Connecting people and sharing resources to advance the beaver's keystone role

in watershed health

Winter got off to a slow start in Montana, and in years with low snowpack, the water-storing, fire-buffering, habitat-diversifying gifts of the beaver become more vital than ever. Whatever 2024 brings, this snowy-pawed beaver is ready to roll with the punches. To see this remote camera photo and more images like it, check out the stunning work of Ryan Pennisi!

Taos Yellow Owl (lower right) assesses the weave of willows on a beaver mimicry dam. Photo Credit: Alicia Yellow Owl

Note: This issue's feature story comes from Taos Yellow Owl, an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe who is in 10th grade. Taos attended the 2022 Native Science Field Center Camp that Alicia Yellow Owl coordinated for Blackfeet Community College, where students repaired beaver mimicry dams. After that transformative experience, he wrote these wise words for an essay contest. Thank you, Taos!

What We Can Do to Help Our Traditional Foods

Does climate change affect traditional foods? Short answer is yes. During this past summer there were no sarvis berries. My aunties had to go to a sarvis berry farm because of the drought caused by climate change and global warming. The drought causes a lack of water in the ground making it hard for plants to grow. Although the berries from the farm were good, they take away from the traditional method of harvesting. My people have picked berries for thousands of years. Gathering the berries naturally is better for mind, body, and spirit. Plus it's just better to get the berries out in the natural world so you can give an offering of thanks. How we can solve this problem is by installing beaver mimicry dams. This is a way to spread water into the ground more efficiently and it's cheap to do.

How to do this is simple. I attended a camp this summer where we installed nine beaver mimicry dams in a stream. You need about five or six posts depending on how wide the stream is. We used old tipi poles, three to five feet long, depending on how deep the stream is. You need to pound those into the ground in a zigzag pattern. After that you have to gather up rocks and place them on the side of the posts against the flow of the stream forming a rock wall. The rock wall can't be too big or too small. Then you need willows or any other Indigenous trees you can find. After you harvest some willows you place them in a weaving pattern between the posts. Start from the sides until you meet in the middle with the woven willows. Don't use so many that it completely plugs up the dam and don't use too few that it lets all the water go through the dam. The water needs to flow over the top of the dam. Then dig up some sedge, about two buckets worth, maybe more depending on the size of the dam. You cover the holes in willows with the wet sedge for reinforcement. 

The dam's job is not to completely stop the water in the stream, but rather to slow it down. This ensures that the water is spread all throughout the ground and is stored better. This helps the sarvis berries and any other plants in the area grow. By keeping the water stored for longer periods of time.  

All the materials used for Beaver Mimicry Dams came from nature and would be free. Labor is free if you are building dams for yourself. Also all the tools used do not acquire gas, just your hands and muscles. The only cost is gas to help you get materials and transport them to beaver mimicry dams site.        

The ultimate goal is to install beaver mimicry dams all across my community. This would help my community by bringing back life to the sarvis berries, all other traditional foods, and all the surrounding plants. Having my community people build dams will help their state of mind and mental health. By getting back to nature and helping to keep our traditional plants growing.  

This past year it was very stressful for my aunties and other community members because we didn't have enough of our essential traditional food, the sarvis berry, that my people have used for eons in ceremonial practice. Strategically placing the dams across my community will help us further mitigate traditional food insecurity.

With this in mind, beaver mimicry is the best way to help bring back traditional foods naturally. This is also a good way to help combat climate change and global warming. And return to our traditional ways of learning from the first engineer, the beaver. Like we have done for millennia.

Montana Beaver Working Group: Spring Meeting

National Wildlife Federation

March 27-28, 2024

Save the dates! The Montana Beaver Working Group will convene for its spring meeting over March 27-28, 2024. This will be a time for beaver-related restoration practitioners from across the state to gather in person and coordinate progress towards our 2023 Montana Beaver Action Plan (see below). The agenda and location are currently evolving, but stay tuned in the next issue of this newsletter for full details, and contact NWF's Shelby Weigand (weigands@nwf.org) if you have questions or ideas. Photo Credit: NWF

Image Credit: USU Riverscapes Consortium

2024 LTPBR Workshop Series & LTPBR Trainings for Federal Agencies

Utah State University Riverscapes Consortium

Spring 2024, Zoom and Face-to-Face

The USU Riverscapes Consortium's popular LTPBR workshop series provides restoration practitioners with guidelines for implementing a subset of low-tech tools - namely beaver dam analogues (BDAs) and post-assisted log structures (PALS) - to initiate process-based restoration in structurally-starved riverscapes. See details here.

The USU Restoration Consortium has also partnered with the Natural Resources Conservation Service's West National Technology Support Center and the Bureau of Land Management’s Aquatic Resources Program to develop a standardized LTPBR training series for federal agency professionals. See details here.

Low Tech Solutions to Wetland Restoration

World Wildlife Fund

January 16, 2024

Zoom



Ranchers continually look for ways to improve their stewardship of the land. In this free webinar, fellow ranchers and experts will discuss ranching with the wildlife that occupy the Northern Great Plains ecosystems.

Leah Thayer works with the World Wildlife Fund and Montana Conservation Corps as a Big Sky Watershed Corps member. In this role, Leah spearheads low-tech processed-based mesic restoration projects on agricultural lands in rural Montana to restore stream health and improve landscape drought resilience. To learn more from Leah about the work she has been doing, sign up here. Photo Credit: WWF

Montana Watershed Coordination Council: Annual Meeting

Montana Watershed Coordination Council

March 6, 2023

Each year, MWCC hosts an annual meeting to provide updates on our programs and resources to partners, as well as to provide opportunities for the collaborative conservation community to connect and learn. More information about our 2024 virtual Annual Meeting will be forthcoming here. Photo Credit: MWCC

Montana Beaver Working Group News:

Winter Meeting Recording & 2023 Beaver Action Plan

National Wildlife Federation

December 2023

The Montana Beaver Working Group convened in December 2023 for its annual winter meeting. This virtual event featured a series of short presentations from beaver partners working around the state, with topics including: FWP's Beaver Restoration White Paper, Nationwide Permit 27 updates, Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes' Wetland Strategic Plan, the Montana Beaver Conflict Resolution Project, beaver-buffalo research on tribal lands from Indigenous Led, beaver dam density research from University of Montana, BRAT applications in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, and the 2023 Montana Beaver Action Plan. If you missed the event or would like a refresher on all the great insights shared, you can watch the recording here. For more on the good work ahead of us, check out the 2023 Montana Beaver Action Plan! Photo Credit: NWF

Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes:

Climate Change and Wetland Story Maps

Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes

November 2023

AThe recent December 2023 meeting of the Montana Beaver Working Group, Blair Libby - the Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes' Wetland Conservation Plan Coordinator - gave an outstanding overview of CSKT efforts in wetland protection. Much of this work is also highlighted in two excellent story maps that CSKT has produced: 1) the CSKT Climate Change Strategic Plan and 2) Wetlands: Lifeblood of the Flathead Reservation. Image Credit: CSKT

Andrew Lahr's research took him to some beautiful, beavery sites in the Lolo National Forest, which helped him explore complex questions facing wildlife and fisheries biologists in our region. Photo Credit: Andrew Lahr

When cattle are kept out of streams and beavers return, woody plants can recover, and the creeks can widen, pool, and deepen. When beavers returned to the once-degraded channels of Nevada's Susie and Maggie Creeks, "the moisture created green oases half a mile wide." Photo Credit: Ben Goldfarb

The Solution to Water Woes Could Lie with Beavers

Rebecca Straley, Modern Farmer

December 2023

"Human-caused climate change set another heat record in 2023," writes Rebecca Straley in Modern Farmer, "with the planet enduring what is likely the hottest year in 125,000 years." These increasing extremes cannot be escaped. Cattle, elk, wheat, wolves, toads, chickens, bitterroots, humans, sheep...not one species is spared from the effects of this warming world. This new story corrals insights on how beavers can mitigate drought, wildfire, and water quality losses on the lands and waters that feed and hydrate people.

Two generations of beavers munching on aspen. Image Credit: Erin Poor / USGS

Beavers Have Engineered Ecosystems in the Tetons for Millennia

Grace Van Deelen, Eos

December 2023



It's time for some very old news: the North American beaver has been shaping the Grand Tetons for at least 7,250 years! Assuming the average beaver lives about 10 years, that means that 725 generations of castorids have been cultivating the conditions for life to thrive. Long before their near-extinction in the fur trade a few short centuries ago, these beavers survived vast changes in climate, vegetation, and so much more. Drawing on DNA buried in Grand Teton lakes, this research yields many new insights about the beaver's capacity to adapt and stabilize ecosystems of the past, present, and future. Read more about this impressive ancient legacy here.

Beaver dams occur in a variety of shapes and sizes in many different landscape settings, which makes finding them and mapping them out a time consuming task. As seen in Fairfax, Emily, et al. 2023. EEAGER: A Neural Network for Finding Beaver Complexes in Satellite and Aerial Imagery. GJR Biogeosciences. https://doi.org/10.1029/2022JG007196

Spying on Beavers from Space Could Help Save California

Ben Goldfarb, Wired

December 2023



Earlier this year, Emily Fairfax and colleagues unveiled EEAGER - the Earth Engine Automated Geospatial Elements Recognition algorithm - which spots beaver dams in satellite imagery. Their May 2023 GJR Biogeosciences paper described what this tool can do and now, in a December 2023 story from Wired, Ben Goldfarb helps unpack its origins and intentions. It took much trial and error for EEAGER to "learn" the true diagnostics of beaverworks, but after training with more than 69,000 images in western states, it appears ready for application. California will likely be the state of EEAGER's first major deployment, but other states are watching. In 2024, Montana Fish, Wildlife, & Parks will be conducting its own beaver dam census work with remote-sensing tools, and practioners are...umm...eager to see if/how these high-tech tools complement urgent needs to assess and advance on-the-ground beaver restoration.

Montana Drought Management Plan

Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation

December 2023



After 28 years, Montana has a new Drought Management Plan. A lot has changed since 1995, especially the rapidly warming, drying climate. But we have also deepened our knowledge on the need for beavers, who get a nod on page 58, which calls on Montanans to "use and incentivize nature-based solutions to maximize water capture and retention." Congrats and thanks to everyone who contributed to this stakeholder-driven effort, which can be read in full here.

Image Credit: DNRC

Postdoctoral Fellowship in Landscape Ecology

University of Saskatchewan

Application Due: January 12, 2024



This postdoctoral position is part of a project forming an evidence base for understanding the potential for, and the potential costs/challenges of, using beavers to mitigate the impacts of climate change on stream and wetland functioning. The project is led by Drs. Cherie Westbrook and Glynnis Hood and has a geographic scope that spans the province of Alberta but focuses on beaver-dominated systems in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. Check out the advertisement below and full details here.

Image Credit: University of Saskatchewan

Stream Restoration Project Manager AND Stream Flow Project Manager

Clark Fork Coalition

Missoula, MT

Applications Due: January 12, 2024



Clark Fork Coaltion is hiring two exciting and complemetary jobs to protect and restore a critical western Montana watershed. Whether you apply to be a Stream Restoration Project Manager OR a Stream Flow Project Manager, you will join an action-oriented, beaver-savvy team who is doing a ton of good in our state. you can learn more about the roles here. Image Credit: CFC

Photo Credit: Joost Verboven

Please send photos, stories, upcoming events, opportunities, and other resources to:

Shelby Weigand - Senior Coordinator, Riparian Connectivity National Wildlife Federation

WeigandS@nwf.org

MT Beaver Working Group newsletters are posted online here.