Leave It to the Beavers
isthmus.com
isthmus.com
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The point of options like beaver deceivers is aid in coexistence, and to deploy them with precision in places where it's really infeasible to adapt (at least for now) to a returning beaver presence. That way water level can be managed without (repeatedly) killing them, particularly as the beaver population overall away from denser human areas is allowed to return towards a natural level. And even when used they're not binary, they can allow some controlled pond formation, even if not quite as big as the beavers would like. That still leaves the beavers in some cases able to live there for a time, or else move on upstream to better areas. Sure it's a compromise solution, but given the long standing default has been to shoot/trap/poison them it's a valuable tool towards getting things back on track.
Another solution I have seen is the A-frame trap which blocks the beaver from damming the culvert and takes longer for them to build around the trap. Even when they do, which they will, when the water rises it spills over. From a maintenance perspective, they are easier to clear than clog in the pipe.
As a species we had better get smart about coexisting with these creatures. Some say the water issues out west are related to the extermination beavers, and their reintroduction will do much to replenish ground water and create natural reservoirs.
But that doesn't mean we we should antagonize the humans by insisting we allow roads to wash out and flooding to occur. We need compromises.
Tell that to Florida. Beavers flooding a neighborhood is little different than a hurricane or a river bursting its banks. The real question is whether such incompatible human activity should have been allowed in such places to being with. Pushing the suburbs a few hundred yards back from waterways seems a small price considering the benefits of a properly-wild waterway has to offer the wider community.
Gets annoying to see after a while.
So they should be on the first mission to Mars?
The main difference is that human dams usually require the river to be regulated, whereas beaver dams make river move around, and after a few years the dams move as well, changing the riverbed again. This cycle repeats, and after a while beavers make the river change its bed dozens of times, creating a wide, green marsh, storing lots of water in shaded, green landscape, only small part of which is the current riverbed.
It's also not a big obstacle for fish, because the dams leak, and change their positions every few years. So it does not stop fish migration and breeding significantly.
We on the other hand create a narrow regulated riverbed and hard obstacles that stay in one place for decades. The bodies of water we create aren't shaded, so a lot of water is lost to evaporation. There's not much new plantlife (in fact it's usually a net loss when you account for the flooded area). The high water head creates a lot of pressure and accelerates the water downstream, contributing further to the desertification of the area.
One of the dogmas since the 30s has been drainage. Flooding is bad, drainage is good.
The problem is that drainage was expensive to create and update. so they chose to put it in places where it really needed.
With modern equipment you can dig ditches, put in drains and make sure that water runs off the land Uber quick.
Combine that with shitty soils, that are left bare and barren, it means that the dwell time for rain water has dropped dramatically. This means that less soaks in and more drought happens. Not only that but there are less habitats for insects.
But conversely flooding gets worse down stream, because there is no storage, so everything is a flash flood.
The solution of course is better drainage....
Beavers are an answer. But it needs support from farmers, urban planners, land owners and law makers.
Not that we should wipe them all out like we seem to now.