Dam Natural - Beavers may create a wetter West without billions for reservoirs
Kevin Taylor, The Inlander, April 9, 2009

It was one of those ideas that occur after a few drinks.  Brian Walker and Mike Petersen were trying to wrap their heads around the idea of the state wanting to build enormous new dams for water storage along the Columbia River.

There had to be something better than miles of concrete, flooded valleys and billions of dollars. But what?

"How do you stop a massive dam project? I'm not sure if I was drinking or if Mike was when we asked,  ‘Hey, why not beavers? They build dams,'" Walker recalls.

High fives and a toast - clink! - for the beaver!

This is usually the point in the story where someone says "and then they passed out, and had no memory of their brilliant insights in the morning."

But no hangover was going to dam this free-flowing brainstorm. Petersen and Walker, both of the Spokane-based conservation group, The Lands Council, kept gnawing at the idea, in fact, and last week attracted 70 lonely Castor canadensis experts from around the West to a two-day conference covering all aspects of beavers. Especially the notion of creating a wetter landscape even in an era of predicted temperature and population increases that will place unprecedented demand on water supplies.

Climate change and population growth are why the state adopted the Columbia River Initiative two years ago to build all those giant dams in the first place.

The initiative clearly prefers man-made impoundments to make up to two-thirds of the Columbia waters available for irrigation and other human uses. But, there are also places in the law that look to conservation and natural water storage.

"Natural storage like beaver dams," says Petersen, executive director of The Lands Council. "We know historically there were probably thousands, or tens of thousands, of beaver dams around here."

Beaver dams are time shifters, he says. Instead of water gooshing away in spring runoff, the dams slowly release water for far longer.

"That was the metric - how it changed the timing," Petersen says.

The Lands Council pitched the Department of Ecology on the idea of thousands upon thousands of beaver dams in semi-arid Eastern Washington all slowly releasing precious water throughout the Columbia drainage.

Ecology's newly created Office of the Columbia River - with a $200 million, 10-year budget - gave $30,000 to study the idea for a year.

Walker, the council's watershed program director, was soon up to his eyeballs in beaver research. Many of the documents are available at Landscouncil.org.

The documents led to connections with scientists and, faster than you can chew down a cottonwood tree, the invitations went out for last week's conference at Liberty Lake's Zephyr Lodge. The tall creaky lodge, according to local lore, had once been a brothel, which lent startling historical overlay to the sign pinned on a tree at the end of the driveway announcing the Working Beaver Conference.

Perhaps as surprising as the grant, Ecology's Rick Roeder, a supervisor at the Office of the Columbia River, participated in a panel on water storage.

"Natural storage reservoirs on wetlands could have some potential," he says. "How will this help with climate change? You might have a hydrograph where you have a lot of runoff at a certain time of year. Does this flatten that out? Does it move it across time? Is there a new time when water is available?"

When the Legislature considered natural storage and aquifer recharge, Roeder says, "I don't think they thought about beavers. That generated a huge amount of discussion" over the merits of a grant.

Beavers, trapped nearly to extinction by fur traders, are still frequently classified as a nuisance animal even as others tout their benefits to the landscape.

Oregon Fish and Wildlife, for instance, cites many benefits to beaver even as the Oregon Department of Agriculture recently reclassified it as a predator.

That drew laughs at the conference. "What do they stalk?" one biologist asks.

"Do they take out peg-legged people?" wonders Michael Pollock, a scientist with NOAA Fisheries in Seattle.

Laughs aside, the classification means Oregon landowners can kill beavers without getting a permit or notifying anyone about how many are killed. Beavers have been declining, especially on private timberland, in western Oregon's Coast Range, Pollock says, although no one knows exactly why.

Beavers are often removed despite showing clear benefit to endangered runs of coho salmon. Researchers were surprised to find beaver ponds stuffed with overwintering juvenile coho, Pollock says.

Fish size - both individually and as a population - often increases in beaver streams, researchers at the conference say. Beaver dams also catch sediments resulting in a) cleaner water downstream, and b) healthier and more diverse plant life around the pond.

This is good if you are Bijay Adams, lake manager for the Liberty Lake Sewer and Water District. Beavers at Liberty Lake are upstream, where their dams are restoring historic marshland, slowing down storm surges and straining out sediment. When beaver dams flooded out some trails, the county rebuilt them at a higher elevation, easing conflict that had some residents poaching beaver or hacking out the dams.

But beavers can be bad if you are Sheila Pearman of the Sacheen Lake Sewer and Water District. Beavers have created marshes that one Ecology wetlands manager calls "beaver heaven" down at the outlet of the lake.

The slower outflow is raising the lake level at Sacheen uncomfortably close to houses and septic systems, and high-water wave action is eroding the shore.

Residents used to dynamite the beaver dams back in the day, Pearman says, and some frustrated homeowners would still like to, even as all parties grope for a less-lethal management tool.

Trey Schille, a Forest Service researcher in Denver, says the lack of beavers in the watersheds serving that city have led to a series of problems. Wildfires have so scorched the earth that it actually repels water, which then rushes downhill carrying so much sediment into drinking water reservoirs that the city has constructed strainers from rock and frequently dredges out the muck.

Beavers, he's thinking, could be just the ticket to repair the watershed.

At a beaver conference, naturally, everybody hiked down to see the beaver dams around Liberty Lake.

"Years ago they said there was a lot of red willow and birch trees here, and cottonwoods. All this … this is beaver country," says Coeur d'Alene Tribal elder Felix Aripa, throwing his arms wide.

As if on cue, a beaver was seen, browsing, about 30 yards away in its ring of shining water.