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After two years of utter frenzy, where I’ve been too consumed by building habitat to get anything done on the publicity front, I’m finally getting around to a website rebuild. To better reflect what the business is about, I’ll be focusing more on what’s paying the bills: process-based restoration (PBR). PBR is watershed restoration using […]

Here’s a snip from some truly fantastic nerdery—it turns out beavers are pretty good at felling trees towards the water. This reduces their exposure to predation and cuts down on the energy they expend dragging branches. I thought this was a pretty cool look at how smart these critters really are. The thread starts here,

Click the stopwatch at 10 AM with a beaver dam and a flooding problem. Click it a second time at 5 PM, with a flow control device in place and the flooding problem solved. It really can happen that fast. Here’s some background. The California foothills have been a hotspot of beaver problems for a

We’re killing beavers all over California, and more every year. Does this mean there are more beavers? Or that we’re encroaching on more of their habitat? Here’s a slide I whipped up a while ago: It’s pretty crude, so anybody with a statistics background feel free to pick this apart in the comments—I’d love to

Here’s an interesting challenge that just showed up—how to deal with beavers in a controlled wetlands built for duck hunting? Hint: not like this: That’s a flood/drain valve meant to control water height. The giant pile of sticks and cattails behind it isn’t a beaver lodge, it’s two hours of some guy’s life, every single

This June I took a multi-week roadtrip to the Methow Valley to work with the Methow Beaver Project at their facility in Winthrop, WA. I arrived with a big box of potential and purported deterrents, a few gallons of paint, and a dream. The dream was that something in that box, when mixed with paint

Well, after 11 months, 9 visits and two reports, we’re done! The device is working perfectly, my maintenance visit took 10 minutes car to car, and resulted in a handful of debris that fit in a 1/2 gallon mason jar with room to spare. These devices truly are low maintenance, even during an El Niño

Thanks to Caltrans and the Tri-County Fish Team for a great pair of presentations. I really enjoyed the questions, insight and reflections everyone offered, and appreciate the time everyone took to come out for the talks. I’m posting a combined slideshow/handout from both presentations, hoping it will be useful to attendees and other folks interested

Imagine if, on your next checkup, the doctor smacks your knee with that little rubber mallet to make it jerk, but then doesn’t stop. Instead they just keep merrily whacking away. After the second or third time it would get annoying, and eventually it would start to hurt. At some point you would certainly ask

The problem of the time horizon plagues restoration. When I was living in San Francisco I met a recovered crack addict. One afternoon, driven by morbid curiosity, I asked him what it was like. He told me, “You can’t think past tomorrow, even on your best day. Some days all you can think about is