BUGLE | Thinking Like a Beaver

90 • BUGLE • JUL/AUG 2020

Thinking Like a Beaver

by Brianna Randall

Elk suffer when streams and floodplains dry up. So do ranchers who need clean water and lush meadows. Stick by stick and stone by stone, low-tech stream restoration is providing a great boost to wildlife, livestock and people. And the next project is just a weekend’s work for volunteers.

PHOTO: DONALDMJONES.COM

A

days-old elk calf looks up from munching on lush spring grass, all knobby knees and big ears as it stares down a trail camera a few inches from its velvety nose. Behind the wildflower-strewn Colorado meadow where it’s feasting, sagebrush cloaks the green hills. But those hills will turn brown in the coming weeks as summer sucks moisture from the soil, leaving this calf to seek out any remaining emerald islands amidst a sea of parched rangeland.

Elk, along with 80 percent of all wildlife species, need access to wet, green places. In fact, multiple studies across the West show most elk stay within a half-mile of water from spring through fall. But this vital wet habitat now comprises less than two percent of the total landscape. Scientists estimate that people have eliminated 70 to 95 percent of the West’s riparian areas over the past 200 years. On top of this loss, nearly half of our nation’s streams aren’t nearly as healthy as they should be.

“I can’t emphasize enough the importance of protecting and restoring riparian areas,” says Tom Toman, who helped lead RMEF’s habitat stewardship work across elk country for more than two decades before retiring earlier this year. That was his second retirement. Before all that, Toman spent 25 years as a wildlife biologist and conservation officer for Wyoming Game and Fish.

Luckily for that knobby-kneed elk calf and others like it, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and its many partners are enhancing the wet meadows, creeks and rivers that sustain the wildlife and people who depend on water out West. Even better news: a suite of tried and true, low-tech restoration techniques—simple, hand-built structures made from rocks, wood and even mud—are working to make elk country wetter and greener.

Never Mind the Backhoe, Grab a Shovel

In the United States, we collectively spend around $15 billion per year to help heal degraded rivers and streams—and we’re hardly scratching the surface. Traditional restoration projects are often high-tech engineering endeavors involving heavy machinery, concrete or metal that are built to last for a century. They also cost a pretty penny and can take years to orchestrate.

Instead of relying on bulldozers and backhoes, conservation groups and government agencies are increasingly working together to find simpler ways of kickstarting a watershed’s natural recovery processes, mainly through slowing down the flow of water.

Unhealthy Stream & Meadow

92 • BUGLE • JUL/AUG 2020

ILLUSTRATIONS: RESTORATION DESIGN GROUP

During the spring, nursing cows and their calves seek out boggy meadows to feast on the cornucopia of high-protein, high-moisture grasses and forbs. Aspens and other riparian trees provide cool shade during the summer heat. During the fall rut, bulls head for those same wet meadows to wallow and slather themselves in rank mud. And when deep snow settles atop mountain peaks, elk migrate to the milder climate along river bottoms to find food.

Muddy hollows and lush meadows weren’t always so scarce. Historically, side channels and sloughs meandered willy-nilly among creek and river bottoms. Dense galleries of willows and cottonwoods filled the valleys of the American West. Beavers were abundant, industriously building dams that spread water across the floodplain. Their ponds once stored enough water to cover all of Washington, Oregon and California combined.

Then the early pioneers moved west. They staked homesteads along streams where the soil was fertile and water was plentiful. Towns grew up in the temperate valleys. People drained wetlands, dammed rivers and channelized creeks to create irrigation systems and tame floods. They killed beavers on a staggering scale, reducing the rodent’s population by up to 90 percent by the end of the 19th century.

That can be as simple as weaving branches through posts placed in the stream channel to mimic beaver dams and create ponds, or interlocking rocks by hand to form steps that create pools. Imagine kids building “dams” during the summer in your neighborhood creek, then simply scale up the size of the sticks and stones. These structures spread water across the floodplain where it can be stored underground in the soil, leaving the landscape better equipped to handle floods, fires and drought.

Low-tech restoration typically works best for small or intermittent streams, such as the thousands of draws that elk (and hunters) adore that streak through West’s vast sagebrush sea. Inside these veins flow the lifeblood of the landscape.

Picture walking across a lush meadow in pursuit of a bugling bull. Suddenly, you come upon an abrupt change in the landscape: the slow, meandering creek has become a mini-waterfall, its banks brown with raw soil as the grass crumbles into the water. This nick into the flesh of the meadow is called a head-cut. If left untreated, it will relentlessly carve its way upstream when water rushes over the lip of the cut during heavy rains or spring runoff from snowmelt. As the banks erode, the creek drops into a narrow and constantly down-cutting channel,

lowering the stream level and taking the groundwater with it. The shallow-rooted grasses begin to dry up, and deep-rooted sagebrush and other droughttolerant plants move in from the uplands. A head-cut can turn a hunter’s favorite green meadow brown in just a few years.

Head-cuts abound in elk country, often caused by human alterations to the landscape. Dams, roads, fire suppression or overgrazing have in many places starved our waterways of their natural “diet” of wood, dirt and rocks. The results are streams that are more prone to erosion because they flow too straight and too fast. Not only do wildlife suffer when floodplains shrink, so do the ranchers who rely on flowing creeks and wet meadows filled with prime livestock forage.

The good news is that reversing a head-cut and turning a meadow green again is relatively easy once you know what to look for—all it takes is a little sweat and some tired muscles. Building low-tech meadow restoration structures is surprisingly simple. By strategically placing natural materials into a stream near a head-cut, a small crew of people can bring a creek back up to its original level where it can re-water the floodplain.

Reconnecting streams to their floodplains is like

Healthy Stream & Meadow

JUL/AUG 2020 • BUGLE • 93

putting more water in the piggy bank for everyone— wildlife, livestock and people—to draw upon when the rains stop and the snow is long gone from mountain peaks. Since most of the structures can be built in a day by volunteers with materials found on site, their price tag is less than one-tenth the cost of traditional restoration projects.

THE EMERALD MILE—Simple rock or wood structures raise the water table and keep forage green and nutrient-rich for several months longer, even after seasonal streams run dry—a boon to everything from elk to sage grouse.

94 • BUGLE • JUL/AUG 2020

A 2019 study by researchers from the University of Montana and the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) found that these simple stream and meadow restoration techniques increase vegetation productivity by up to 25 percent. The results also show that simple rock or wood structures keep habitat greener for several months longer per year compared to unrestored sites.

“These low-tech projects produce amazing outcomes on a shoestring budget,” says Jeremy Maestas, an NRCS ecologist who co-authored the study. “By restoring ecological processes with sticks, stones and beavers, you end up storing more water and producing more vegetation, which benefits wildlife and livestock.”

NRCS provides resources that help ranchers enhance wet habitat on western rangelands through its Farm Bill conservation programs and efforts like the Sage Grouse Initiative. Like elk, sage grouse hens and their growing chicks rely on the green groceries near wet meadows and riparian areas during late summer and fall. With their population now at less than 500,000—down from the estimated 16 million sage grouse that roamed the West just two centuries ago— North America’s largest native grouse need all the help they can get. Without enough high-protein insects and forbs, these chicken-sized birds—especially their chicks—are less likely to survive the winter.

In addition to research and providing matching funding for stewardship projects, NRCS also hosts low-tech restoration training workshops around the West in partnership with universities, non-profits and resource management agencies. These hands-on field workshops feature seasoned ranchers who tell participants how low-tech restoration made their streams flow year-round again. They teach others how to design and build structures so they too can improve wet habitat in their own backyards.

One of the most enthusiastic presenters at these workshops is Jay Wilde, an Idaho rancher who worked with state and federal agencies to build 26 beaver dam analogs in 2016. Wilde’s goal was to re-water Birch Creek, a stream that used to dry up by mid-summer, leaving his cattle thirsty. The hand-built stick structures provided the much-needed pond habitat for a half-dozen relocated beavers to get to work repairing the watershed. The reintroduced beavers have since

PHOTOS FROM TOP: RMEF / COURTESY COLORADO PARKS AND WILDLIFE / COURTESY COLORADO PARKS AND WILDLIFE

Helping Birds and Herds through Blue-Collar Conservation

multiplied and built over 130 dams of their own, which keeps Birch Creek flowing 42 days longer than it used to, providing livestock and wildlife with reliable water until it freezes in the fall.

“When you see the results, it’s almost like magic,” says Wilde.

The concerted outreach by NRCS and others has helped generate a boom in low-tech riparian stewardship projects in sagebrush country.

“It’s blue-collar conservation. Anyone can build these low-tech structures with a little sweat and a few shovels,” says Maestas. “More people are getting involved, and we’re able to repair more streams in need.”

Old Ways are Good Ways

Although low-tech stream restoration structures have been gaining popularity with resource managers and landowners over the last few years, they’re by no means new. Indigenous cultures like the Zuni people of the Southwest used similar techniques millennia ago to disperse water for drinking and agriculture, and to dissipate the energy of floods.

RMEF was an early adopter of low-tech stream restoration. Starting in the early 2000s, RMEF partnered with the Boy Scouts each summer to build simple rock structures—similar to those used by the Zuni—as part of week-long backpacking adventure camps on New Mexico's Torstenson Wildlife Center, formerly known as the Double H Ranch. Over the course of a decade, scouts built hundreds of rock structures to slow runoff and restore floodplains.

RMEF maintains a conservation easement on this 93,403-acre ranch that protects prime habitat for

elk, mule deer, pronghorns, mountain lions and scores of bird species. As part of its stewardship efforts, RMEF also hired contractors to thin conifer trees and improve water availability on the ranch.

A century of fire suppression allowed junipers and piñon pines to march across once-open western rangeland. Each piñon or juniper can suck up 35 gallons of water per day, leaving a landscape dominated by trees with little but bare ground in between. That’s up to 40 times more water than an aspen tree drinks—so removing them is another simple way to restore wet meadows.

“It was amazing to see what the Torstenson Ranch looked like after five years of these kinds of hands-on stewardship projects,” says Toman.

RMEF works to strategically pair stewardship projects with its land protection efforts, and has long prioritized protecting and enhancing riparian areas.

Creeks or rivers wind through more than half of the 1.2 million acres RMEF has permanently protected through conservation tools like acquisitions and easements. With RMEF’s help, the people who own or oversee those lands have been steadily improving the health of the waterways there. This might mean planting native shrubs, building wildlifefriendly fences, treating weeds or installing low-tech restoration structures.

According to Toman, who has been involved in many of the 102 riparian projects RMEF has funded over the past 25 years, hand-built structures are a cost-effective and efficient way to improve wet habitat in elk country—and a great way for RMEF’s volunteers to get their hands dirty.

“By building simple structures, volunteers can

PHOTOS FROM LEFT: COURTESY NRCS / RMEF

BUSY QUASI-BEAVERS—Beaver Dam Analogs do what the largest rodent in elk country is so great at: slowing and spreading streams and creating lush corridors for the good of fish and wildlife.

96 • BUGLE • JUL/AUG 2020

see first-hand how they helped re-wet a meadow,” explains Toman.

For instance, a trickle can turn into a pond after just one morning’s work. And volunteers can return the following year to see green grass and wildflowers growing, thanks to their labor the previous fall.

Karie Decker, director of habitat stewardship for RMEF, points to the organization’s annual grant process as the biggest avenue for local chapters to participate in on-the-ground habitat enhancement work. These grants are administered by RMEF Project Advisory Committees in each of the 28 states where wild elk roam. The grant-making process brings together local volunteers, RMEF field staff and natural resource professionals to recommend the highest priorities for elk in their backyard. And that definitely

includes restoring the vital green zones along streams.

“Our grants also encourage partners to think about how to bridge projects across different land ownerships,” says Decker. “Wildlife don’t care where the fences are—they see continuous habitat and we try to emphasize that.”

New Pipes for an Elk Factory

The Gunnison Basin in south-central Colorado is one of the West’s most productive elk factories.

It’s also a poster child for how partners are making watersheds more resilient using low-tech methods.

In 2012, a group of private ranchers, public land managers and nonprofit conservation groups began brainstorming about how to improve habitat for the threatened Gunnison sage grouse. With roughly

Wet Meadows for California’s Tules The creek had carved nearly 10 feet below its banks, leaving the roots of grasses and forbs clawing for water. Now this prime foraging meadow is green again.

In California, RMEF volunteers helped launch a low-tech meadow restoration project in 2013 that is still paying dividends—and yielding delicious forage—for tule elk. Volunteers spent 88 hours building rock dams in Upper Craig Canyon on BLM’s Cache Creek Wildlife Management Area. Formerly known as the Payne Ranch, RMEF helped to permanently protect this 50,000-acre chunk of land north of Sacramento through multiple purchases beginning in 1996.

Years of overgrazing had eroded an intermittent stream, putting a prime foraging meadow for elk and

other wildlife in danger of drying up.

The creek had carved itself nearly 10 feet below its banks, leaving the roots of grasses and forbs clawing for water. Pardee Bardwell, then BLM’s Cache Creek Manager (now retired), put two dozen RMEF volunteers to work. They moved big rocks with wheelbarrows, chinking the rocks together with mud to raise the water level in the little creek. Meanwhile, a herd of tule elk—the smallest and rarest wapiti subspecies in North America—stood on the hill above the crew, watching them restore the meadow.

“It was a great project and the

cost was zero with the volunteers,” says Bardwell.

He points out that keeping meadows green also mitigates against other threats to wildlife.

For instance, wet habitats can provide valuable refuge for animals during wildfires, which are burning more frequently and more intensely across western landscapes. In the aftermath of several recent wildfires in the West, the only remaining green areas amidst miles of scorched rangeland were healthy floodplains where riparian vegetation kept the flames at bay.

PHOTOS: RMEF

HEAD-CUT HALTED—All it takes is sweat and stones to heal a creek and restore a meadow.

98 • BUGLE • JUL/AUG 2020

Bringing Beavers Back specializes in low-tech riverscape restoration. In landscapes where streams are bigger and flow year-round, adding beavers—or beaver dam analogs (BDAs) made of sticks or mud that mimic real beaver dams—are often more appropriate than building rock structures as a tool for restoring the floodplain. Bouwes is also the director of Utah State University’s new Beaver Ecology and Relocation Center.

“Over the last year, we relocated 50 beavers,” he says. “It’s a win-win, since some people need them removed and plenty of people want them.”

As an example, Bouwes says they trapped a beaver in a creek in Park City, Utah, whose dams were flooding basements downtown. After quarantining the animal to ensure it wasn’t carrying parasites or disease, the center relocated it to a stream on public land managed by the BLM where it could join an existing community of beavers. Bouwes believes the demand for beavers will continue to increase.

While more ranchers are starting to use them as a tool for restoring streams on private land, most of the Center’s beavers are relocated to public land.

A key component for successful relocation is releasing beavers as a family unit whenever possible, since they are social creatures. Another ingredient for success is providing beavers with the initial building blocks to help them recolonize a

watershed. BDAs give them cover from predators while they go to work creating their own dams that restore the floodplain.

The U.S. Forest Service is also using more low-tech, less-invasive methods to nudge riparian ecosystems toward recovery, like relocating beavers and building BDAs. In 2018, RMEF contributed to a project on the Malheur National Forest in northwest Oregon that used BDAs and wood jams to restore a tributary to the John Day River.

Past land management practices had eroded the banks of Bear Creek, lowering the groundwater level and killing off the adjacent aspens, willows and sedges. Local youth crews helped build over 100 woody structures that restored 2½ miles along the creek.

“Riparian and wetland habitat create biodiversity hotspots for a plethora of wildlife,” says Dustin Hollowell, wildlife biologist for the Malheur National Forest. “These restored wet areas provide better calving and fawning habitat, as well as higher-quality browse and forage, which is especially important in late summer.”

Thanks to the new ponds in Bear Creek, wetlands in the floodplain are already expanding. Plus, now the stream has enough water to flow all the way to the Middle Fork John Day River, allowing steelhead and juvenile Chinook salmon to swim up Bear Creek for the first time in nearly a century.

PHOTOS FROM LEFT: TOM & PAT LEESON / BOBBY MARSHALL

The North American beaver.

You’ve probably smiled at their peculiar nature. These giant, semi-aquatic rodents gnaw down trees to build intricate dams and lodges to protect themselves from predators, to stockpile their favorite snacks (bark, buds, stems, leaves and twigs), and to create deep ponds that remain unfrozen beneath the ice for their winter refuge.

Beaver ponds also provide invaluable “ecosystem services.”

They recharge the floodplain, allowing water to flow downstream long after snowmelt and spring rains fade away. Plus, ponds generate a much higher density of biodiversity than fast-moving water because more plants and insects are able to grow in them and in the surrounding soils. In turn, these plants and bugs attract critters looking for food and shelter.

Unfortunately, beavers in the wrong places can be a nuisance, since their dams can flood roads and clog irrigation ditches. Due to massive over-harvest during the fur trade, beaver populations are just 10 percent of their historic numbers.

Eliminating these industrious natural engineers has dramatically reduced the amount of water available for people, livestock and wildlife.

Luckily, beavers are making a comeback.

“We’re helping beavers so they can help us restore streams,” explains Nick Bouwes, co-founder of Anabranch Solutions, which

100 • BUGLE • JUL/AUG 2020

4,000 birds, this basin is home to 90 percent of the world’s remaining Gunnison sage grouse.

One of the main hurdles facing the bird is lack of wet habitat during late summer and fall, when growing chicks rely on green spots to find food— the same places cow elk have been bringing their calves for centuries to stock up on crucial nutrition before the basin’s tough winters. Ranchers and rural communities in the area were also concerned about worsening droughts in the region, and looking for ways to boost water availability. The group decided to address these concerns by investing in low-tech rock structures to improve floodplain storage and revive wet meadows.

Now called the Gunnison Basin Wet Meadow and Riparian Restoration Collaborative, the group has collectively hand-built over 1,900 rock structures that have restored a series of healthy wet meadows along 24 stream miles. These projects span public and private land to re-wet entire drainages. They also enhance prime habitat for thousands of elk, pronghorn and mule deer, which is why RMEF contributed to building these rock structures through its PAC grant program.

Nate Seward, wildlife conservation biologist with Colorado Parks and Wildlife, has been invested in the Gunnison Basin wet meadow restoration efforts from the get-go. Seward (who, incidentally, received funding from RMEF for his graduate research on reintroducing elk to reclaimed coal mines in

Kentucky) set up remote-sensing cameras to monitor whether wildlife use the restored sites.

So far, the cameras have captured over 2 million images, many of which show sage grouse and big game foraging in restored meadows adjacent to rock dams recently built by the hands of hardworking volunteers.

“We’re seeing more cow elk stick around in these ribbons of green, and they’re calving down in the interface between wet meadows and sagebrush, too,” says Seward.

It’s clear these low-tech restoration projects create little havens of green that growing elk calves need.

The proof of success is in the pictures. One of those remote-camera photos stars the fuzzy-eared elk calf mentioned at the start of this story (and featured on page 94), happily nibbling the lush grass.

Karie Decker is thankful for the RMEF chapters and volunteers who are investing in hand-built structures that enhance wet habitat for elk and other wildlife, and looks forward to seeing future projects.

“Volunteers are tremendous at amplifying what we’re doing to restore the landscape,” says Decker. “And that includes turning brown meadows green again.”

Brianna Randall is a freelance writer in Missoula, Montana. Like elk calves and sage grouse, she seeks out wet, green places all summer long.

JUL/AUG 2020 • BUGLE • 101