Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Second rate reporter says what?

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Cancel the cowardly WaPo and set up an equivalent monthly donation to ProPublica.

In after Baud. Damn.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

We still have time to mess this up!

… gradually, and then suddenly.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

American History and Black History can not be separated.

Somebody needs to explain to DeSantis that nobody needs to do anything to make him look bad.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

Can we lighten up on the doomsday scenarios?

Israel is using food as a weapon of war. Unforgivable.

Since we are repeating ourselves, let me just say fuck that.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

You are here: Home / Nature & Respite / Nature / I Love Stories Like This

I Love Stories Like This

by | 64 Comments

This post is in: 

This is great news:

Horace Smith blew up a lot of beaver dams in his life.

A rancher here in northeastern Nevada, he waged war against the animals, frequently with dynamite. Not from meanness or cruelty; it was a struggle over water. Mr. Smith blamed beavers for flooding some parts of his property, Cottonwood Ranch, and drying out others.

But his son Agee, who eventually took over the ranch, is making peace. And he says welcoming beavers to work on the land is one of the best things he’s done.

“They’re very controversial still,” said Mr. Smith, whose father died in 2014. “But it’s getting better. People are starting to wake up.”

As global warming intensifies droughts, floods and wildfires, Mr. Smith has become one of a growing number of ranchers, scientists and other “beaver believers” who see the creatures not only as helpers, but as furry weapons of climate resilience.

Last year, when Nevada suffered one of the worst droughts on record, beaver pools kept his cattle with enough water. When rains came strangely hard and fast, the vast network of dams slowed a torrent of water raging down the mountain, protecting his hay crop. And with the beavers’ help, creeks have widened into wetlands that run through the sagebrush desert, cleaning water, birthing new meadows and creating a buffer against wildfires.

I love stories like this because not only do I love everything furry, but because stories like these JUST MAKE FUCKING SENSE TO ME. It makes intuitive sense to me that tens of millions of years of evolution would lead to an animal that is PRETTY FUCKING GOOD at what they do and surviving and thriving in their environment. I love stories like this because it involves one of my favorite things in life, which is not fucking with animals and people and letting them do their thing. I love stories like this because a beaver dam is free and chemical free and doesn’t trash the environment and doesn’t mean ugly as cement canals or rusting pipes all over the place.

And I love stories like this because biodiversity is so important and so easy to achieve, it just means not doing stupid shit and it means you don’t have to inject chemicals and other bullshit into land to achieve a lush environment. I don’t understand it. I have not used fertilizer or any chemicals in my back yard since moving here. I planted a ton of pollinators, some trees, and I just let shit go and the bugs and birds and critters do their thing. They tithe a couple apples and some veg from the garden and occasionally work Thurston into a froth when the rabbits in their warren under the shed act up at night, but other than that, everything takes care of itself. I’ve got enough greenery and shade that I didn’t even need to water the garden this year, and the leaves and droppings from the willow tree makes great mulch and that keeps all the water in.

The only thing I have to do in the backyard (which is now nothing but garden, a small patch of grass that is half clover, and trees) is occasionally check the ph under the pine trees that overhang into my yard and take a trimmer to the willow and the wisteria. Other than that, everything takes care of itself. I have no idea why this is so complicated for so many people. I don’t understand why more farmers don’t plant a row of wildflowers to attract insects and predators to attack the pests on the cash crop. Obviously it is more complicated than what I am saying, but not much.

Reader Interactions

64Comments

  1. 1.

    Baud

    But his son Agee, who eventually took over the ranch, is making peace. And he says welcoming beavers to work on the land is one of the best things he’s done.

    I didn’t realize the labor shortage had gotten so bad.

    Thanks, Biden.

  2. 2.

    Jerzy Russian

    “beaver believers”

    Speaking as someone who has spent the last 43 years being 12 years old, this made me snicker.

    That said, I saw that article (or similar) earlier, and I am glad that more people are seeing the benefits of working with nature, rather than against it.

  4. 4.

    Richard

    I love this story too. It is hopeful. Last year, Utah Public Radio aired an interview with the author of a book titled “Eager” , about these animals and how they live and what they do. Happy news that people are beginning to appreciate this beneficial neighbor.

  5. 5.

    Richard

    I love this story too. It is hopeful. Last year, Utah Public Radio aired an interview with the author of a book titled “Eager” , about these animals and how they live and what they do. Happy news that people are beginning to appreciate this beneficial neighbor.

    We have a small population, just barely getting by, in our waterways.

    People still think they are varmints.

  7. 7.

    Roger Moore

    Nature can do amazing things. It’s up to us to make nature work for us rather than against us. My gut feeling is the big problem is people in the 19th and 20th Century made a big deal about conquering and controlling nature, and everyone wants to do that now. But we can see from things like the state of the Colorado River that our attempts to control things don’t work as well as we think they do.

  13. 13.

    gwangung

    My gut feeling is the big problem is people in the 19th and 20th Century made a big deal about conquering and controlling nature

    White people, that is. I believe a lot of Native American tribes were a lot better about working with nature and stewarding the land.

  14. 14.

    Barbara

    Sadly, we had to trap three beavers whose dam was creating a lake over the only access road to our house, but we have seen other beaver lodges around and give them a pass. They are amazing creatures. We had the road reconfigured to make it less attractive.

    Really, there’s a case to be made that there should be no grazing livestock anywhere west of the Rockies.

  16. 16.

    Mike S (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!)

    A similar ranching story How Dingoes are Saving the Outback

    TL::DW They control the Kangaroo poupulation  and keep them from eating too much grass.

    @Kristine: Beavers, dingoes and wolves are all Keystone species.. See also Sea Otters eating sea urchins and saving kelp forest off the coast of California.

  17. 17.

    Old Dan and Little Ann

    Ah, The Beaver Trade.  It has quite the history

    Edited to add:  White people have been killing Beavers for hundreds of years for the worst reasons. Pelt loving Assholes.

  19. 19.

    Spanky

    Well, I’m sure y’all are sorry you missed BeaverCON this year, but there’s always next year.

    We’re looking at building BDA’s in some of the county watersheds to help slow erosion.

  21. 21.

    TaMara

    I guess I should get off my butt and put together a post on how bison, wolves and beaver have been key to restoring balance and part of the climate change solution. I know we’ve covered prairie grasses and holistic farming.

    :-)

  22. 22.

    Spanky

    @Barbara: No, but the beaver population in North America had been cut down to about 100,000 before trapping them either eent out of style or was outlawed. I don’t remember which. In any event, the population is still rebounding.

  23. 23.

    trollhattan

    Occasionally run across beaver dams in the Sierra Nevada and just this June found myself hiking across one, at first not realizing at first what it was. They’re simply amazing critters and yes, a critical part of the mountain ecosystem in holding water back, after spring runoff, so that it filters downslope slowly over the duration of summer and into fall, helping water the lower elevations until winter storms return.*
    *At such time as the deign to return.
    The scale of their projects can’t be adequately described–very ambitious!​

  26. 26.

    MagdaInBlack

    Nothing quite like floating peacefully in a canoe and having a beaver surface next to you, then dive with a BIG tail slap.That’ll wake you up 😊

  28. 28.

    Spanky

     I don’t understand why more farmers don’t plant a row of wildflowers to attract insects and predators to attack the pests on the cash crop.

    Happily, I’m seeing this more and more often, even with the can’t-even-spell-“organic” farms around here. I guess they can argue against success for only so long.

  29. 29.

    Bill

    There’s a farm on the eastern shore of Penobscot Bay in Maine that is completely organic, where the guy’s deal is basically feed the soil, and bio-diversity and companion-planting and all the good stuff.  When we visited about 10 years ago, I was struck by how frigging healthy and robust the plants were. His celery, in particular was bright green and about 2 feet tall and so strongly fragrant that the bugs wouldn’t even come within several yards of it. You would have sworn that he was using fertilizers and pesticides. Nope. Compost and Sunlight.

  30. 30.

    Skepticat

    @Roger Moore: But we can see from things like the state of the Colorado River that our attempts to control things don’t work as well as we think they do.

    Maybe because of the why and the how of how we’re doing it?

    This is a great and encouraging article; thanks, JC.

  31. 31.

    Elizabelle

    @TaMara: I’d like to see that.

    Watch passenger pigeons be the cure for cancer, or something.  We have been so reckless with our environment, but some of us are learning.

    Animal lives matter!

    Saw this article in the FTF NY Times today.  Very glad John highlighted it.

  33. 33.

    HinTN

    @trollhattan: Saw much the same thing in the mountains outside Durango, CO. Saw something called Spud (Potato) Lake on the map and decided to hike up there (8800 ft.). The trail up was beside a creek that had been dammed and dammed and dammed. Lush green semi wetland the whole way up. If you looked at it right, Spud Lake was the result of the original beaver dam. Just amazing creatures.

  34. 34.

    mrmoshpotato

    I’ve got enough greenery and shade that I didn’t even need to water the garden this year, and the leaves and droppings from the willow tree makes great mulch and that keeps all the water in.

    Sounds like the garden has teamed up with the willow.  Beware.

  36. 36.

    RaflW

    A couple decades ago I took a 2 week permaculture course just outside San Francisco with Penny Livingston-Stark & Starhawk. They had a special guest whose name I’ve long since lost. He was part of a family with a huge, overgrazed ranch in western Nebraska.

    Once his dad passed, he started leaving the beavers alone on their ranch, too. And implementing rotational grazing on smaller sections of land (which no doubt required a lot of labor to establish the fence lines.)

    This was probably 35-40 years ago, and controversial. But he said that over decades, the land recovered in amazing ways. He claimed you could spot their ranch from space vs. the neighbors dry dusty spreads.

    I wish I could recall who he was!

  38. 38.

    J R in WV

    I helped my grandpa with his organic garden back in the ’50s, because he only had one leg (his right leg was amputated after a farm accident back around 1913) and he couldn’t use a wheelbarrow to spread his compost pile onto the garden. I was young but strong, and did the forking of the compost into the barrow and spreading it on the garden.

    Grandpa was big into small dams in the head of hollows, organic gardening, etc. Beavers would have been right in his lane! Rare in WV, but we have them. Coal mining interferes with them to a large degree…

  44. 44.

    middlelee

    John, you might enjoy the Louis Bromfield books, written in the early 1940s, about Malabar Farm.  After farming in France for 20 years, he came home to Ohio and bought a farm which he then restored.  Pleasant Valley and Malabar Farm are the titles.  He also wrote a lot of fiction and many screenplays. I just pulled the two I mentioned off the bookshelf to read again, for the umpteenth time.

  45. 45.

    Splitting Image

    There are some beavers living in the park near where I live. I saw one on a walk a few weeks back.

    Didn’t see any today when I was out, but I did see a white egret and a great blue heron sharing some space when I crossed over the river. The battery in my phone was kaput, or I would have gotten a picture. Next time maybe.

  47. 47.

    Spanky

    @middlelee:  Now that the thread’s quieted down …

    by E. B. White
    “Malabar Farm is the farm for me,
    A place of unbridled activity.
    A farm is always in some kind of tizzy,
    But Bromfield’s place is really busy:
    Strangers arriving by every train,
    Bromfield terracing against the rain,
    Catamounts crying, mowers mowing,
    Guest rooms full to overflowering,
    Boxers in every room of the house,
    Cows being milked to Brahms and Strauss,
    Kids arriving by van or pung,
    Bromfield up to his eyes in dung,
    Sailors, trumpeters, mystics, actors,
    All of them wanting to drive the tractors,
    All of them eager to husk the corn,
    Some of them sipping their drinks till morn;
    Bulls in the bull pen, bulls on the loose,
    Everyone bottling vegetable juice,
    Play producers jousting with bards,
    Boxers fighting with St. Bernards,
    Boxers fooling with auto breakes,
    Runaway cars at the bottom of lakes,
    Bromfield diving to save the Boxers,
    Moving vans full of bobby soxers,
    People coming and people going,
    Everything fertile, everything growing,
    Fish in the ponds other fish seducing,
    Thrashing around and reproducing,
    Whole place teeming with men and pets,
    Field mice nesting in radio sets,
    Cats in the manger, rats in the nooks,
    Publishers scanning the sky for books,
    Harvested royalties, harvested grain,
    Bromfield scanning the sky for rain,
    Bromfield’s system proving reliable,
    Soil getting rich and deep and friable,
    Bromfield phoning, Bromfiled haying,
    Bromfield watching mulch decaying,
    Womenfolks busy shelling peas,
    Guinea fowl up in catalpa trees,.
    Oh, Bromfield’s valley is plenty pleasant –
    Quail and rabbit, Boxers, pheasant.
    Almost every Malabar day
    Sees birth and growth, sees death, decay;
    Summer ending, leaves a-falling,
    Lecture dates, long distance calling.
    . . .
    And though his husbandry’s far from quiet,
    Bromfield had the guts to try it.
    A book like his is a very great boon,
    And what he’s done, I’d like to be doon.”

  48. 48.

    Elizabelle

    More from the article.  I love that someone invented a “Beaver Deceiver.”

    Beavers build dams with logs, sticks, stones and mud to create deeper water, which helps them dodge predators like bears. Their lodges have underwater entrances, and they stockpile food below the surface for winter. Beavers’ front teeth are orange from the iron that strengthens them for gnawing trees.

    When human-beaver conflicts arise, they can be addressed without killing the animals, experts say. Paint and fencing can protect trees from gnawing. Systems like the Beaver Deceiver secretly undo their handiwork with pipes that drain water from beaver settlements even when the animals keep building. Such measures are actually a more effective solution than removing the animals, according to advocates, because new beavers tend to move into empty habitat.

    If coexistence is impossible, a growing number of groups and private businesses are seeking to relocate, rather than kill, nuisance beavers.

    “We put the nuisance in air quotes,” said Molly Alves, a wildlife biologist with the Tulalip Tribes, a federally recognized tribal organization just north of Seattle that moves unwanted beavers to land managed by the United States Forest Service.

    [Moar beavers means moar salmon. They improve the habitat. And: they have other admirable values:]

    … One lesson learned: Keep beaver families together.

    “They’re much more likely to stay where we put them if their whole family is there,” Ms. Alves said. “Beavers tend to form really tight-knit familial bonds.”

    But in many states, it’s illegal to relocate beavers (and other wildlife), in part because officials worry about people simply moving the problems elsewhere.

    … Part of what has made the [beaver-biped] partnership successful is [rancher] Mr. Smith’s flexibility. For example, beavers have completely rerouted one section of creek. But Mr. Smith doesn’t see the change as good or bad, “just different.” The most important thing, he said, is how much water they’re storing on the land.

    Now more than ever, he said, “water is liquid gold.”

  53. 53.

    CZEdwards

    @Barbara: 100th Meridian, if I get a say in it. That’s where the rainfall drops off.

    West of the 100th, bison do fine, and the shortgrass prairies between the Continental Divide and the 100th are the creation of bison-enabled evolution.

    But cattle aren’t bison, and it shows.

  54. 54.

    Ksmiami

    @Roger Moore: the Mississippi River would like a word…

     

    @Bill: My huge Dallas yard is au natural with an herb garden, milk weed , wildflowers and nut trees, plus a hearty native grass. I do nothing but trim and compost the soil. No pesticides etc and just let it rip. Despite an insane summer of heat, critters, plants and bugs are healthy and the herb garden has become a nursery for mini geckos. And when we had 11 inches of rain all at once, I had no flooding or anything. We can all do our part by giving nature space.

  55. 55.

    StringOnAStick

    @TaMara: How about a post about regenerative agriculture?  Polyface Farm is mentioned in Michael Pollan’s Ominvore’s Dilemma and there’s the recent film Kiss the Ground too.

  56. 56.

    TriassicSands

    It makes intuitive sense to me that tens of millions of years of evolution would lead to an animal that is PRETTY FUCKING GOOD at what they do…

    Millions of years of evolution haven’t helped much with human beings. Of course, if by “good at what they do” means trash the planet and ignore reality, then, yes, maybe human beings are good at what they do.

  61. 61.

    Jeffery

    I recently discovered permaculture videos on YouTube. That led to finding out about P. A. Yeomans and his Keyline ideas. This is a link to Yeomans videos about using the contour of the land to collect and store water for a year round supply.

    https://rainwaterrunoff.com/p-a-yeomans/

    He also came up with a keying plow. Rather than till the soil over it break it up deep underground to allow water to get further down into the soil layers that encourages root to go deeper into the ground pulling more water further down into the soil.

  62. 62.

    J R in WV

    And revisiting this thread late at night, I recall back when we lived in Beckley, V near the New River before it was a park. there were beavers who instead of building lodges of tree debris, dug dens in the solid dirt banks of the river, which was way too big water for a beaver dam to work.

    Saw lots of them.

    Raleigh County is one area that has many streams running out of the county, but none running into the county, as the geology won’t allow water to run uphill. So many streams are tiny up near their heads. New River runs along the east side of Raleigh County. Love beavers!

  63. 63.

    Matt Smith

    In Cuba, all the urban farms have caught on to the idea of planting a row of certain flowers and similar methods.

    They had to master these techniques because when the USSR collapsed, suddenly Cuba didn’t get any chemical pesticides or fertilizers. So they learned how to do it all naturally. There’s so much we could do naturally if were our mindset.

    Also, Cubans don’t understand that for us, organic produce is a premium product. They’d probably be happier if they had pesticides and fertilizers again.

  64. 64.

    SteverinoCT

    Along Rt 11 in CT, the Eight-Mile River watershed, is a pond with a beaver lodge. In the before times, my commute took me past it. Something happened and it was abandoned. I assume the state did a relocation. The lodge is decaying, but taking a good long time about it. More wildlife: couple coyotes crossed the road before me right in town; there are scattered bits of woods here and there where they hang out.

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