Check out baby beavers on 'Kit Cam' thanks to Cowlitz Indian Tribe
May 12-The Cowlitz Indian Tribe recently launched a new livestream featuring a mother beaver and four kits born April 16 as they wait to be relocated.
According to the tribe, the Cowlitz "Kit Cam" gives viewers the opportunity to watch in real time as the kits grow and learn essential survival skills from their mother. It will be available until the beavers are released into the wild.
"As Cowlitz people, we have always understood our responsibility to care for the land and the resources it provides," Cowlitz Indian Tribe Chairman Bill Iyall said in a news release Monday. "This program is one way we are putting that responsibility into action - restoring balance to our ancestral homelands and waterways, and planning for the generations that come after us."
The North American beaver is the largest semi-aquatic rodent species in the United States and Canada, and the second-largest living rodent after the capybara.
With stout bodies, large heads and long, chisel-like incisors they use to chew down trees, beavers are commonly found in freshwater rivers, streams, lakes and ponds and can weigh as much as 100 pounds. Beaver dams and lodges built from downed trees, mud and other vegetation provide shelter for the rodents but also restrict water flow, helping to restore wetlands, improve water quality, increase drought resilience, and create habitat for fish and wildlife.
The Cowlitz Indian Tribe's beaver relocation program is the largest of its kind in the state, and one of the largest in the western U.S. Each year, about 70 beavers representing 20 to 30 family groups are relocated from areas with human-wildlife conflict to areas suitable for beaver habitat.
"Beavers are amazing ecosystem engineers and create high-quality, complex wetland habitats that support biodiversity and ecosystem properties that can help buffer projected impacts of climate change," Jesse Burgher, wildlife program manager for the Cowlitz Tribe, said in the news release.
Now considered a keystone species, beaver populations neared extinction by the early 20th century due to commercial fur trapping and eradication efforts, while beaver habitat was severely degraded by land use changes in the late 1800s. Even today, beaver populations in many areas remain below desired levels.
"We're finding a lot of evidence that suggests beavers once occupied many areas of the Cascade mountains of Southwest Washington and are taking efforts to rebuild beaver populations to restore critical freshwater resources and ecosystems across the landscape," Burgher said.
Beavers that enter the tribal program are brought by wildlife professionals to the Cowlitz Indian Tribe's beaver husbandry facility on the Cowlitz reservation. There, the animals are held while additional family members are safely captured - an approach that improves relocation success, the news release said.
Working with the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife's Beaver Relocation Permit Program, beavers are typically held for seven to 10 days before relocation. Once a family group is complete, they are released into suitable habitats, followed by post-release monitoring to track relocation success.
The beaver kits will stay at the Cowlitz facility for the first five weeks of life. In an email to The Columbian on Tuesday, Burgher said the kits will then most likely be released into the Lewis River drainage area in the southern end of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest.
"We are planning to release the beaver family during the last week of May when the kits are more than five weeks old. This gives them the appropriate amount of development time to safely dive and avoid predators," she said. "The entire family will be relocated together to an area where there is high quality beaver habitat and abandoned infrastructure such as bank dens or lodges that they can safely occupy."
Remaining within the protected confines at the Cowlitz facility also allows the kits to grow and gain weight, and develop water-proofing oils for their fur, the tribe wrote on the livestream page.
According to the tribe, relocating beavers into suitable environments helps restore natural ecosystem processes while reducing conflict in more developed areas. In the roughly eight years of the program, Burgher said the tribe has relocated hundreds of adult and baby beavers.
The livestream can be found at https://shorturl.at/hEHu2.
This story was made possible by Community Funded Journalism, a project from The Columbian and the Local Media Foundation. Top donors include the Ed and Dollie Lynch Fund, Patricia, David and Jacob Nierenberg, Connie and Lee Kearney, Steve and Jan Oliva, The Cowlitz Tribal Foundation and the Mason E. Nolan Charitable Fund. The Columbian controls all content. For more information, visit columbian.com/cfj.
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