Beavers relocated to improve salmon habitat
This summer, raceways at the Tulalip Tribes’ Bernie Kai-Kai Gobin Hatchery were renovated into temporary beaver condominiums.
Six beavers nestled together in a furry cluster in one of the manmade lodges, confirming wildlife biologists’ suspicions that this was a family unit. Tribal staff, along with biologists from the University of Washington (UW), had captured the beaver colony in Duvall, where they were flooding a blueberry farm.
“The mother beaver is more than 50 pounds,” said Jason Schilling, wildlife biologist for the Tulalip Tribes. “And there’s one kit that’s about the size of a football and pretty cute.”
The beavers were pioneers of the Skykomish Beaver Project, a partnership among Tulalip, UW, U.S. Forest Service and other agencies. The project is relocating certain beavers from the Snohomish lowlands, in places where they are considered a nuisance, to public land in the Skykomish River system.
Beavers are nature’s wetland engineers, instinctively building dams, lodges and underwater passages to store food and protect themselves from predators. In doing so, they create reservoirs of cool water that salmon need to survive, but sometimes their industriousness interferes with human development. (more…)