Ron Loehman. Conservation Chairman
conservation@newmexicotrout.org
Visitors driving north on FR 376 just past Porter’s Landing on the Jemez Ranger District of the Santa Fe National Forest (SFNF) may be surprised to see a long black pipe extending across one of the beaver ponds on the Rio Cebolla. It is part of a structure called a pond leveler, or sometimes, a “beaver deceiver.” A pond leveler is designed to set a maximum water level in a beaver pond in situations where higher water can damage nearby structures or property. Beavers are nature’s environmental engineers, and they work 24/7. They have evolved to hate the sound of running water, which motivates them to build their dams ever higher and wider, eventually being limited by food, site topography, and building materials. I have seen the dam complex on the Cebolla in various levels of occupancy since the mid 1980s, so those beavers are persistent.
For some time, road engineers with the Santa Fe National Forest have been concerned that rising water levels in the beaver dam nearest to FR 376 could undermine the road and restrict vehicular movement. Maintaining fire and emergency vehicle passage is a particular concern. Beavers provide important ecosystem services on the landscape so removing them was untenable. Their dams raise water tables, slow down runoff pulses, trap sediment, create pools of deeper, cooler water, reduce erosion, create wetlands, and improve fish and wildlife habitat. Many abandoned beaver ponds eventually become meadows, as can be seen in the long meadows south of where FR 376 crosses the Cebolla at the bottom of Lake Fork canyon.
This past June 20th, about twenty SFNF staff and volunteers from New Mexico Trout and Trout Unlimited met to construct a pond leveler on the Rio Cebolla beaver pond that was deemed the greatest threat to FR 376. The pond leveler is a simple device consisting of 60 feet of 15” diameter PVC culvert with one end submerged in the pond and the other passing across the top of the beaver dam. The level where the culvert crosses the dam controls the water level in the pond. The inlet in the pond is enclosed in a sturdy wire cage that we constructed on-site. This cage around the inlet prevents the beavers from blocking the flow into the pipe. The outlet is high enough above the stream that the beavers can’t reach it to plug it. We don’t know how the beavers will respond. Beavers in other locations where pond levelers have been installed eventually get used to the situation and just go about their business of being beavers.
In the current political environment, the USFS was unable to fund the project, so they asked for help from conservation organizations like ours. This project was funded by New Mexico Trout with additional contribution from Trout Unlimited.