In 2019 the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes' fisheries program chose the West Fork of Bannock Creek, at the north end of Arbon Valley, south-west of Pocatello, as a site for imitation beaver dams, and tribal crews built 31 of them along the creek. In the fall of 2019 two beavers were released in the project area. The program reported the work and its first results in the Sho-Ban News of Fort Hall in March 2021.
These articles are recent and still under copyright, so this post retells them in its own words and quotes only short phrases. The paper's web pages carry no year, but their contents date both articles to 2021.
West Fork and its water
West Fork lies north-west of Pauline, where a spring sends cold water into Bannock Creek. The meadows below it were known for good grazing and plenty of stock water, and settlers came early. Gertrude Daniels's desert-land claim in the Big Meadows, patented in 1901, was the first land title in the valley. The creek's water was soon in dispute. In the federal case United States v. Daniels, the 1907 decree kept the Tribes' earliest right to the creek's water and set the settlers' shares, and it still governs the creek. In the later 1930s the United States bought West Fork and Big Meadows land for the Fort Hall project. By the Lusk family's account, Perry Lusk sold his West Fork ranch to the government in the spring of 1939. Much of West Fork now lies within the Fort Hall Reservation. The Pauline and West Fork history, quoting a 1982 account, says that where the West Fork families once lived, only cattle, elk, deer and coyotes remained.
Dams built to look like a beaver's
The Sho-Ban News article was submitted by Zachary Wadsworth of the Shoshone-Bannock Fish & Wildlife Resident Fisheries Program. It says that in 2019 the program, working with Watershed Solutions Inc., "selected West Fork Bannock Creek as a project site" for beaver dam analogs.
A beaver dam analog is a woody structure built to imitate a natural beaver dam. The crews built them in groups of two to five, at places chosen to make the kind of ponds beavers use for refuge, with cover where they could safely reach food. The structures were also meant to improve the creek for trout. By letting the creek spread over its banks, they were to soften the steep banks into a gentler floodplain and to reconnect old side channels that had dried up, the article says, "because of the absence of a beaver population." Side channels give young fish a "safe zone" from larger predators.
Tribal Fish & Wildlife employees built 31 of the structures at different places along West Fork Bannock Creek, using untreated, natural materials. The article draws on a 2019 restoration design report for the creek by Boyd Bouwes of Watershed Solutions.
Trout and two beavers
The program also counted trout. Before the structures went in, it found 19 trout for every 100 meters of creek (about 110 yards). The 2019 count was 23, and in 2020 it rose to 28. The article reports more trout not only in the project area but overall, and in the project area larger fish in the pools and many young fish along the banks. It does not say which kind of trout was counted, or whether the 2019 count was taken before or after the structures were built.
In the fall of 2019 two beavers were released into West Fork within the project area. One goal of the project was to bring back a beaver population to the creek, which the program expected to give more kinds of habitat, more fish and more wetland for other wildlife. The article's pictures are captioned as showing the locations of the structures, Fish and Wildlife staff building them, and a beaver being released in Bannock Creek. It names Hunter Osborne, the Resident Fisheries Program Manager and Deputy Director, and Zach Wadsworth, Wetlands and Nursery Manager, and thanks the Fort Hall Business Council, Fish and Wildlife Director Chad Colter, Boyd Bouwes and the tribal staff who worked on the project.
The article does not say whether the two beavers stayed, and none of the papers read for this post follow the project past 2020.
A dry summer
Two summers after the beavers were released, the reservation was in drought. On July 27, 2021, the Fort Hall Business Council declared an emergency drought on the reservation. The Sho-Ban News of July 29 reported that cattlemen had been advised to bring their cattle off the range about a month early, and it described a meeting of cattle owners and tribal departments. The Bannock Creek area was discussed there, and it was decided that it was "no longer good for cattle." The Bottoms area was suggested instead, though there was concern that it might not be enough. The report does not say which part of the Bannock Creek area was meant, and it does not mention the West Fork project.
On this site: the Pauline and West Fork area history, the Daniels family of the Big Meadows, the Lusk family, and the Bannock Creek decree of 1907.