 appreciate what a wonderful and very beavery part of the the world New England is. I'm sure there are lots of people out there with lots of lots of beaver experience and I'm looking forward to hearing about that during the the Q&A. So tonight I'll be talking a lot about beavers as tools of ecological restoration that transform landscapes in ways that are really beneficial for the environment. But I thought I'd just begin by establishing some basic beaver facts. What are beavers exactly and why do we care about them? So beavers of course as many of you know are rodents right? They're North America's largest rodent. 40 to 50 pounds is a typical adult beaver so they're pretty pretty hefty animals. And they're semi aquatic rodents which means they spend pretty much all of their lives in and around water. And they've got all of these wonderful features for this unique semi aquatic niche they fill. They've got incredibly dense fur so one of the densest thickest pelts in the animal kingdom. They've got as many individual hairs on a postage stamp sized patch of skin as we have on our entire heads. And of course you know those those dense pelts were ultimately their downfall and we'll talk about that in a second. They've got webbed duck like hind feet right? They're very powerful agile swimmers. They can stay underwater for up to 15 minutes so they're champion breath holders. They've got a second set of transparent eyelids that act like goggles as well as a second set of lips kind of this fur lined valve that can close behind their front teeth which allows them to chew and drag branches underwater without drowning. I think that's a really cool adaptation. And then what's the beaver's most recognizable iconic feature? What makes a beaver identifiably a beaver? The tail of course right? The tail provides all kinds of different functions. It's an alarm system where I'm sure that many of you have heard the smack of a beaver's tail hitting the water which they do to warn other beavers about the presence of predators. It's a rudder while they swim. It's a kickstand out on land. It's a fat storage device so beavers actually put on fat for the winter in their tails. So the tail is doing all kinds of cool things. And then the other classic beaver feature of course is their teeth. Beavers have these wonderful sort of chisel like incisors that basically file each other down into points and the teeth as you can see are orange. And the reason for that is that beaver's teeth are actually chemically and structurally fortified with iron that beavers derive from their food which gives them very durable powerful teeth which is important of course when you spend your whole life cutting down trees. Beavers fell trees for two reasons. The first is that they eat the cambium which is the inner bark of trees. Beavers are what scientists call choosy generalists. They've got a few species of tree that they prefer, generally trees in the popular family, but they'll take just about any deciduous tree. They do tend to avoid conifers. And they eat lots of sort of green, herbaceous vegetation as well, you know, cattails and water lilies and wildflowers and you name it, beavers, beavers eat it. They are totally herbivorous that they don't eat fish at all which you guys probably know as manors. So of course in addition to cutting down trees to eat that cambium, that inner bark, they're also using the wood as construction material. Beavers build two basic types of structures which many of you have probably seen. The first is the beaver lodge that's kind of the basic beaver housing unit. You can sort of see in this picture there are underwater tunnels that lead up into the lodge. Inside the lodge you've got kind of an elevated nesting platform or chamber and inside the lodge you've got the colony or the family and that's typically two to as many as eight beavers. So you've got the male and female, the monogamous mating pair, the baby beavers, the kits, the one-year-olds and the two-year-olds. You've got three year classes of offspring all cohabitating together sometimes and then during their second year you know those teenagers will disperse out looking for their own territories you know like yeah teenagers heading off to college or something like that. Somebody did ask in the chat about beavers that live in big bodies of water and you know there they'll just tunnel into the river banks and live very happily in bank boroughs. So not all beavers live in these big conspicuous you know island lodges they do live in the banks very very happily sometimes. Submission to the lodge you know the other basic beaver construction is the dam right? So why do beavers build dams? What's the point of this really unique strange specialized behavior? Well a beaver out on land is as one biologist put it to me a big slow smelly package of meat right and beavers get eaten by you know any large carnivore black bears and coyotes in Maine you know out here in eastern Washington we've also got cougars and wolves you know which would love to eat a beaver. So you know by by building that dam and creating this nice deep pool of water right beavers are basically expanding their own shelter and increasing the size of their habitat right so instead of having to walk over land to that good-looking aspen tree and maybe get eaten by a bear on the way they can swim to it instead and and be relatively safe so beavers just you know they're just expanding their own habitat and here's a picture of a beaver that was eaten by a wolf in Minnesota I believe I found this and you know and when a wolf eats a beaver it actually eats the pelt bones and all and just leaves the mandible and the lower incisors so you know just the takeaway there is you don't you don't want to be a beaver on land right that's what that's what happens to beavers when they spend too much time on land you want to stay in the water. So a typical beaver colony is building you know one primary dam and then a number of smaller secondary dams you know maybe in some cases you know 10 to 15 dams and all and these dams come in all kinds all kinds of different shapes and sizes you know here's a nice you know three foot long one foot tall secondary dam that's you know doing a little bit of work on the landscape but they do get quite a bit bigger here's a pretty impressive structure also in Minnesota that's you know probably 15 feet tall and maybe 800 feet long is obviously the work of many successive generations of beavers all adding their their stick to the pile so this is you know not a typical beaver dam but it is the kind of thing that they can do when left to their own devices and some of these beaver dams are impounding or capturing enormous volumes of water right here's a here's a pond and wetland complex that's basically you know maybe 300 acres or so and is formed by a single beaver dam you know and I'm always impressed I always feel like you know if you took an engineer from the army corps to a stream and said okay build a dam in the spot that's going to minimize labor and maximize the total volume of water impounded you know that engineer would choose the exact same spot that the beavers did I'm always impressed by their their hydrological savvy so in addition to building dams you know the other important thing that beavers do that I don't think they get enough credit for is that they also dig these kind of prolific canal networks you know they're really wonderful excavators and again the point of the canals similar to the the dam you know is they're just trying to expand that water right so instead of having to walk over land you know now they can swim up a canal cut down a tree float it back down the canal all without without leaving the water and these canal networks you know can extend hundreds of feet up into the forest and you know I often see little baby fish and amphibians hanging out in these canals so I think these are a really important landscape feature that beavers create as well as the the dams so you put it all together and you know here's kind of a really classic beaver complex this is in Colorado actually this is at about 12 000 feet up on the continental divide so they really get you know way the heck up there and you can see you know here all of the you know the linear features right the beaver dams and you know the stream just kind of comes meandering through this valley you know and then it hits these beaver dams and you know just kind of sits in that valley you know so here these dams are capturing hundreds of thousands if not millions of gallons of water and really saturating or irrigating this this little valley here at a pretty impressive scale I think so you know they're just taking this straight stream and making it this beautiful multifaceted complex series of ponds and wetlands and meanders and and braids so this is I think a really good representation of what one of these beaver complexes looks like so beavers you know by building dams and digging canals and creating ponds you know they're trying to maximize their own habitat but in the process they're creating habitat lots of other creatures as well right you know beavers are what scientists call a keystone species an animal that is disproportionately supporting a lot of weight in the ecosystem a few classic beaver beneficiaries here's a great blue heron rookery at a beaver complex in wisconsin so you know you guys are birders of course so you understand that you know if you want to see birds where you go you go to a wetland right so you know waterfowl wading birds really you know every I mean lots of species of passerines songbirds are also really happy around beaver complexes you know perched in the coppicing willows or eating the aquatic insects coming off that that pond so you know beavers are just wonderful creators of bird habitat here's you know your state mammal I think the moose here's a moose hanging out in a beaver pond you know all kinds of aquatic mammals you know muskrat otters mink all love love beaver complexes and then fish you know or the other kind of with another classic beaver beneficiary this is a juvenile rainbow trout which are native out here in Washington and you know if you're a baby fish right you don't want to live in the main stem free flowing fast-moving river you know you'll just get blown downstream right you just you want to live in the slow side channels the meanders the eddies you know you want that complex slow water refuge habitat that beavers create so well and here you know of course you guys well you know rainbow trout are native in Maine but of course your your native cell monitor is the brook trout and here's a really spectacular brook trout that I pulled out of a beaver pond so you know any every cell monitor is benefiting from the the the habitats that beavers create of course one sort of common objection that you hear um from anglers and even sometimes fish biologists is you know wait a second we're trying to pull dams out of rivers right not put more dams in two rivers you know I know that you guys of course just uh just pull the the the dam on the on the panopska river you know so why would you want to introduce more structures uh the fish have to get passed but you know of course beaver dams and human dams are very different uh fish have no problem whatsoever jumping over beaver dams wriggling through the woody structure um you know lots of fish are migrating during periods of high flow and there's water going around the beaver dam um you know that I know that this is uh you know this is more anecdote than evidence but you know here's a nice example on a stream outside of Seattle here's the beaver dam here's the pond above it uh and here are the two freshly dug coho coho salmon nests um so clearly two fish had no problem whatsoever getting getting beyond this obstacle and in fact you know beavers and salmon are so intimately linked right they've been they've been sort of evolving together for millions of years uh that they inspired my favorite bumper sticker uh which is that beavers taught salmon to jump I think that that gets at the the evolutionary connection nicely uh one other important point um that I'd make about beavers it's you know especially applicable uh in New England you know is that beavers are a form of disturbance right uh you know you've got these very dense forest canopies um you know they're kind of a lightless forest floor you know beavers are opening up that canopy uh and really creating these you know these these these diverse areas these little patches on the landscape um of you know a pond and wetland habitat uh in this otherwise you know kind of monotonous forest scape so that that function of you know creating disturbance and opening up the canopy uh I think is is really important so you know we know that beavers um historically were much more prevalent on the landscapes than they are today right I you know I know that in Maine it probably feels like there are beavers everywhere and you know beavers are not an endangered species right there you know maybe 10 to 15 million beavers in North America we don't know exactly how many which you know sounds like a lot uh until you consider that you know they're really at a tiny fraction of their historic abundance uh you know before Europeans arrived in North America there were as many as 400 million beavers uh on the on the landscape um and those beavers would have created hundreds of millions of beaver ponds uh of course um and you know a little bit of back of the envelope math suggests that uh beavers pre-european arrival impounded something like 230 000 square miles of land which for reference uh is basically the size of Arizona and Nevada put together um so beavers you know were this remarkably prolific animal uh on the landscape and I think that you know an important point to remember too is is that native people had a really um deep and intimate relationship uh with with beavers um you know interestingly sort of the the native relationship with beavers was was very sort of regionally specific right so on the east coast um you know many tribes were were enthusiastic participants in the fur trade um because I mean first they wanted the goods from the fur trade um you know pots and and knives and whatnot um but they also understood that hey when you when you remove beavers manaria you know you create this nice lush uh meadow essentially that's really good foraging habitat for deer that you like to hunt right um so you know removing beavers was a way of engineering the landscape at the same time and you know in the american west where I live you know it's a much drier more arid landscape and and native people like the blackfeet uh understood that beavers created these really important ecological oases uh on this otherwise arid landscape and and thus they had cultural prohibitions um against killing beavers uh and refused to take part in the fur trade you know which is why guys like you know Kit Carson and Jedediah Smith and and Hugh Glass uh you know all of these famous fur trappers had to go become trappers themselves because native people wouldn't do their dirty work in in the west so you know I think that that you know I'll be talking tonight tonight a lot about sort of you know how we're coming to use beavers as these ecological restoration tools but you know that's not an understanding that's new to western science right that's something that native people have known for a very long time uh that these animals are incredibly important ecosystem engineers um so you know a lot of what I tried to do working on this is this book was was to reconstruct what a landscape with its full complement of beavers might have might have looked like uh and they're just some really incredible records you know explores diaries and trappers journals and railroad survey reports and native histories uh you know about what this continent might have looked like with its full complement of beavers you know and you read explorer you read accounts of explorers crossing what is today Indiana uh and not finding a dry place to camp for 100 miles because beavers and so thoroughly ponded everything up um you know Lewis and Clark uh described seeing beaver dams and every single tributary uh of the Missouri River uh you know as far as the eye could see up up into the mountains so this is just you know this incredible beaver paradise um that of course you know we we destroyed uh you know the fur trade really begins in the 1600s uh in new england and in Connecticut and the Hudson Valley and you know pretty quickly spreads west and south um you know just trapping beavers out of every river lake stream and pond that uh that europeans encountered um the reason of course was for beaver hats right I think we often hear the phrase beaver hat and think of like a big fluffy you know kind of Davey Crockett type of thing but in fact you know beavers were these elegant Victorian top hats that were all the rage back in europe and uh you know really along with timber and cod were the most important economic resource um that uh that europeans found in the the quote unquote new world um you know just a few indications of how significant the the the beaver trade was economically here's the city seal of the city of New York which is still the city the official city seal today and here are the two beavers in it uh I think that's a pretty interesting indication um I live out in in what it what used to be the Oregon territory you know this giant territory that encompassed basically the the whole of the northwest and out here you know we had we had what was known as the beaver coin um and the value of one beaver coin was fixed to the value of one beaver pelts the entire northwestern economy operated on the the beaver pelts standard and you know practically every significant historical event prior to the civil war had some kind of beaver connection um you know the revolutionary war for example you know one of the uh the British offenses that angered the colonists was denying them access to trapping grounds west of the Appalachian mountains and you know the Louisiana purchase was partly inspired by Jefferson's desire to secure a new source of beavers and of course you know the smallpox and other diseases that were spread by so many you know fur trappers and traders ended up you know ravaging Native American tribes so you know the story of the fur trade is really the story of early American history and all of its kind of grandiosity and tragedy so in addition to being this this hugely significant historical event you know the fur trade was also a really profoundly impactful ecological event right I mean what happens when you trap out 400 million beavers where all well all of those those uh those beaver dams break down and all of those beaver ponds drain uh and in fact you know in in in New England so when those beaver ponds drained in the 1600s so much nutrients flowed out of them and into the Atlantic Ocean that it fertilized this enormous algae bloom that then settled out so today if you took a a sediment core in Long Island Sound you would see this layer of of diatoms of phytoplankton that was fertilized uh by the by this this beaver bloom essentially I think that's a pretty incredible indication of you know what a geological event this was and one of the ironies of the fur trade you know is that it really made agriculture possible uh in New England you know right of course New England is you know an otherwise pretty inhospitable place for farming you know very uh sort of rocky infertile soils but you know all of those old beaver pond footprints were perfect agricultural areas right they're flat they're treeless they're incredibly fertile um so you know in some ways the it was the trapping of beavers that paved the way for uh for for farming of course for other species uh you know the beaver trapping was not nearly so beneficial right and one of the the unfortunate things that happens when you uh you know eliminate beaver dams is that you really change the streams in which those dams occur right and in a beaver rich stream you know all of those beaver dams are acting as speed bumps spreading out water and and connecting the stream with the floodplain but when you lose all of those beaver speed bumps you know there's nothing checking the velocity of that stream and you get this really dramatic down cutting or incision or erosion and the stream separates from the floodplain and you know that that lush wetland or wet meadow on the floodplain turns into kind of desiccated pasture land you know so I mean tens of thousands of stream miles in the U.S. uh ended up degraded as a result of of beaver trapping and of course that was you know catastrophic for all kinds of different species here's a boreal toad which is a an amphibian that lives out west here it's basically a beaver pond obligate so breeds almost exclusively in beaver ponds you know the east coast leopard frogs would have been you know really seriously impacted and then salmon you know I think were the kind of the quintessential collateral damage of the the beaver trade and you know in some watersheds out in washington where I live uh you know we we lost 97 percent of our our baby coho salmon rearing habitat when we lost beaver ponds so you know I think they were not accustomed to thinking about uh the fur trade in the same terms as the deforestation of new england or the busting of the midwestern prairie as being this really seminal ecological catastrophe but there's no question that it was so you know fortunately by 1900 or so we start to wise up to recognize that you know hey beavers are are are more valuable dead than alive uh and you know lots of states around the country have um had beaver reintroduction programs uh you know mostly using stock from canadian beavers uh you know main I think where where beavers were essentially wiped out um you know had a lot of natural immigration down from Canada as the you know the industrial fur trade uh kind of kind of ended um so all of these states you know are engaged in in kind of rebeavering the landscape in the early 1900s um and restoring these animals uh of course the most famous beaver reintroduction project um occurred in Idaho uh in 1948 um there they wanted to reintroduce beavers to what is today the uh the frank church wilderness area um first they tried moving the beavers on horseback uh the horses didn't take very kindly to having a big rodent strap to them so they abandoned that idea but you know it was 1948 it was just post world war two uh they had all of these airplanes and surplus parachutes on hand and one of these guys had the bright idea of of air dropping beavers uh into the back country so that year they they dropped 76 beavers uh via parachute uh 75 of the beavers survived one beavers unfortunately escaped from the crate in midair and fell to his death very sad um but the next year when they flew back over this landscape they saw uh new ponds in every single place where they dropped beavers so this was actually an incredibly effective and successful restoration project uh nobody's doing uh beaver airlifting anymore as far as I know but you know that was certainly uh impactful at the time so you know throughout the 1900s beavers are starting to recover they're moving back into their former habitats but they're discovering that hey you know in their absence we have colonized those exact same habitats right it turns out that you know beavers and humans like to live in the exact same places you know we both like these low uh sort of low gradient stream corridors and and nice broad fertile flood plains right that's where we like to uh build our our infrastructure our roads and our rail lines and our power lines and our towns and our farms and that's where beavers like to hang out and you know I'd argue that you know that we're the the nuisance species more than they are uh but you know there's no question that as beavers start to recover uh you know conflicts become increasingly frequent here's a a set of railroad tracks in in massachusetts that I visited uh kind of a Boston suburb and these tracks that these were these this is a set of trail of train tracks that leads to a a rock quarry and these tracks have just been refurbished tossed it was a this big million dollar uh sort of track laying project and you know within three months of the completion of this this this set of tracks beavers had them underwater so that's the sort of thing they're capable of doing here's another nice illustration I think of beaver conflict this is a little cabin that I came across in New Mexico and here you can sort of see um so the beavers begin their their dam in the left hand corner of the screen they dam to the base of the cabin then they incorporate the cabin in their dam and they keep going on the right hand side uh so you know I wouldn't want to be that landowner but you have to admire the uh the ingenuity of the beavers in in that that instance probably the most common cause of beaver conflict in in north america is damming in road culverts right if you're a beaver you know the road bed is this wonderful dam uh and then the culvert is the leak in the dam right the pipe through which the water is flowing and you know beavers hate leaks right they plug up leaks that's what that's what they do uh so you know the water level rises the road washes out that's a very common uh cause of beaver conflict and then they occasionally get into even more creative trouble here's a beaver that broke into a dollar store in maryland and was browsing the plastic christmas tree isle uh when it was apprehended by the authority so they get into all kinds of interesting interesting trouble and you know the way that these sorts of beaver conflicts are almost always handled is by trapping out the offending beaver right which makes a lot of sense you know that beavers causing a problem get the beaver out of there uh so every year you know that the federal government the agriculture department uh kills about 20 000 beavers and you know private trappers take you know certainly tens and probably hundreds of thousands of beavers more uh and you know the problem with that kind of reflexive uh lethal approach to management I think is is too full I mean first of course um when you eliminate the beaver you're also eliminating potentially that great pond wetland habitat that you know the beaver would otherwise be creating uh but also you know all you're doing is opening a vacancy for the next family of beavers right as long as that you know as long as that uh that culvert is there uh attracting them you know they're always going to be back so all of these communities you know are engaged in these really expensive cycles of trapping and recolonization and trapping and and recolonization so you start to wonder well you know maybe there's a better way of of doing business uh and and dealing with these beaver conflicts um so you know somebody asked in the chat about uh you know about tree damage and you know every year you know many many thousands of beavers are killed for cutting down trees and you know to me I just don't think that a beaver should ever be killed for cutting down a tree that's just you know too easy a problem to solve uh with a bit of a bit of wire fencing and you know check out the check out the the beaver institute for uh for kind of design specs uh about you know the kind of the best gauge of wire to use and and how to install it um so I think this is kind of a cool case study incidentally this is a uh this is a land trust that had these beautiful old cottonwood trees they wanted to protect so they fenced off the cottonwoods and the beavers that's that's fine uh and then they left unfenced the non-native Siberian elm trees uh which the beavers took down so that's that's actually invasive vegetation management using beavers I think that's I think that's pretty cool uh so when the when the problem is flooding you know that's that's you know somewhat more difficult to solve but you know there too we've got options this is a contraction known as the beaver deceiver um invented by Skip Lyle uh who uh runs beaver deceivers international down in Vermont um Skip actually invented the beaver deceiver while working for the Penobscot nation in in Maine and uh you know and there's a whole there's a whole bunch of these these sorts of devices um you know beaver deceiver is sort of one model of this broader category of of things called flow devices and they'll you know basically use the same principle the idea is that you know you pass the um the pipe you know through the beaver dam or into the road culvert uh you know you've got these these fences or cages to basically keep the beavers from plugging up the pipe um and you're just trying to move water from the upstream side of the dam to the downstream side right you're you're just you know lowering the level of that pond ideally to a spot that both the the beavers and the humans can tolerate um so here's kind of a very you know I mean Skip would probably say this is this is under underbuilt uh and not beaver proof enough but here you know here's a little device that we put in uh out here in Washington last year um you know you can see that all of this water is you know flowing out of this pond um and you know when this picture was taken this this pipe had probably been in for an hour or so and you can see on the tree trunks here you know we've we've already dropped the the water level uh by you know foot or so uh and you know a year later beavers are still at they're still at this site um and you know they'll be the adjacent landowner um you know her property is no longer flooded so you know everybody's happy and you know these I mean these sorts of devices might not be appropriate for every single situation although Skip I think would say that um you know there's really no spot where you couldn't use one of these um you know there there have been studies that basically find find these things work 87 to 97 percent of the time depending on the situation so you know there's no question that there are thousands and thousands of sites all around the country and you know certainly many in Maine um a very beaver replaced where we're currently lethally removing beavers where we could be you know using these more cost effective uh more permanent uh and you know certainly more ecologically sensible uh methods and instead uh another option for dealing with beaver conflict you know not so prevalent in Maine just because um you know you guys have a pretty robust beaver population but you know out here in in the west you know we're we're certainly very far from beaver carrying capacity so we do a lot of beaver relocation um you know basically live trapping nuisance beavers on private property and moving them to public land um so here's sandy and chopper a nice pair of beavers heading off to their their new home high up in a national forest um you know you're always trying to move the beaver family together right they're very family oriented animals so you know you know you want to catch you want to catch and relocate the whole the whole colony as a unit um in some cases you know one of the the drawbacks of beaver relocation uh is that um you know you're you're moving the beavers into an area that's new to them they don't have a pond in a lodge yet so they're at risk of predation um so in some cases you know we like to build them these kind of these starter lodges essentially that they can move into uh and and be relatively safe until they can build a better lodge of their own and here's the beaver enjoying his his new uh his new starter lodge and again i'm not you know different different states have different beaver relocation regulations i don't i don't actually know what main's uh regulations are um but you know worth worth looking into uh you know if you if you have a beaver conflict on your land that you know for whatever reason maybe can't be solved with the flow device uh you know maybe there's an option to live trap and relocate that animal uh non-lethally but you know obviously check with check with dnr since i don't you know i don't i don't know different states regulations around that another thing that we do a lot out out here in the west um you know less less prevalent in the east but there are some eastern uh conservation groups doing this kind of work or beaver mimicry structures right you know in in many cases because a lot of our streams are so eroded and in size you know beavers can't establish in them right one of you know a very a very eroded stream is like a fire hose just blasting out any damn they they try to build so by by pounding some vertical posts into the stream bed uh you know we can give them a little bit of structure um you know give them something to build off of so they might be inclined to move back into an area where they they might not be able to otherwise um you know as you can see it's a very kind of low tech uh low cost restoration technique doesn't require any kind of you know big back hose or you know or front loaders or anything like that um and you know the place for this technique was really pioneered uh was in Oregon um you know there they had a bunch of uh they had this kind of endangered population of steelhead of rainbow trout they wanted to save um so they built 115 beaver dam analogs these you know artificial beaver dams uh the beavers went crazy they built 120 dams of their own uh they flooded this huge amount of land um and they filled up all of these old side channels so you know you they by by pushing water out onto the flood plain you know they took this single thread stream and they filled up these old side channels and made it this very complex multi-threaded stream uh and all of that additional habitat led to a 50 survival increase in in baby uh steelhead salmon or steelhead trout um so that's that's kind of a cool case day I think that's basically humans and beavers working together to help save this this endangered fish that's that's that's the kind of restoration project that again is very common out here in the west um you know not not used quite as much on the east coast but you know there there are some places that are building these these beaver dam analogs uh on the eastern seaboard and here's another example of one that we just we just built in on a creek out here in in washington so this is a you know a new beaver dam analog just just waiting for the beaver dam for the for the beavers themselves to show up and make this site really really great habitat so up you know I've been talking a lot about sort of their benefits for for fish and other species but what about what about human benefits you know what do beavers do for us uh as you know homo sapiens that we might we might care about and you know there are a few really important ecosystem services that I want to highlight I mean first of all they're just wonderful stream restorers right and and you know out here in the west as I'm sure you know you know we've just had terrible uh drought problems uh you know over the last 20 years or so we're basically in this kind of chronic state of drought uh you know resulting from climate change um and you know it starts to look really important you know hey maybe we can you know basically take some of these really degraded streams and you know use them to store water more permanently right um so you know here's kind of a classic case study in nevada they had this very sort of degraded um you know kind of uh lifeless stream um as a result of you know first beaver trapping followed by uh sort of unmanaged cattle grazing and uh you know in this case you know nobody you know did anything too radical they just kind of stopped grazing the stream bottom super intensively and you know the cattails and willows started to regrow and then the beavers kind of magically showed up you know they're really good at um basically finding a you know an available food source on their own so you know here's what the stream looked like in 1980 and here's what it looks like today um you know thanks in large part to the the work of beavers you know you might look at this and say well wait a second you know what are what are beavers doing here i don't see any beaver dams but all of this old cattail growth uh is growth atop of beaver dams they're really deeply embedded in this system and you know here researchers found that beavers added 20 acres of open water to the streams they created all of these wonderful ponds uh they added three miles of wetted stream length so what does that mean but when the stream was super degraded like this it was actually going dry before reaching its confluence with the main river right so by slowing water down beavers basically ensured there would still be water in the stream in you know august september the hot dry season it's basically they took a seasonal stream and made it perennial i think that's pretty magical and it's you know a great indication of why they're such important drought mitigation tools um they also added two feet to the water table right so you know when you look at the beaver pond there's all of the visible surface water uh that you see but what you don't see is the weight of that pond forcing water into the ground recharging aquifers hydrating the soil raising that water table uh and that's what beavers are doing at a pretty a pretty massive scale so here you know they they basically irrigated 100 more acres of stream side vegetation and they basically just yeah they sub-arrogated this entire stream corridor and that's a pretty big deal for for guys like this this is a dude named james rogers he's a rancher uh out there in nevada you know the point that he made to me is that beavers basically increased the forage production for his cattle tenfold right through their irrigation services uh you know which means more weight on his cows and more money in his back pocket so now out there in you know eastern nevada very dry place there's this wonderful cluster of pro beaver ranchers uh who have seen what these animals can do I think I think that's pretty cool so out here you know in the west we're experiencing these really bad droughts but on the east coast you know you have the opposite problem right you're you know you have more intense rain events um because of climate change uh you know leading to to flooding um but there too you know beavers have this really important role to play right beavers you know by building dams and creating ponds and wetlands they're basically capturing all of this you know storm water all of this runoff right so you get a really big rain event and that water hits uh you know a series of beaver ponds and it you know it's it's captured in the pond or it sinks into the ground or it spreads out laterally onto the flood plain uh you know so there have been there have been studies showing that beavers capture 30 percent or they're they're capable of capturing 30 percent of any given big rainfall event which is pretty amazing so this is a picture I took in Scotland where you know the Scottish government is reintroducing Eurasian beavers as a as a flood as a flood mitigation tool on a very rainy landscape so you know I think that's pretty incredible to contemplate right you've got these two opposite problems drought and flood and beavers are are helping us tackle both of them I think that's pretty magical another really important service is pollution capture right you know you get a big you get a stream kind of running running down river you know and then it hits that beaver dam and the water slows down and it drops out all of the suspended solids you know all of the nitrates and phosphorus and sediment and you know that and that stuff basically settles out and is is enshrined or captured in the pond and here you can see this really nice thick layer of you know organic matter that's built up behind this beaver dam over over many years so you know there have been studies finding beavers capture you know 100 tons of and this is a single pair of beavers two beavers captured 100 tons of sediment over several years they sequestered 15 tons of carbon right so they're storing lots of carbon and they also captured a ton of nitrogen pollution so now you know beavers are being used as a restoration tool in the Chesapeake Bay watershed you know one of the most agriculturally impacted bodies of water in the world you know where every summer this big dead zone forms in Chesapeake Bay now which is basically you know the result of all of this agricultural effluent and beavers are helping to capture some of that and mitigate that that pollution so that that idea beavers as sort of pollution mitigation devices is really really driving a lot of beaver restoration on the east coast and then you know the final sort of key beaver service that I wanted to highlight here you know which is really especially relevant for us in the west is they're great firefighters right you know they spread water out and water doesn't burn and you can see here's just a you know beautiful illustration of this this point you know here's a fire in Idaho a few years ago and the only you know green wet blue lush place on the landscape is that that beaver influenced valley bottom so beavers you know in some places they've really stopped fire in its tracks and created these amazing fire breaks uh so that that idea you know beavers as as firefighters is really important actually you know Skip Lyle has shown me pictures of of uh of firefighters um in New England using beaver ponds as water sources you know dropping I mean helicopters you know dipping their their big buckets in beaver ponds and putting out fires that way so you know really anywhere you are in the country beavers are playing this firefighting role so you know given all of the wonderful services I've been talking about you know you might be wondering well wait a second why I mean given given how great beavers are why do we still kill so many of them you know why why don't why aren't we more amenable to beavers and you know I think I think that the reason for that is you know as a failure of historical ecological imagination right I mean you know when we killed 400 million beavers uh several hundred years ago you know we changed North American streamscapes in ways that we don't fully understand right and we kind of internalized this notion I think of a healthy stream being this you know free-flowing fast-moving cobble-bottomed thing that you know you you could just you know leap or wade right across you know this is the sort of stream you might see in the you know an orvis catalog or a field and stream magazine when in reality you know we know that many many ecosystems looked more like this right there was water everywhere there were dead and dying trees all over the place you know the bottom of the pond was kind of mucky rather than gravel or cobble probably smelled pretty funky you know so I don't think you would necessarily see this you know in a fly fishing magazine but you know I think that in in many many cases this sort of landscape was more ruled than exception thanks to beavers so if we're going to fully embrace beavers you know we have to we have to reconceptualize what our landscapes historically look like and what they should look like today and you know I just wanted to here's one sort of one illustration a kind of a recent headline from a newspaper in New York where you know after the beavers returned to Staten Island you know they were they were perceived as wreaking havoc and you know one of the local landowners said well it was you know it was never a lake before right it used to be this you know free flowing fast moving stream and now now there's water everywhere and they cut down all of these trees but you know again we have to we have to internalize the idea that that sort of beaver work is is more is normal and natural and healthy and really you know what a lot of these these systems look like historically so to sum it all up you know we've got this wonderful rodent this wonderful animal that provides us all of these incredible ecological services both for humans and for other species it does it all for free and best of all it doesn't need permits right so as the mantra of the beaver believer goes it's time to get out of the way and let the rodent do the work that's that's I'm going to get that tattooed on me someday so with that I'll say thank you guys so much we have some time for questions I did write this book about this this subject I'm always happy to send you a signed copy if you're interested or to talk about beavers moving forward so there's my email address I'll put it in the chat too and yeah we can take some questions yeah hi Ben that was great we have several questions already and I'd like to start with what is the typical lifespan of beavers and how large are their families or colonies yeah good good question so you know in the the oldest beaver I've I've heard of them in captivity is 19 years old in the wild you know I think 12 would be a pretty old beaver and then yeah the typical colony or family is you know you'll you'll see you know up to eight or so beavers and again that's the you know the mating pair who made for life the male and the female then you've got you know three year classes of brothers and sisters all kind of living together in the in the lodge and do the younger beavers ever push the older ones out of their positions of power as some animals do you know like prides of lions or or do they just happily coexist for for their lifespan yeah you know they I mean they definitely for you know for a couple of at least for a couple of years you know those those brothers and sisters those siblings are all living together and actually you know they're the the the younger beavers will follow and and mimic the the older beavers you know they're clearly learning from their their older siblings to an extent and then again you know during their sometime at some time during their second year you know those two-year-old older siblings will disperse and you know I'm not sure that it's known whether they're you know they're leaving of their own volition or or you know actively being pushed out by the younger ones that's a that's a good that's a good question and I'm not sure that the answer is really known do beavers live along larger rivers oh we have a couple questions about that yeah they absolutely do you know I think that one one important thing you remember is you know of course you hear the phrase busy as a beaver right like they're you know these these fanatical workers but you know they're not I think that they're they're they're not just busy for the sake of busyness right they're you know they're building dams to create these nice deep pockets of water where they can be safe but if those deep pockets of water already exist then they're happy right so they'll you know they'll they'll live very happily in big lakes and big rivers you know I've seen I've seen beavers at the bottom of the Colorado River and then the Grand Canyon you know and they're certainly not building dams in there so yeah they're you know they're they're you know they're they're happy and maybe even happier in these you know these big bodies of water where they're not they don't have to work very hard have a couple of questions about people disturbing beavers if you know would motorized or or foot traffic near beaver lodges disrupt what they're doing or would they be pretty unconcerned with that yeah it's a good it's a good question you know and it really depends on the on the colony I mean they you know they do they definitely acclimate to two people over time you know my my wife and I used to live in in Northampton I think I mentioned that and there's a place there called called Lake Fitzgerald this little conservation area and there's this really big beaver lodge right on the shore and it's you know it's been there since the 1950s according to some locals and and there you know you can go there in an evening and actually see people standing on top of the lodge and bass fishing while the beavers will be out and maintaining the other side of the lodge you know 10 10 feet away it's really unbelievable so that's you know that's clearly a population of beavers that's been around people for a very long time and has has habituated to them you know and then you see other colonies um that you know that that freak out whenever you you know get within 100 feet of them um so you know they've you know they've got personalities and they you know they've habituated to uh to people in different different ways so we have a question sorry we have a question about uh muskrats and whether they chew down trees could they be culprits of uh felled trees yeah no muskrats do not chew down trees that's so if you've got trees that have been chewed down that's that's a beaver and nothing else is really is really doing that you know muskrats do build little lodges which some of you have probably seen but those are you know those are made from uh grass and mud typically not not not nod sticks so they do build lodges but you know only beavers build dams only beavers fell fell trees um and you know often people often say um you know like people sending lots of videos of uh you know the baby beavers they see swimming around and and those baby beavers are almost always muskrats um you know and a very easy way to tell is that you know of course beavers have this you know this wonderful paddle tail whereas muskrats have a you know kind of a rat like tail um and you know muskrats use their tail to swim unlike beavers so if you see a little sort of like propeller like tail behind the the aquatic rodent that you're watching that's a that's a muskrat I have a question about predators if uh if beavers are introduced will this uh you know boost the population of predators uh with perhaps unintended consequences yeah it's a it's a good it's a good good question um you know predators like coogers and wolves right right I mean you know certainly you know which certainly we're obviously native native species in in in Maine um I mean I think that you know so a couple points you know one one common question is you know in places like New England where that you know there aren't a lot of native predators you know are beavers going to proliferate wildly you know do they need predators to control their populations um you know and the answer to that is is pretty clearly no um you know they they basically you know they're very dependent on the amount of available habitat and the amount of available food and that's you know that's really what determines their their population levels not not predation um but you know it's yeah it's a it's a good it's a good question I mean you know coogers and coogers and wolves are you know part of part of the historic landscape for sure and and you know would probably do a lot of good in reducing whitetail deer populations which are you know certainly overpopulated on the east coast so I'm all I'm all for bringing back coogers and wolves to all of their their native range great well I uh this this is a comment does not qualify as a question but someone wrote I loved reading your book what a great work I learned so much it should be required reading for everyone oh wonderful so just wanted to toss that in uh I think that covers most of the questions we have thank you so much for for joining us tonight do you any further do you have a I'm sorry I should know this but do you have a website um yeah it's it's uh it's you know ben bengoldfarb.com and um again you know I put I put my uh my my email address uh in the chat so if you're interested in talking more about beavers that didn't get to your question um or you know if you're interested in in a signed book just drop drop me a line and we'd love to hear from you yes well thank you so much for joining us and maybe we'll see you in Maine again sometime and uh we want to send every all our viewers out there our best wishes for the upcoming holiday season and we'll see you in the new year thanks bill thanks everybody yeah goodnight everyone take care