Process-Based Restoration

After two years of utter frenzy, where I’ve been too consumed by building habitat to get anything done on the publicity front, I’m finally getting around to a website rebuild. To better reflect what the business is about, I’ll be focusing more on what’s paying the bills: process-based restoration (PBR).

PBR is watershed restoration using stream power to do the work instead of diesel. Basically, our job is to be two-legged beavers.And there’s nothing complicated about most of it. We’re just using simple hand tools, some elegant design methods, and the massive free energy of stream power to drive system recovery. We start by addressing source problems, to ensure we’re actually treating the root causes of watershed degradation, rather than wasting money and carbon trying to manage symptoms.

Then our job is to nudge the trajectory of the system back towards recovery, over time, with natural processes doing the heavy lifting. We do this by building structures that mimic naturally occurring wood jams and beaver dams, or reinforcing existing beaver dams. This additional material forces simplified stream systems to become more complex, start recruiting sediment, and reconnect to the floodplain.

Since the site provides both materials and energy for the build, PBR cannot be matched for pace, scale and efficiency. By using ecosystem power instead of diesel, we can build a mile of stream in under a week, for 50 thousand dollars and ½ barrel of oil

That’s really exciting, because most of California’s stream miles are 1st and 2nd order streams which are the fastest to treat. They tend to be high in the landscape and so deliver the most miles of wetted channel for the longest time.

PBR also creates more jobs than any other restoration method by focusing on handwork and human power. We’ve got a bunch of people with shovels instead of one guy with a bulldozer, and without any heavy equipment our carbon emissions are very, very low—the last build we did was under 1/2 ton of carbon, door to door, mobilization and everything.

The lack of diesel toys does make it a great workout, but a lot of this work can be done by a reasonably fit high school graduate who loves to get dirty.

And with 40+ million people newly unemployed, there’s never been a greater need for meaningful work at living wages. So there’s a bigger vision here than just driving posts and shoveling mud. I want to get people outside, in the fresh air and sunshine, doing good honest work to restore our watersheds. I really believe that together we can fix our working and wild landscapes, and the new website will reflect this conviction. Coming soon!

Is a beaver just another dumb animal?

Here’s a snip from some truly fantastic nerdery—it turns out beavers are pretty good at felling trees towards the water. This reduces their exposure to predation and cuts down on the energy they expend dragging branches. I thought this was a pretty cool look at how smart these critters really are.

The thread starts here, and later leads to a different paper suggesting it’s more a matter of them simply approaching from the downhill side.

I’m for both—even if they’re just cutting from the downhill side so they’re closer to the water, it’s still a pretty successful strategy that gets good results.

So…how much do you have to think to be smart?

 

 

El Dorado Hills gets a flow control device.

Click the stopwatch at 10 AM with a beaver dam and a flooding problem.

Click it a second time at 5 PM, with a flow control device in place and the flooding problem solved. It really can happen that fast.

Here’s some background.

The California foothills have been a hotspot of beaver problems for a while now. The chart below is a look at California depredation permits by county, from 2015.

El Dorado doesn’t look so bad next to Placer and Sacramento Counties, but it’s got similar geography and the population density is skyrocketing.

So hats off to the unincorporated census-designated place of El Dorado Hills for being ahead of the curve and employing coexistence strategies before things get contentious. This was a classic win-win multi-stakeholder process, and a real joy to be part of.

USFWS granted money to the American River Conservancy, who paid for OAEC and Swift Water Design to survey the site and determine if a device was suitable. The El Dorado Hills Community Services District and Creekside Greens took a brave step and stepped back from lethal management and agreed to the installation. Then USWFS worked out all the permitting, everybody convened at the site, and we installed the device.

By the end of the day, the water level was right where it needed to be, and it’s stayed there since.

There’s more to come shortly…

Thoughts on the California beaver population

We’re killing beavers all over California, and more every year. Does this mean there are more beavers? Or that we’re encroaching on more of their habitat? Here’s a slide I whipped up a while ago:

It’s pretty crude, so anybody with a statistics background feel free to pick this apart in the comments—I’d love to make this piece a little more robust. Anyway, I used APHIS kill numbers from their website (click a year, scroll down and click PDR G) to build the chart. Since there’s no current data on total population, I wonder if there’s any possible extrapolation from kill numbers, even to within an order of magnitude. Probably not, so let’s try to make relocation legal as soon as possible. California’s dehydrated, streams are getting flashier all the time, and what, exactly, does LA plan to drink when the Sierras are dry? Thoughts?

Duck Hunters, Beavers, and Mosquitoes

Here’s an interesting challenge that just showed up—how to deal with beavers in a controlled wetlands built for duck hunting? Hint: not like this:IMG_8138

That’s a flood/drain valve meant to control water height. The giant pile of sticks and cattails behind it isn’t a beaver lodge, it’s two hours of some guy’s life, every single day, unplugging the 25 different drains that make this system run.

A few of us Castor nerds have been asked to help out, which shouldn’t be a big deal—looks like a trapezoidal fence/pipe arrangement will work fine. However, they’ve got tons of ‘invasive’ fish in these ponds (warm, slow, low DO, perfect for bass and crappie and bluegill) and want to keep them from getting out into the river. So we’ll do the opposite of the Snohomish leveler Mike designed, and add a small gauge screen to the pipe end to keep the fish out. Fish solved.

Finally, they want some method of mosquito abatement. And there’s the hook. Real innovation will be required here, since some mosquitoes can be laid in, hatched and back out of the water in 2 days. They’re really small, breed by the billions in these kinds of human-generated ponds, and are part of the reason that thousands of acres of water is getting sprayed with pesticides weekly down in the rice growing areas of California. Classic lose-lose scenario, and we hope to turn this around.

Beaver Paint Trials

WNFHEntrySignThis June I took a multi-week roadtrip to the Methow Valley to work with the Methow Beaver Project at their facility in Winthrop, WA.

I arrived with a big box of potential and purported deterrents, a few gallons of paint, and a dream. The dream was that something in that box, when mixed with paint and applied, would convince beavers not to chew on trees.

Cliff Notes version: nope, at least not in captivity when there’s nothing else available and you can’t give them too many trees or they’ll build a ramp and escape.

Working with captive beavers awaiting relocation, I collected their favorite food (aspen trees) in their favorite size (2 years old) and presented the sticks with foliage attached and painted on the (non)deterrents as high up as they could chew. The sticks were anchored in metal tubes attached to a feeding platforms, 4 to a side, a couple feet apart, with control and treatment sticks randomly assigned a position using a random number generator. The beavers had all the rodent chow and water they could want, but nothing else to chew on except the plywood on their ramps and the undersides of the roofs of their hutches.

As you’d expect, they ate all the controls every time, starting with the first night. As you might not expect, they also ate all the treatments. I tried 20 different things, and nothing worked.

PE-950% pure capsaicin (thanks to Texas Creek products!)—chomp chomp chomp, no visible distress or reaction. Bittrex, the bitterest substance known to man—no indication they even noticed. Tanglefoot got a couple seconds of paw washing, but that’s all. The big surprise for me: sand, both large and small grains—crunch crunch crunch. Seems to work in practice, but does it hold up in theory, professor?

Casein, eggs, Liquid Fence, grape Jell-o (for the methyl anthranalite), hydrated lime, citric acid, the list goes on. I’ve got some video that’s worth seeing, but no answers yet. I’m reluctant to start field trials because the variability is so extreme and unavoidable, I funded this out of pocket which was kind of expensive, and it turns out I kinda suck at science.

But it was a super cool field trip, I loved the Methow, the Beaver Project and Hatchery folks were incredibly helpful and supportive, and I’m interested in extending the study. I’m just not sure how yet, and need to work my day job for a while longer to save the money for another run at the problem.

Caltrans Pilot Completed

P1030125Well, after 11 months, 9 visits and two reports, we’re done! The device is working perfectly, my maintenance visit took 10 minutes car to car, and resulted in a handful of debris that fit in a 1/2 gallon mason jar with room to spare. These devices truly are low maintenance, even during an El Niño winter. Many, many thanks for the heroes of Caltrans: Scott Dowlan, who built such a fantastic site the beavers couldn’t resist it; Nancy Siepel, biologist extraordinaire who figured out the permitting; and Katherine Brown, the tireless advocate for Team Beaver. I’ve been impressed from the word go, and hope to have more opportunities to work with Caltrans in the future. Here’s the last report, feel free to share liberally.

Prunedale Non-Lethal Beaver Management Pilot Report 2

May 3&4 Presentation

Thanks to Caltrans and the Tri-County Fish Team for a great pair of presentations. I really enjoyed the questions, insight and reflections everyone offered, and appreciate the time everyone took to come out for the talks. I’m posting a combined slideshow/handout from both presentations, hoping it will be useful to attendees and other folks interested in beavers and restoration. Please contact me with any questions or comments you might have, and I’ll put together a bunch of links in the next few days that fill out the research this show is based on. I hope this link works…

May 3&4 Slideshow

Knee-jerk

Reflex Mallet

Smack, smack, smack

Imagine if, on your next checkup, the doctor smacks your knee with that little rubber mallet to make it jerk, but then doesn’t stop. Instead they just keep merrily whacking away. After the second or third time it would get annoying, and eventually it would start to hurt.

At some point you would certainly ask them to stop, then get off the table and maybe punch them and take away the mallet. In the case of many beaver conflicts, the situation is slightly different.

In this case there’s no doctor. The humans are sitting there, asses hanging out of a paper nightgown, hitting themselves on the knee and complaining bitterly about the unfairness of it all. The beavers are merely the mallet.

Luckily, this  downward spiral can be broken by utilizing a few of the techniques posted here.

Downward Spiral

The addict, the elder, and the time horizon

The problem of the time horizon plagues restoration.

When I was living in San Francisco I met a recovered crack addict. One afternoon, driven by morbid curiosity, I asked him what it was like. He told me, “You can’t think past tomorrow, even on your best day. Some days all you can think about is the next hit—which might be fifteen minutes away.

crack-pipe

Does this look like long term planning?

So what you do is score some crack, get a hotel room, put a rock in the pipe and hit it. Put a rock in the pipe, hit it. Call a hooker, buy some booze, put a rock in the pipe, hit it.

Until one day you wake up and the money’s gone, the rock’s gone, your wife’s gone, your business is gone, everything’s gone. I went into recovery right there, but some of the guys who didn’t are still homeless, crawling around on the sidewalk looking for rocks somebody’s dropped. We called it crack farming.”

7gen

I don’t mean this kind of greenwashing, either.

In stark contrast to this bleak shortest-possible-term planning, consider the great law of the Iroquois nation, which required that the Council consider the impact of their decisions on seven generations of people to come—around 150 years. You know anybody that’s doing that kind of planning?

Most of us fit somewhere in between these two extremes: the average ‘consumer’ lives for the weekend, their boss is thinking about retirement, traders in exotic derivatives buy and sell on a minute-to-minute basis, politicians can’t see beyond the next election, and some interesting fraction of the population believes we have enough of everything to last forever. Their time horizon is effectively zero, but that’s by choice—a kind of willful blindness to the mounting and unavoidable evidence that no such resource base ever existed.

Coupled with the law of unintended consequences, the problem of the time horizon grows some world-ending teeth. We’re living this sad reality right now. COVID is crushing the economy because our feckless “leaders” refused to look beyond the election. California’s wildfires rage ever larger because 90 years ago somebody thought it was a good idea to suppress every fire, every time. Peak oil, called out as an inevitability all the way back in 1965, has come and gone.

And we’re still burning fossil fuels with climate-changing effects measured in centuries, to harden stream channels that might remain fossilized for decades, using unproven techniques developed in the 1980s that are based on bad science from the 1950s derived from anthropogenic sediments laid down in the 1800s that are only possible because we destroyed indigenous cultures starting back in 1492.

And we’re doing all of this without having the humility to say that the terrible ideas of today are the great ideas of not that long ago. Remember when smoking was good for mothers because it lowered fetal birth weight?

What if we made decisions today that allowed the restorationists of tomorrow to correct our mistakes? Instead of moving thousands of yards of rock, we’d be cutting encroaching conifers to reduce fuel load, while raising water tables and complexifying habitat, and doing all of it without burning fossil fuels that make the problem worse.

Call me crazy, but leaving our descendants MORE choices rather than less just makes sense.