As many of us know, the Beaver is "natures engineer",,,,,,,,,,,a tireless builder of dams that result in improved habitat and water availability for a myriad of species.........In my book, the Beaver is a keystone species, its impact reverberating up and down the food chain for all animals including man..............The Beaver was one of the primary economic engines of pre-colonial and colonial Eastern North America during the 16 and 1700's.............and was this same stimulant west of the Mississippi from the Revolutionary War right through the so-called "Mountain Man" era that persisted into the 1840's..............Like all of our fur bearing animals, the Beaver was virtually exterminated from our Continent prior to the Civil War...........Fortunately, as forests rebounded and demand for Beaver pelts evaporated, the Beaver has made a steady comeback over the past 100 years.............Scientists have determined that the Beaver's pond building activities aids migrating ducks in Spring by causing quick ice melt in those ponds, allowing the ducks to achieve higher nesting success.............This pond building assists songbirds as diverse stream side vegetation grows where Beavers cut down trees----perfect nesting habitat and hiding places for many birds......................And with global warming stimulating more frequent and long lasting droughts across the Continent, Beaver dam building has been found to increase the presence of open water by up to 9 times versus absence of Beaver activity...............As one researcher put it recently: " we must mimic the Beaver in our stream and river restoration projects if our goal is for optimum biodiversity and health for our waterways"

Beavers: Dam Good For Songbirds

science dialy

 — The songbird has a friend in the beaver. According to a study by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), the busy beaver's signature dams provide critical habitat for a variety of migratory songbirds, particularly in the semi-arid interior of the Western U.S.

The study, which appears in the October 2008 issue of the journal Western North American Naturalist, says that through dam building, beavers create ponds and stimulate growth of diverse streamside vegetation critical for birds, including many migratory songbirds in decline. The study found that the more dams beavers build, the more abundant and diverse local songbirds become.

"We found that increasing density of beaver dams was associated with a diverse and abundant bird community and the wetland and streamside habitat these species depend on," said Hilary Cooke, the study's lead author who is now finishing her dissertation at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. "This habitat is critical to birds in semi-arid regions yet has been severely degraded or lost through much of the West. Our results suggest that management of beavers may be an important tool for restoring habitat and reversing bird declines."

Beaver populations once numbered in the millions in the American West but dramatically collapsed due to the fur trade in the 1800s. Currently, beaver are often considered a pest species when they take down trees and flood property. Their influence is still missing on most watersheds in the West, yet this and other studies suggest that beaver are very important to wildlife and to reviving the natural function of streams.

"Beaver are an essential ecosystem engineer," said co-author Steve Zack of the Wildlife Conservation Society. "Beavers help repair degraded stream habitats and their dams and associated ponds recharge local water tables and create wetlands. With our changing climate likely to mean increasing droughts in the West, managing ways to allow watersheds to act more like sponges will be a challenge. Beaver are a powerful tool to be considered for that, and the associated benefits to other wildlife add to their value."

the Beaver felt hat was the cause of the overtrapping of Beavers in the 17th & 18th centuries

This study was part of a larger effort by WCS to identify how to restore wildlife to streamside habitats in the western U.S. This study occurred in Wyoming where beaver reintroductions have been done on both private and public lands with owner consent and interest.

In 2007, WCS made history with other beaver news when an active beaver lodge was discovered in the Bronx River on the grounds of the Bronx Zoo – the first one spotted in New York City in at least two centuries.
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Busy Beavers Give Canada Geese a Lift, Study Shows

 — A new University of Alberta study shows that busy beavers are helping Canada geese get an earlier start when the birds fly home and begin spring nesting.

Ponds in Alberta where beavers were active tended to result in earlier thaw of winter snowpack, giving the geese a better chance at reproductive success, according to the study, published recently in Mammalian Biology.

The study is the first to link beavers to early season nesting habits of Canada geese in a Northern climate.
A team led by Glynnis Hood, an associate professor in the Department of Science at the U of A's Augustana Campus, surveyed 32 active and 39 inactive beaver ponds at Miquelon Lake Provincial Park in east-central Alberta.
The study showed that open water occurred 10.7 days earlier in active beaver ponds, especially the water that was next to main beaver lodge entrances and food caches. As well, snowpack was on average almost six centimetres shallower in active ponds.

The activity of the beavers warmed and thawed the water, which makes it more welcoming habitat for the geese to nest, Hood said. The open water and the active ponds, which housed island lodges, provided food resources and nests away from land predators for the geese.

"Having access to safe nesting grounds and ample food is necessary for Canada geese to raise at least one set of offspring before fall migration," Hood noted.

The open water was also used by several other animals, Hood noted, including coyotes, fox, weasels, moose, deer, ravens, and other birds.
The findings reinforce earlier research indicating that beavers are a vital keystone species that contributes to the success of other wildlife and helps protect boreal wetlands against drought.
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The Ecosystem Engineer: Research Looks at Beavers' Role in River Restoration

 — When engineers restore rivers, one Kansas State University professor hopes they'll keep a smaller engineer in mind: the North American beaver.

Beavers are often called ecosystem engineers because they can radically alter stream or valley bottom ecosystems, said Melinda Daniels, an associate professor of geography who recently studied the connection between beavers and river restoration. Beaver dams create diverse river landscapes, she said, and can turn a single-thread channel stream into a meadow, pond or multichannel, free-flowing stream.

"Our argument is that the restoration target for streams with forested riparian zones has got to acknowledge the diversity brought to river systems by active beaver populations," Daniels said.
Daniels and three researchers from the University of Connecticut co-authored "The River Discontinuum: Applying Beaver Modifications to Baseline Conditions for Restoration of Forested Headwaters." The article, led by Denise Burchsted at the University of Connecticut, appears in a recent issue of BioScience, the journal of the American Institute of Biological Sciences.

While the research involves observations of several watersheds in northeastern Connecticut, the results are applicable to any forested stream, which typically have large beaver populations. Beaver populations have rebounded in recent years, Daniels said, after coming close to extinction in the early 19th century by hunters for their fur.

The ultimate goal of the research, Daniels said, is to help restore rivers in an efficient way that acknowledges ecosystem diversity and doesn't destroy it.

"A lot of rivers are in trouble and need work and restoration, but it's amazing how little we know about the systems we're trying to fix," she said. "We know they're broken, but we don't exactly know what they should look like because we know so little about how many of our river systems function."
Current restoration projects often don't consider the role of beavers as ecosystem engineers, and instead focus on creating continuous free-flowing streams, Daniels said. Such restoration can be expensive because it usually involves completely tearing down small 19th-century milldams and re-engineering an entire valley bottom.

Rather than tear down the whole milldam and radically change the surrounding ecosystem, the researchers recommend river restorers only remove part of it. This allows some ponded water to remain and mimics the role of beavers. Daniels said that in many cases if an old dam breaks and forms a gap, beavers may build their own dam to patch the gap and recreate the ecosystem that previously existed.
The researchers plan to continue river observations and collect more data to provide river restorers with insight for maintaining river ecosystem diversity.

"You can use these natural analogs to produce an ecosystem that looks a lot more like the one that was there before the colonists arrived," Daniels said. "We can restore rivers in a way that mimics the naturally diverse beaver streams, and we can save a lot of money in the process."