LEAVE IT TO BEAVERS

What if we had handed Cobbs Creek over to wild engineers?

Much of the work being done in the Cobbs Creek Golf Course by the Cobbs Creek Foundation is intended to reduce flooding around the creek and its tributaries, including Indian Creek. Human engineers have designed retention ponds and artificial wetlands … kinda like what beavers build. ¶ To be clear, this is a fanciful thought exercise. A beaver-driven restoration of the floodplain is not currently possible given that the lease with the foundation won’t expire for several decades. But maybe the next time a Philly waterway needs to be restored, the beavers can get the contract.

Beavers are the other great landscape engineers in the Philly region, aside from humans. The semi-aquatic rodents, which live in and around the golf course, build dams that back up streams and creeks into ponds. Eventually those ponds fill in with sediment and become wetlands, and the beavers move up- and downstream to repeat the process. The result is a dynamic landscape of meandering flowing water, ponds and marshes. The beaverengineered landscape is a resilient one. When it rains, the marshes and ponds hold water. Beaver dams can shunt floodwater out into the floodplain, which slows its flow downstream (though it can be a problem for human infrastructure in the floodplain).

A beaverengineered landscape might have meant less golf right around the creek, but given the flood control and other environmental benefits of a rich wetland complex such as carbon storage and improved wildlife habitat, maybe that would have been worth it.