Now is the time to let your state reps know why it is critical to protect beavers and pass HB 2843!

The three pro-beaver bills for this legislative session are are all interrelated and complement each other. The habitat created naturally by beavers brings significant ecological and economic benefits to people, fish, wildlife, and forest. In order for these benefits to be realized, beavers must be able to safely build and maintain their dams while expanding their numbers and distributions across the state.

Whether you live in an urban or rural area, tie it directly to your community's needs as well as the larger picture. Restoring beaver's place on public lands benefits us all — from Oregon water security and water quality to drought-preparedness, natural resources, fish and wildlife habitat, and wildfire mitigation.

We've provided some talking points to help you get started. It’s best to pick one or two issues to include with your request for a hearing. It's helpful to stress the importance of water-related benefits. Letters should be fairly short and to the point. The more personal the letter, the better.

Talking Points

• These bills address goals and objectives of the Oregon Conservation Strategy (OCS), the Governor’s 100-Year Water Vision and ODFW’s mission statement. They address all seven Key Conservation Issues in the Oregon Conservation Strategy plus four Strategy Habitats and the habitat needs of 82/294 strategy species, and they address all four goals of the updated Governor’s 100-Year Water Vision: Health (clean water for all who live in Oregon), Economy (sustainable and clean water to support local economic vitality), Environment (adequate cool, clean water to sustain Oregon’s ecosystems for healthy fish and wildlife) and Safety (water supplies and flood protection systems for Oregon’s communities). In addition, the bills bring state policy related to management of beavers into compliance with best available science.   
• Improve water security and quality for municipal, ranching, and agricultural users. Beaver dams, ponds and resulting wetlands and wet meadows increase temporary surface water and groundwater in the headwaters resulting in water being more slowly and sustainably released. This temporary storage helps offset the impacts of drought and decrease the frequency and magnitudes of downstream flooding. Abundant wetlands and ponds lead to improved water quality (i.e. cooler stream temperatures, less sediment). National forests are key to this effort because drinking water for a large percentage of Oregonians comes from national forests. And all of these public lands contribute to the waters used for ranching and agriculture.
• Improve fish and wildlife habitat. Habitat abundance, distribution, diversity, complexity and connectivity increases. These changes increase the ability of species to survive increased uncertainty in climate (drought, wildfire, flooding) by making the habitat less sensitive and more resilient to climate variability.
• Create wildfire safe zones for wildlife and livestock. The increase in abundance, size, and distribution of wetlands, wet meadows, and ponds across the state creates safe zones during wildfire for wildlife and livestock to retreat to. Forage and habitat recover more quickly post-fire than upland vegetation because of the presence of abundant water and the fact that many riparian plants are fire-adapted and respond favorably to the disturbance. Beaver ponds and wetlands/wet meadows help maintain downstream water quality by trapping sediment that might erode off hill slopes post-fire.
• Create carbon capture and storage areas. Wetlands and wet meadows extract carbon from the air and store it in roots and decaying matter below ground, and in the abundant riparian vegetation above ground. Beaver ponds also capture and store carbon as dead vegetation is submerged under water.  This natural process of carbon capture and storage related to wetlands, wet meadows and ponds directly addresses climate change and is currently an underutilized climate change response strategy.
• Improve rearing habitat for 11 endangered salmonid stocks throughout the state. Rearing habitat is a key limiting factor and beaver ponds have been identified as a key source of rearing habitat. Beavers also create beaver bank lodges which are used as summer rearing habitat for juvenile coho and other salmonid species.
• Improve stream temperatures. Currently ODEQ has thousands of stream miles listed as water quality impaired for temperature.  The rise in water tables in beaver dominated meadows results in increased groundwater contributions to streams and ponds.  When combined with deeper pond water depths, the result is a decrease in stream temperatures.  This decrease can, in some cases, result in the stream or a segment of the stream being delisted.
• Improve migratory bird habitat. Expanded beaver ponds, wetlands, wet meadows and structurally complex and diverse riparian habitat across the state provide increased food sources, habitat resting areas, and rearing areas including snags for cavity nesting species. Benefits threatened, sensitive, and declining species like the Willow Flycatcher, Yellow Warbler, Song Sparrow and Yellow-breasted Chat.
• Retain the ability of state and federal officials and private landowners to manage beaver. HB2843 only applies to commercial and recreational harvests and to the above mentioned federally-managed public lands. As such it does not eliminate any options for federal land managers when it comes to dealing with beavers.
• Improve recreational opportunities. Oregonians will be able to easily view and experience the beaver-created changes— be it watching wildlife, exploring the increased diversity of plants, animals, and ecosystems, or partaking in improved fishing and hunting opportunities.
• Open up opportunities to demonstrate effectiveness of non-lethal solutions to beaver-human infrastructure conflicts in publicly-accessible sites, without financial risk to private landowners or state, county or city land managers.
• Create a uniform policy with statewide benefits and eliminates ambiguity in the regulations. The existing trapping regulations are confusing with language used to describe closures varying.  Existing regulations limit beaver-related benefits to very few places in the state despite the fact that drought, wildfires, flooding, and municipal and agricultural water needs are a worry statewide.  Amendment creates a uniform, easily understood set of regulations that brings benefits to entire state.
• Limited restoration dollars go further and restoration self-maintaining because beavers now do the stream and riparian restoration. Beaver-created restoration is self-maintaining and self-enhancing as long as beavers continue to be around to repair dam breaches. Minimizes spending dollars on maintaining restoration effort (repetitive cost, reoccurring costs).   Dollars would be available to focus on species and restoration efforts in areas not influenced by beavers. Also, many may be surprised that trapping permits only cost around $52, and allow the permittee to take as many beavers as they like without reporting their take to ODFW. This permitting process doesn't bring in much revenue, and the current system fails to gather information that would help with sustainable management of beaver numbers and locations.  

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