810-Lancaatar Fanning, Saturday, Dacambar 10, 1994 Kids Skilled woodsmen, industrious beavers use their large front teeth to fell trees for their dams and lodges. They can gnaw down trees in minutes and build a new dam In days. The paddle-tailed animals. North America’s largest Jtens.. .led rodents, common in most of North America, are natural conservationists: They create new wetlands, improve water quality and attract other wildlife. But they’re considered pests in some places because of the damage they can cause 40 woodlands. •sr* - '• Korner rodent, are being used to restore overgrazed and overiogged rangeland in tl West. . Busy Beavers Help Rescue West’s Parched Pastures PAT DURKIN National Geographic News Service Lew Pence was called crazy by Idaho ranchers who thought the only way to restore eroded West ern rangeland was to build tiers of $2,000 concrete dams. But ever since a pair of beavers that Pence relocated to a cattle trampled stretch of Copper Creek did the job naturally, his how-to slide show has been in great demand. Today, converts throughout the Western United States are using beavers to restore land that has been overgrazed, overlogged or otherwise abused. Beaver commit tees have been organized all over the region. Still, the buck-toothed rodent remains unpopular with a lot of people. On the positive side, the pad dle-tailed dam-builders have proved to be better than humans at Copper Creek and some 30 other areas. When beavers re-engineer a watershed, they create new wet lands and improve water quality. Fish, ducks and grasses return. “It’s not like I deserve a lot of credit,” said Pence, who is project manager for Idaho’s Wood River Resource and Development Area. “The Indians have been telling us for a long time that we need to put beavers back into the system.” When University of Wyoming researchers supplied logs to beavers living in dried-up creeks near Rock Springs, Wyo., in the 1970 s and ’Bos, the animals built dams and restored the eroded watershed. Since then, the Beaver Com mittee of the Wood River organi zation, a coalition of ranchers and government agencies that fosters economic development in rural southern Idaho, has placed about 30 pairs of beavers along the Cop per and other small creeks that water the once-lush grasslands of the Wood River basin. “We started to show pretty good results several years ago,” said Pence, whose traveling pre sentation makes the point with dramatic before-and-aftc? pho tographs of Copper Creek.' His pictures tell the story of how beavers reverse the erosion process. In the fall, they build dams of sticks, logs and mud that create moats around their lodges, where the animals spend the win ter and rear their young The dams protect the land by slowing fast-moving storm water and spreading it across the ground to be soaked up by dry soil. Stud ies show that the dams also catch 90 percent of the eroded topsoil that otherwise would be washed downstream. In Copper Creek, it took aboig f', *. four years for the level of the severely eroded stream to rise enough for grasses to return. Waterfowl, fish and the tiny organisms that live in healthy streams returned soon thereafter. “Beavers give more to the sys tem than they take out,” said Pence. “They get the water in there, and that’s all it takes.” Ecologists have dubbed North America’s largest rodent a “key stone species.” A Cherokee Indian legend said that God called on the beaver to help finish the Earth. Archaeologists credit the ani mal with creating North Ameri ca’s fertile prairies. Evidence of beaver dams dates back 55 million years. Some scientists date the begin ning of the decline of the conti nent’s great wildlife era to the killing of beavers for fur. Rampant beaver-trapping, which started with the opening of the Canadian West in the 1600 s, all but eradicat ed the species from North Ameri ca by the 1900 s. “Once we took them out of our system, the system went to hell,” Pence tells National Geographic. “Then we sat back and wondered what happened.” He praises the return of beavers. Often, a pair will build dozens of dams, restoring parched meadows in as little as two years. (Turn to Papa tic)
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