Beavers moved into the creek we replanted
Four years after we put willow and alder back along Coldspring Creek, a beaver pair built a dam there. Nobody released them. They walked in.
Rangers found the first dam in May, about 300 metres upstream of the 2022 planting. By June there were two. We had no record of beavers anywhere on the creek when we started work, and the nearest active colony we know of is roughly twelve kilometres downstream, below the old mill weir.
The willows we planted to hold the bank are now the wood the beavers are cutting. That sounds like a loss until you see what the ponds do. The water table behind the dams has come up by close to half a metre on our piezometer readings, and the wet ground is pulling in sedges and rushes we never planted.
Tomás drove out in early June to walk the reach with the Salish stewardship council's two field staff. Their read was the same as ours. The beavers are doing for free the slow work of widening the wet zone that we had budgeted three more planting seasons to attempt.
There is a cost. A pond that good drowns young alder, and we have lost maybe forty saplings to standing water already. We are not going to fight it. The trade is a few dozen trees for a wetland that holds water through the dry months, and on this creek that is a trade worth making.
We did not plan for beavers. They are a sign the creek is working again, which is the thing we were actually trying to build. The willow came back, the willow brought the beavers, and the beavers are now building something we could not.
We are leaving them to it. The monitoring cameras have been moved back from the bank so we stop spooking the kits, and we will count the pond edge for new growth in the autumn rather than going in to poke around now.
