Letter to the Editor - Beavers in Beaver Creek Park – Enemy or ally?

It depends on who you ask. Are beavers a nuisance or an invaluable Mother Nature-provided stream ecosystem engineer? Like many things in our biological world, both attitudes are partly right and partly not right.

Beavers cut down trees, flood areas, alter vegetation communities, jeopardize infrastructure, sometimes spread diseases and complicate some irrigation practices. All of these can be problems, nuisances, costs, lost profits and inconveniences to personal goals.

However, beaver activity also contributes to stream restoration/ecological function and ecosystem health in numerous ways — water table stability, seasonal moderation of base flow level, bank saturation/water holding capacity, silt/sediment traps, moderation of flow energy, pools, fish and wildlife habitat, livestock water, vegetation regeneration, etc. All of these can be useful in healing the stream and land, reduce costs, and increase profits and be beneficial to long-term land management goals.

Through the years, we have had several things that have altered and damaged Beaver Creek and the larger watershed. These include, but are not limited to: floods, fires, droughts, roads, logging, recreation sites, mining — gravel/rock and otherwise — grazing, haying, and other human and natural causes. Most of these leave minor and sometimes major wounds to the stream and larger watershed. We can argue about how significant one or the other is, but arguing about these misses the point of managing our Beaver Creek for its natural resource values and goals.

The point is, are we doing the best we can to take care of the ecological and economic health of all the resources and natural processes that benefit the long term? Or are we needlessly encumbering or fighting natural recovery processes for some immediate/short term benefit?

As we remove beavers, what are we doing to replace the positive ecological functions beavers provide? What are we doing to avoid or mitigate installation of facilities or infrastructure where beaver activity can be expected and would be beneficial to improving ecological health, and economic stability of the park?

At the recent park board meeting, there was discussion about how to pay for someone to lethally trap our beavers as the only action we are going to consider and no serious discussion of how to deal with and manage the larger issues we have in Beaver Creek and the watershed.

It is time to put our heads together, work together and tackle the larger issues and problems and go beyond short-term fixes.

Lou Hagener

Havre