So take this with a little perspective and not as if its ALL or NOTHING……..But when I look at nature and the way our overall ecosystem is designed to function here in our part of the world……the beaver is a key specie to making all of that function the way it was designed. I don’t see why we are forming such a negative association with them…..It looks like we would mold our way of doing things around them a little more instead of trying to eradicate them so we can force our way upon the land. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone needs to let beavers take over their place……we can still bring in the same concepts and designs…….like thinning the trash out of the watersheds using H&S …or building small duck ponds along the watersheds.....…although if it were my place and it was a recreational hunting property…….I’d want beavers to inhabit as much of my watershed as they wanted to. It’s preforming a number of functions that makes the whole ecosystem around it thrive better. I think I could find a way to incorporate low water crossings or other solutions than to exterminate the beavers……I tromp across a lot of miles of habitat during hunting season looking for deer and without fail beaver swamps are THE most infested areas for buck sign.

We get too narrowly focused sometimes on trying to manage for just one specie (deer) that we forget that they exist within a much bigger design…..There’s a lot more links in the chain to building a complete “home” or ecosystem to which the deer lives within. If we want things to truly thrive then we have to manage for the whole picture and then pull out that one specie from it that we may want to micromanage a little more intensely. You still need to “paint the rest of the picture” around it though. THAT is where I believe you have the potential of producing the best results.

At the end of the day we are first and foremost soil and forage managers..........

When I say that beaver swamps serve numerous functions above just helping landscape scale water function…..here’s another example probably not thought of very often……They serve as key strategic defense locations for deer to escape from predators like dogs or coyotes……They’re deer and wildlife magnets on many levels. This is a completely different swamp where I tracked for some folks

Got a call to check out beaver activity on a tract where they have flooded a couple of low water crossings and had another hunting club with a flooded low water crossing that limited their access to a good portion of the leased property. Most of the issues I've dealt with involved a road crossing, either a culvert or low water crossing. A few instances where they inhabited someone's fish pond, which has it's own share of problems, but more often than not it's a problem with a road.

I agree with you that road issues are one of the bigger problems. I’m sure each situation would need to be looked at in its own way but I would think we could collectively come up with better ways of adapting to the situation than to eliminate from our properties one of the key species to the whole ecosystem we're trying to promote. The more we eliminate these things just because we want culverts, etc……the more we move away from the original design and how things like our watersheds are suppose to function. I would first look to see if I could re-engineer the road to cross at another point or maybe put a little more into a low water crossing and beef it up more……Something other than fighting to control an animals population that is trying to help me manage the water flow and understory vegetation in my watersheds and promote more wildlife.

On the idea of reclaiming SMZ's and dealing with privet..........You can skip to the 8:30 mark for the "After" once you see what the before looks like....This area is basically just like one of our SMZ's with a small creek branch down the center.......The after may look kinda rough to many in this video but its the ensuing flush of new understory growth that would follow that would be the desirable outcome. It would also make it a whole lot easier to then come in with some H&S treatments if needed to thin out some of the bigger woody trash

It's kind of a slow video but a lot of good concepts talked about including the beavers.....as well as possible options for helping restore areas of land.......Pretty cool story also about the old timers hand fishing the creek on this place toward the end of the video

Here's the results..........This is how clover was meant to be grown.......

So its been a couple of weeks now since I mowed.......You can see all of the tender young poke weeds and other plants coming back in a new flush.....These are the same general concepts as in the videos and such above.....just implemented in a different way. Using animals like cattle, goats, and sheep to set back succession you would have whole paddocks coming back in a flush of new growth rather than strips like where I've mowed. Imagine if we scaled this up and were doing it in 10-20 acre strips where you moved in 3-4 day increments.......

A really important principle to understand with that last picture is what happens after a plant has been bushhogged or grazed in that manner. It responds by using stored energy reserves in its roots to put back out a new flush of foliage……However, a plant can’t continue to do this over and over again without a recovery period because it has to replenish those energy reserves through photosynthesis first…….And in order to do that it needs leaf area and time. This is why you don’t want to heavily mow or graze the same area continuously without rest. You’ll change the whole dynamics of the plant and soil community by doing so.

This area has been “mobbed” by the deer……It’s near a mineral lick and concentrates their activity. I’m actually not too far away from a natural balance of the deer setting back a lot of the succession just like goats would. It’s just that they don’t always concentrate where you want them for the duration of time you want them there. I still have to use other methods for some areas. Feeders are a good way of concentrating the deer in some of the same manners and using them to accomplish some of the same effects…..Just move them around to new areas periodically and allow the old areas to recover. I've seen this effect happen through just pouring out corn on the ground too......

If anyone in this world needs some Beavers it's you. Hope you get some of your furry little want-to-be friends to help you with your "habitat improvement" goals.

I don't know how you have enough sense to get out of the rain, if you even do have that much.

Nice weeds.

Me too..........

This is a little bit of a spin-off related to the same topic of “water”……But something that always has me scratching my head wondering why we don’t put two and two together more revolves around rainfall. If you watch over time you’ll see post after post after post where we talk about rain and weather and we say the same things over and over and over…….”Man, it sure came a frog strangler!”…….”We’ve had too much rain, I’m tired of it!!!!”……..”It’s dry as a BONE!!!!”……..”It ain’t rained in 3 weeks!!!!”…….

How many discussions do have in comparison though about the days when it rains “just right”???.........Rarely………About 1 out 10 weather related events are gonna be “just right”……..the rest are gonna be heavy downpours or heat and drought………..So why then do so many folks manage in a manner where they need everything to line up “just right” instead of manner that buffers against the extremes??......

One of the most important concepts the guy talked about in that last video is where he says that

"they may use fire annually to impact 1/3 of a unit but they will impact 100% with the cattle and how doing this doesn’t confine or put the mother’s and young chicks in a box……It creates a mosaic of different successional stages of plant communities across the landscape that the birds can then pick and choose from"…..

I think about what PCP said in raising young turkeys and how he thinks they need a certain height and type of grass for the first few weeks……Taking that into consideration and the fact that your quail and turkey chicks are probably gonna be hatching out across a matter of weeks and maybe even a couple months…….then having that constant mosaic of plant communities at multiple stages (plant heights) would in my mind offer the best possible habitat situation for optimal survival rates……In other words, you’ve got an optimal stage of plant community growth available to them at all times for whatever stage of growth they may be in from egg to adult . They have lots of options. That is the concept the guy is talking about in the video

I’ve watched a bunch of these videos now on how folks are managing the land for wildlife with cattle and there’s a number of different methods being used to promote the same concepts and ideas. Taking all of it into consideration, I think maybe the simplest manner for achieving the desired results for wildlife would be ……if let’s say we have 3,000 acres total……we divide that into 3 paddocks of 1,000 acres each and then rotate a low stocking density of cattle annually from one to the next just letting them roam the paddock as they choose. In other words you would have one 1,000 acre paddock that was “this year’s” to be actively managed by the herd and then you would move over to the next 1,000 acre paddock next year and so forth…….This would create that nice interspersed mosaic of successional habitat types that suites the needs of the deer, turkey, quail, etc… with the least amount of input and hassle. I still see a time and place for more intensive management where needed but all of that daily moving stuff seems like overkill if producing wildlife habitat is the main goal and you aren’t worried about maximizing cattle production so much.

Plus all of that blocked off mob grazing way of doing it is still putting your successional units each in a box so to speak just like the guy was talking about in the video with the small fire unit on his ranch…..For example, if you blocked off that 1000 acres into 10 units and rotated between them then it would create 10 different stages or heights of growth…..However, level 10 may be ½ mile from level 1 and so forth….An animal like a quail needs as many stages of them as possible within a 30-40 acre area..... and that is the more "natural form"....It would look more like abstract art than nice neat lines

If you just let a light stocking rate of cattle roam a 1,000 acre paddock then you would have a much more interspersed mosaic of all of those same stages of plant growth growing together versus everything being laid out in block fashion……This would give more opportunity for all of those stages to intermingle with one another in a small area creating better micro-environments. Just my ponderings on a rainy day anyways........

A story that ties in with all of these same land management ideas…..

I tracked the same buck twice last year for a guy in south Montgomery Co…..When I get there he tells me that he’s pretty sure the buck ran onto the neighboring property but he knew the folks who owned it so all was good…..Well, we start tracking this buck through the guys place and it was a pretty hunting property with some nice pines and bottoms on it…and you could tell that he had a few deer there for sure…...But sure enough though, the buck crossed the line off of his property and onto his neighbors like he thought.

So as we’re crossing onto this other place he starts telling me about this farm we’re going onto and the folks that own it, etc……just chit chatting more than anything……He tells me that it’s about 120 acre farm that the folks ran cows on up until just a few years ago and he reckon they must have just sold them or something because the place had been sitting there with nothing happening for maybe 3 years or so.

Let me tell you what…..it didnt take long to figure out where ALL of the local deer lived around there…..That “grown up” cattle farm was infested with bedded deer. He shot this buck with a bow twice and we tracked it 800 yards the first time and 1,000 the second time and both tracks led to the center of the neighbor’s farm right in behind the pond dam……..That “grown up” cattle farm is no different than what would be the third year rotation of what I described in the last post…..same principles and concepts. That place was a good example of what the results would look like and it was pretty awesome. That 120 acre block was likely holding most of the local deer herd for that little area I was in.