March | 2015 | Leslie Patten Books: Wild Places, Sacred Spaces

Grey Owl–trapper turned conservationist

Posted on March 28, 2015 by Leslie

In the 1930’s, a white man by the name of Grey Owl, living in the Canadian wilderness, made his living trapping. He married an Iroquois woman named Anahareo. He had no remorse about his profession until one day he killed a mother beaver leaving two young kits. As he was about to raise his gun to shoot them, Anahareo intervened. “Let us save them,” she cried. “it is up to us, after what we’ve done.” And so began Grey Owl’s transformation.

Grey Owl and beaver kit

Beavers are among the 2% of land mammals that live in social groups. His beaver kits quickly became part of his family. He described how they were like children–playful, intelligent, mischievous, and hungry for affection. They liked to sleep against their pillows, cuddle with him and Anahareo, and were extremely sensitive to the moods of their human caretakers.

Grey Owl began to understand those animals which he previously sought to only kill for their pelts. He vowed to give up trapping altogether, though he didn’t take this lightly as it was his sole means of livelihood being a mountain man.

A number of incidents had contributed to this line of thought. About the first of these was the sight of a mother beaver nursing one of her kittens whilst fast by one foot in a trap. She was moaning with pain, yet when I liberated her, minus a foot, she waited nearby for the tardy and inquisitive kitten, seeming by her actions to realize that she had nothing to fear from me….The spectacle of a crippled beaver with only one hind leg and three stumps, doing his best to carry on, had moved me to put him out of his misery…I was getting sick of the constant butchery…but this had not, however, prevented me from going on to the next lodge, and setting my traps as carefully as ever; and like many another good business man I had justified myself…they had seemed to me to be just foolish dupes who took my lures, beasts that were put on earth for my convenience, dumb brutes who didn’t know the difference.

And now had come these small and willing captives, with their almost child-like intimacies and murmurings of affection…they seemed to be almost like little folk from some other planet, whose language we could not yet quite understand. To kill such creatures seemed monstrous.

Grey Owl was not an educated man. His winter with Anahareo and the two beaver kits was long and desolate, deep in the wooded backcountry of Canada in a one room cabin which they’d quickly built during a November snowstorm. Swearing off trapping, Grey Owl no longer had any means to pay off his debts accrued in buying supplies for winter. He had the idea to write an article on the beaver kits and his experiences as a woodsman. He walked 40 miles to town in January, dropped the article in the mail off to a prestigious English magazine, and so began his writing and speaking career to save the beavers of Canada.

Trappers had outtrapped Canada; loggers had cut down large swaths of forest. Things didn’t look good for the beavers of Canada in the 1930s. Yet Grey Owl continued to write and speak and gained enough notoriety that the Government of Canada approached him about making a short silent, film with his beavers.

Soon the Canadian Government had found a new home for Grey Owl and his beavers where trapping and logging was illegal. At Prince Albert National Park, a new cabin for Grey Owl became his permanent home. The cabin can be visited today. Grey Owl had turned from avid trapper to a prominent and vocal conservationist for wildlife and wildlands. You can see a very interesting 9 minute documentary here and another a narrated one here in the Canadian archives.

In 1999 David Attenborough directed a film called Grey Owl, starring Pierce Brosnan. Attenborough as a boy had seen Grey Owl speak, and was greatly affected, perhaps even to the point of influencing his future profession.

Grey Owl’s book Pilgrims of the Wild chronicles the journey I’ve described above. A wonderful read.

We need to re-examine our views on beavers. We can work with beavers, using them as a tool to:

store water and off-set some of the problems we face with a warming climate and declining water sources
restore salmon and trout populations
create good habitat for our declining moose populations due to a warming climate
create wetland habitats for songbirds and other wildlife, especially as the climate warms.
repair stream incision

Here are some good, easy-to-read references on line. As well as some short talks by experts.

Will Harling, director of the Mid Klamath Watershed Council, “we need to encourage beavers to build dams and to increase fish habitat where it’s feasible.”
Working together to restore beavers to fight climate change
This is a very interesting article how to channel beavers to work for us in designs that we want.

Filed under: Beavers, New ideas | Tagged: Beavers, climate change and beavers, Grey Owl, Prince Albert National Park, trapping | 2 Comments »

Doug Smith, Yellowstone Beavers and Salmon

Posted on March 14, 2015 by Leslie

Although most people hear the name Doug Smith and associate him with the Yellowstone Wolf Biologist, he also wears another hat. Smith did beaver projects beginning as far back as 1984 at Voyageur’s National Park, then went on to study beavers in five national parks. He completed several aerial surveys looking for beavers in Yellowstone National Park, the first in 1996 and the last one documented in Yellowstone Science was in 2007.

I won’t go into the whole report here, but essentially beaver colonies have increased over the last 20 years in the Park due to several things:

Willow regeneration, probably due to reduced browsing, and most importantly…
A rapid re-occupation of beavers along the northern range, especially along Slough Creek, because Dan Tyers of Gallatin National Forest released 129 beavers in drainages north of the Park between 1986 to 1999.

Tyers did a survey of the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness in 1985 and found no evidence of active beaver populations. He talked with old-timers, sheep herders, outfitters, and MTFWP employees about the area’s history. What they told him was that beavers were abundant until around the 1940’s and 1950’s. There was general agreement that the decline was due to persistent over-trapping, some disease, and a decline of willow stand (beavers in the GYE mostly use willow) due to over-browsing by moose and elk.

In 1996 there were 49 known beaver colonies in the Park. In 2007 the number had stabilized to around 127. These sites overlap fairly consistently with willow stands and slower water–mostly in the southeast, the southwest, and the northwest of the Park. The re-introduced beavers just north of the Park jump-started this healthy increase.

In the Sunlight Basin area, there used to be beavers, but they have been consistently trapped and removed. Even recently as noted in my previous post, a beaver colony began making some headway down at Russell Creek on mostly forest land, but once on private land, the homeowners trapped and killed them. A lot has been said about the reduced moose population in the basin over the last thirty years. If we had beavers here, moose habitat would greatly expand.

So why all this animosity towards these large rodents? Beavers, as we all know, gnaw down large trees. They also can plug up culverts and irrigation ditches and flood fields. Yet if you want to have a healthy ecosystem, you need beavers. They are considered a keystone species, building habitat for birds and mammals literally from the ground up. They reduce stream incision, slowing water and creating a soil base for plant life that wildlife feeds on. And if you’re willing to work with beavers, there are many ways to prevent culvert damage.

In a new twist, beaver dams once thought to be a deterrent to salmon swimming upstream and so were removed, are now thought to be the only thing that can save the West Coast salmon population. Not only can the salmon easily cross beaver dams, but since beavers slow water, they also raise the water table. Stream restoration in California that included beaver dams more than doubled salmon production.

“Beavers are the single most important factor in determining whether Coho salmon persist in California,” MKWC executive director Will Harling says.

What’s more, Pollock’s work shows that by slowing a river’s flow and allowing water to soak into the ground, beaver dams can raise the water table under the land. “So they don’t just help fishermen,” he says, “but can help ranchers and farmers save on water pumping and irrigation costs.”

Garreth Plank, a cattle rancher on the Scott River, has always welcomed the animals to his land. As a result, he has found that the beavers save the ranch significant amounts of money each year. “One of our largest expenses is electricity for pumping water,” Plank says. “With beavers on the land, the water tables are higher, and we’ve had a 10 percent to 15 percent reduction in pumping costs.”

“Due to their benefits, we started planting more trees, and instead of calling it riparian and shade plantings, we call it ‘beaver food.’ “

We need new ways of thinking about this little engineer. Smith says that in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, drought may be advantageous to the rodent. Drought slows down spring melts and allows more areas where the beavers will build. And in a warming climate, the Greater Yellowstone may need beavers to increase water conservation, and habitat for wildlife.

Filed under: Beavers | Tagged: beaver colonies, Beavers, Beavers and salmon, Doug Smith, Yellowstone beavers, Yellowstone National Park, Yellowstone Science, Yellowstone Wolf Biologist | Leave a comment »