Re: Beavers POSITIVE EFFECTS on Water Quality, the BAY...
Add to this the real possibility that national policy may soon call for greater
use of corn-based ethanol in gasoline. It saves little or no energy and would
likely result in clearing more acres around the Bay for more corn.
There are promising programs to counteract polluted runoff, such as planting
thousands of miles of vegetated buffers along rivers and streams. But those
efforts are far behind schedule, and they don’t specifically call for the
vegetation to be forest, the best buffer.
And while such greening of the Bay’s lands is good, we know that far better
would be green and wet; and that’s where we need to reconsider and actively
restore the beaver.
No creature on Earth, save for modern humans, has more capacity to transform a
landscape; and in designing a landscape that produces excellent water quality,
the beaver has no equal.
Beavers ruled the hydrology of North America for a million years or more, until
just the last few centuries, when fur trapping reduced populations from an
estimated 100 million or more to less than half a million. In the Chesapeake,
from millions to thousands is a fair estimate.
Through damming and ponding, beavers stanched the shedding of water from the
watershed, cleansed it, filtered it, held back floods, let rain soak in to keep
water tables high and streams running even in drought. They created luxurious
habitats for a stunning variety of amphibians, fish, waterfowl and mammals.
In recent decades, beavers have come back to the point where a solid body of
science in Canada and the United States confirms they were this continent’s
most important keystone species — a species whose functioning underpins a whole
ecosystem.
My class this year listened to a young man in the stream-restoration business
say that in many cases, the work that his company does might be done as well or
better by just releasing beavers.
But it is illegal to do that, he said.
That’s a mindset that needs to change. It will take education to overcome
prevailing views of beavers as tree-chewing, property-flooding nuisances. They
can be, but there are technologies to help us coexist — piping that keeps
beaver ponds deep enough for the animals without flooding, for example.
You will hear more about beavers in my future columns — and in the news, I
hope. A good place to start: Should the Chesapeake restoration effort include a
beaver goal?
https://www.bayjournal.com/
Katharina Bergdoll
watershed address: Newton's Pond>Beales Mill Run>Nomini Creek>Potomac
River>Chesapeake Bay>Atlantic Ocean
