Pennsylvania Cabin Trip Five — Beaver Meadows

A beaver-created meadow. Photo by author.

For our last day of hiking I’d “staked out” another small trail system in Allegheny. This one is called “Beaver Meadows.”

Beavers are one of the few animals to significantly change their environment to adapt to them rather than the other way around. They don’t do so on the same scale as humans, but they do so quite efficiently. The picture above? I can tell there are beavers around somewhere. The width of the creek and the way the forest is set back.

This is a beaver meadow, created by them damming the stream, drowning multiple trees and then eating the saplings that come back up.

This is part of why beavers are a so-called keystone species. A healthy beaver population is associated with:

• Improved flood control and river flow. Beaver dams even out river flow, which reduces flooding and the impact of drought both. In fact, in places where beavers have been eliminated, humans have to do that work…the beavers, of course, don’t need to be paid.
• Improved nesting conditions for waterfowl
• Improved nesting conditions for fish. In Scandinavia, salmon that spawn in streams with beavers present are larger than those elsewhere. (Mmm….salmon).
• Improved soil development and reduced soil erosion, which helps filter pollutants and…