perverse incentives it does put on those who own this kind of land. One example is that new paths generally can’t be cleared, except when a wildfire happens, if you can justify it as part of firefighting or fire prevention efforts. So if and when there is a fire nearby, bulldozers come out in droves. I’ll leave you to connect that to what might be the root cause of some of these fires.
The problem isn't the beavers. The beavers bring water with them. With water comes wetland rules and regulation and setbacks and, and, and, and.... and all your plans for whatever you were gonna do with the land go up in smoke. Doubly so if you were planning something cheap and minimal impact. A couple cabins in the forest don't justify huge regulatory expenses to fight this stuff. Whereas BigCo's development can absorb that cost. Bonus points if the locals show up to the planning meeting for the BigCo project and say things like "we don't want things like this here, we want rustic cabins and campgrounds and agriculture and small business".
Wetland regulation also acts like a ratchet. The soil will change from being underwater and so land that would have been considered upland before the beavers will be considered wetland after them even if the plants go back to how they were before the beavers.
Pretty much all the "hey, that's obviously dumb and non-optimal why the F does that make financial sense" stuff you see in land development comes from the massive third rail that is wetlands.
Ignoring externalities remains popular.
We live in a society. I can’t build a helipad on my roof in the middle of Seattle. Technically that’s a limitation on my personal liberty. We accept it because of the cost to the people around me.
Unfortunately it seems like considering the cost to those around you is becoming a dying art
Good? They don't own the commons.
I actively allow beavers to exist. They have two dams on my property.. Previous owners a long time ago actively exterminated them. The county also actively exterminates them instead of simply putting in simple flood/beaver control devices where necessary.
As a pre-teen I had my first encounter with the law when they figured out that I was triggering the town traps to save the beavers. My parents had to haul me down to the station so the police chief could lecture me on vandalizing town property.
We had a beautiful set of beaver ponds, but the town won. Now it's just underbrush with a stream running through it. I'll never forget though: don't let your laws get in the way of doing the right thing.
Beavers can be incredibly difficult to live alongside of.
My parents have 100+ acres of bush in central Alberta. When they bought the property it was logged out and mostly in a bad abused state and mostly dry. Over a few years, beavers moved in and transformed a formerly semi-marshy spot into a full pond. And then another. And another.
Eventually though, without a lot of predators around (there's some skittish bears, coyotes, that's it) they begin to overpopulate. And any efforts to keep the water level at a certain point starts to get tricky. In order to keep access to some parts of the property my dad ended up having to put in some sneaky culverts with various tricks to stop them from plugging them. (I forget, but he eventually figured out a beaverproof trick).
Even then, every few years the need to "remove" some of the beavers, because they just get to be too many, they run out of poplars near their lodge and start to cause more problems for downstream and upstream neighbours.
They've done amazing things for the property. But when my parents pass it's going to be hard to maintain this property with the beavers actively trying to transform it constantly.
What are the problems actually? That they have improved water retention and soil hydration?
They will continue to breed, expanding territory unless there are predators. When they come across a culvert (or bridge), they will block it, eventually overtopping roads and washing them out.
Thanks for the good faith reply. I can see that this would require regular maintenance.
It is interesting that we see our infrastructure as 'valid' or correct, but the work these engineers (beavers) put in as a nuisance. In an ideal world, the benefits to local biodiversity and ecosystem health should be balanced with the cost of relocating roads when necessary.
There are many ways to prevent blockage of culverts and even control the water level behind beaver dams it's just that people don't want to bother, are ignorant, or just don't care.
You'd be amazed at how ingenious they are. It's a constant war at my parent's place to stop them from blocking the culverts. It drives beavers absolutely mad to hear the sound of free flowing water from an area they've colonized. They will work themselves into a fit trying to plug it up.
My dad is a crazy old German retired machinist/tool&die maker. I think he enjoys the challenge. Not everyone would.
Is there no more demand for beaver pelt and/or meat?
I've heard the tail is particularly tasty and easy to skin and cook.
No, the people I know that trap them because someone hired them to remove them just dump them.
My dad shoots one or two every couple years to keep the population down. But leaves them dumped because actually there's lots of scavengers that appreciate the meal. No free food lasts long out in the woods.
There are simple devices that can easily prevent blockage of culverts.
> They will continue to breed, expanding territory unless there are predators.
Just like our fellow humans. Godzilla to the rescue!
> They will continue to breed, expanding territory unless there are predators
Maybe part of the problem is that humans in North America are largely not hunting beavers anymore?
We're very capable of being the predators that keep animal populations in check, and plenty of people do still hunt, but I don't think I've ever heard of anyone hunting beavers in my life
I do believe people still hunt beaver, but they usually trap them instead of shooting.
When I got my hunting license, part of the safety course was about trapping. The impression I got from that was that trapping is basically torturing animals to death and infinitely worse than shooting them with rifles.
Throw in some wolves and create a brand new set of problems :)
That's the beauty of it. When wintertime rolls around they simply freeze to death.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuiK7jcC1fY
what's wrong with it not reverting to nature when they pass? people put flowers on loved ones graves.
floods roads, buildings, neighbour's properties.
they are very persistent buggers and breed like... rodents
Busy beaver problem?
Why are you wanting transform the beavers property?
this is basically the inciting incident of the recent movie Hoppers
Because the government makes the water that comes with them a huge liability.
Tons of vacant land owners would be happy to allow beavers and everything else if not for the fact that it destroys any prospect of doing anything on the land.
That's a an oversimplification since beavers don't obviously adhere to property boundaries and the areas that are good for beavers are more then likely to have originally been flooded to begin with before the beavers were killed off.
His freeform, not-too-serious libertarianism can easily be mocked, but PJ O’Rourke did have a very good point about well-intentioned but counterproductive environmental legislation like the laws governing wetlands: imagine that, should an Old Master painting be discovered on your property, you were required immediately to cease all other use of the property and protect that Old Master painting against damage or theft, under penalty of law, but without any compensation for the expenses this might incur. You can imagine that any new ones found would simply be burned immediately, not protected. And wetlands laws work a bit like that.
Regardless of specific political ideology it only takes a room temperature IQ to realize that copy pasting the concept of Royal Forests from Norman England to today is probably gonna cause all the same perverse incentives and hardship and stunt wealth accumulation/progress in the affected areas and so on. What did we spend the last few decades of the 20th century doing? Basically that.
The other real fucked up thing is that most of it is state/local implementations of federal rules but that's insane because California has a completely different relationship with swamps and water than the Carolinas.
The worst of it will probably get unwound when the courts adopt a "no you idiots, a fractional taking is still a taking pay the F up" doctrine but that might be a century from now. There's sooooo much money tied up in it though.
> Maybe I missed it, why didn't they just reintroduce beavers?
My guess is that trees are not there in numbers enough to support beavers. Or maybe they don't want beavers chopping the trees.
The latter. You are basically English, and look at us... Not a single wild predator larger than a rat. No bears, wolves, wild dogs, wild cats, not even snakes or spiders or hornets cos we killed them all. I'm just not sure it's possible cos America is so vast and has land borders
We need a professional approach there, able to see the whole picture. Amateurism can be really expensive.
Sometimes beavers are a big mistake. Hazelnuts and willows can be chopped to the ground and just will return stronger and more dense. Poplars will regrow from the roots at some distance. Argentinian trees they will vanish instead. This happens because temperate South American forests never evolved with beavers. On this places they may done more harm than good.
I would've thought it was obvious we shouldn't introduce beavers to South America if they aren't native there.
So obvious, but Argentinian government didn't see it coming. Thousands millions of dollars in damages caused by amateurs with power in Argentinian government.
Another example: Beavers are native from Sweden, but beavers on Sweden should be removed.
The temperature is cooler? That can't possibly be the only reason to explain such a dramatic change in survival rates. We definitely need more research on this topic.
If you do even a moment of reading about salmon, you will find that they are extremely sensitive to warm temperatures. Even a couple degrees F above their "normal" will allow disease to run rampant.
I give the salmon a little more credit because the entire river can't be a beaver dam. That's their theory and I think will more research we're going to learn more about what's happening here.
There's more food, less energy wasted fighting excessively strong current, and more places to hide from predators. Water quality goes up downstream of a beaver(-ish) dam.
With freshwater increasingly being a problem, being able to slow down tributaries and allow the water to percolate and help rebuild aquifers is something that should be happening everywhere possible.
Lost cost, high reward. Not sexy enough to get the attention it deserves.
Loads of projects being done for that (at least in Europe) after droughts have become more and more common. Netherlands especially, worldwide experts in water management because for hundreds of years they tried to actually get rid of the water; the whole country is full of infrastructure for managing the water table.
This year was bad in terms of drought, yet it seems it wasn't as bad as the one we had a few years ago (2018 or 19? I don't remember exactly) because they allowed the water table to go higher a bit, used the ijsselmeer as a giant fresh water reservoir, closed / limited locks, etc. After this year and the rapidly accellerating / worsening effects of climate change, like the drying out (ok, low water levels) of the Rhine, I'm sure they're working hard to do more. They can for example choose to allow the flood plains to flood even when there's no flooding, to (locally) add to the ground water. Granted, it takes (iirc) decades or hundreds of years for that to end up in the aquifers but better now than never.
Other projects I've heard of involve allowing rivers and streams to meander again, undoing the work of straightening them to get rid of water faster and / or optimize shipping traffic.
You will be amazed at how much local governments don't care about this. They actively try to remove water was fast as possible from an area.
Sadly, not amazed. Flooding is a natural concern (but not natural enough to not build in a freaking flood plain), and most communities are not forward-looking enough to look upstream for solutions likely because it may be out of their township and "not my worry".
Los Angeles seems to be waking up to the issue: https://www.ladwp.com/who-we-are/water-system/sources-supply...
Whatever they eat, did that go down to an all time low. Im m curious about the chain reaction vs an isolated result.
Cattail tubers and bark from smallish hardwood trees that they embed underwater for winter food. Hidden affect of that is the cattail is not particularly good habitat or food source for waterfowl so then you have one more item pushing down on waterfowl populations.
That was my thought too. Nothing in an ecosystem exists in isolation. Change a single variable, especially a dramatic change like going from 8% to 60% on a single variable, and there will be ripple effects throughout the local ecosystem. The Law of Unintended Consequences is one of those unchangeable, eternal laws that when you forget them, the Gods of the Copybook Headings limp up to explain it once more*.
* https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_copybook.htm for anyone who doesn't recognize the reference in that last sentence. Most people will, I hope, but there's always the lucky 10,000. (https://xkcd.com/1053/)
I am sick of underachieving beavers. Go us! Seriously, that would require statutory change here in Washington state. I live in a rural area with salmon waterways all over. Farmers just quietly clear the way for them, because it's illegal to make any changes to the waterway even if it's trash thrown out of cars.
> I am sick of underachieving beavers. Go us!
This really made laugh for some reason, just imagining a beaver typing away at HN specifically.
And probably playing Timberborn on a second monitor at the same time.
How long do you think these artificial dams will last?
I really want this to mean dams constructed by robot beavers. Move over, A.I.! Time for A.B.
I just... don't like comments like these; it's so much cheaper, easier and better to either have humans build one (out of biodegradeable materials like in the article) or reintroduce beavers. But instead of allocating some money for that, people allocate millions/billions to build robots that can't do the job as well.
we clearly need to design better salmon.
Been there. Done that. Even attended the “spawn till you die” festival in ‘98 but all I got was a stupid t-shirt.