Co-existing with beavers as they return to Michigan

Did a beaver bring all of these over here? Oh totally, and if you take a closer look, it's also each sticks are packed in with a bunch of muck and whatnot to help seal the gaps around. Underneath us, Galloway Creek, water flowing this way. That's actually also where beavers have also set up shop. We're gonna go take a look at the little experiment they got underway, but first I gotta get ready. Okay, that's a lot better. Now the water here is a little bit more shallow than it used to be, but it doesn't mean it's still not a little bit high. Let's go take a look. Hey everybody, you're here on Brother Nature. I'm here with Sandy Troxell-Smith. She is a special instructor at Oakland University. Sandy, what are we about to go look at? We're about to look at the beaver dam that has been constructed under a footbridge on Galloway Creek here in the OU Biological Preserve. It is during low water, so just be careful, be careful. Oh, well, I guess you're in. Sorry. Our photographer is an expert. All of a sudden it showed up, so then we were really trying to figure out how we could coexist with these beavers because this pond had been then creating some flooding on the trail. Gotcha. And so you can see the stepping stones that we've put in since then. Our trail crew has been really great about that, and we've been trying to come up with some additional coexistence solutions to try to reduce the pond level and reduce some of that flooding ever since. These are slippery rocks, and I'm frankly stunned I haven't slipped yet. Wow, someone knows his, someone knows his trick. Welcome, welcome to my field site. Welcome to my TED talk. Essentially, this thing's not moving probably until there's a crazy water event. If the beavers stop to maintain the dam, and like you were saying, if there's a giant flood event or something, you could do run the risk of blowing out the beaver dam, but they picked a really great spot because underneath this footbridge they have a bunch of, you know, pylons to use, you know, for stability and stuff like that. So we're hoping that they're going to stay for a while. I mean, it sounds like we almost kind of made it easier for them to pick where they want to go. Why would a beaver pick this place of all places to build their dam? This is only one place of many, many places that beavers are picking to build dams. Basically, beavers will dam anything. In case you're wondering, audience, this is what MacGyver actually looks like. Jess, tell me about beaver behavior and why this is necessary. Well, with this cage, it allows for the water to flow properly through the flexible culvert pipe to flow at a rate that will not trigger the beavers. When they hear that running water, they want to dam it up, and so this will let it flow slowly and allow the pond to not flood the trail or any homes or anything like that. It's just so cool that beavers did this, you know? It really is, and it really helps a lot of other animals in the area too, you know, like the great blue herons are always fishing, and yeah, the muskrats use the water as well, so it really helps a lot of other animals too. Do the fish like it? Yes, I believe so. We've noticed they like to travel through the dam and things like that, so they will travel downstream, they will come upstream, they will, yeah, they really enjoy. If I was water, well, if I was anything but water, I would get stuck right here. I couldn't go through. The brilliant minds, smarter than me, have come up with a way of making sure that water can continue to travel all the way through there. That way, if the water ever does get a little too high, well, there's a place for it to go. Generally speaking, is this ingenious technology? This is our first fully permitted pond leveler in Michigan that has been permitted by EGLE. There is another pond leveler that was permitted by EGLE under an emergency circumstance, but this is kind of the first one. The beavers actually aren't there. Where are they? They are right around the corner. Actually, they have a very large beaver lodge. That is where they live and they raise their young and things like that. Sometimes they'll even build like an extra chamber just to give all of the kind of other residents a place, their own place. So if you've got like muskrats or something around, then sometimes the beavers will make another chamber just to like keep them away a little bit from their own place to be. Multi-use housing then. The beavers are actually creating habitat for lots of different things, including den homes for multiple different species. You have to respect just their engineering, but their influence over the local hydrology and the food circle and the food web they've even created just by existing here is kind of amazing. How long would a beaver live here? It can be three to five years is generally how long a beaver habitats their dam. Now, they can move on to build other dams and still occupy that same, on the same stream, same lodge. It's once they outgrow it, they start moving on. They are pretty territorial though. So it's not like they're just going to up and leave and let another beaver family take over. So a beaver family will tend to spread out. They'll have, they'll make multiple dams. They'll have multiple burrows. They may even have multiple lodges. And you know, they'll live along the stretch for who knows how long. Any lasting remarks about our, about nature's engineers, I guess. About nature's engineers? Yeah. I mean, we got to find a way to coexist with this species, right? We got to find a way to live with these beavers. If we want to have rejuvenation of our streams, of our wetlands, if we want to support all of these other kinds of native species, we need to find ways to live with them.