SHAVER LAKE – It would be an understatement to say that Kevin Swift loves the outdoors. Swift, slender, goateed and with a dirty blond ponytail, has built a company— and career —out of emulating a furry, charismatic woodland mammal.
Here’s a hint: he forages for tree limbs and mud to build dams.
“We’re pretending that we’re beavers,” Swift said. “A thousand percent.”
Swift restores meadows and other habitats that have been damaged and destroyed. On a recent day, he stood at a meadow he helped to restore, just a few miles above Shaver Lake in the Sierra Nevada.
In 2020, Lower Grouse Meadow was decimated by the Creek Fire. It’s hemmed in by barren hillsides and blackened, denuded pine trees. But here, gravel and sloughed off curls of desiccated bark give way to grasses, purple wildflowers and buzzing pollinators.
It’s like a strip of black-and-white film that’s been colorized.
“It’s so darn cool I can’t stand it,” Swift said. “To be in something like this that just got absolutely wrecked and see it responding so fast, the recovery’s amazing.”
Recovery here involved “process-based restoration,” a technique of using available materials like branches, rocks and sediment to mimic natural structures and processes. Beaver dam analogues, as Swift said they’re technically called, are just “dirt lasagna” — branches and mud, laid in alternating layers and stomped together.
“It’s super simple,” he said. “A poor but evolving human version of what beavers have been doing for five million years.”
It’s also a part of how indigenous people had been managing Sierra ecosystems for millennia, before colonization and a shift toward fire suppression changed forest management priorities in the twentieth century.
Meadows: beautiful and important
Meadows are distinct from their surroundings by their relatively flat topography and absence of trees, which would guzzle the water necessary for meadows to thrive.
They tend to be beautiful. But they also serve important functions for the health of forests and other nearby ecosystems.
That’s why Swift was contracted to restore this one by the U.S. Forest Service.
For one thing, meadows can help mitigate climate change.
“Recovering meadows sequester carbon, and they can sequester up to six times more than the surrounding forest,” said Karen Pope, a research ecologist with the forest service who’s been studying Lower Grouse Meadow and has been actively involved in its restoration.
The beating heart of a meadow is its water.
At Lower Grouse Meadow, Pope was standing ankle-deep in it, delightedly watching passing fish and frogs. Petite and with an easy, lop-sided smile, she even crouched down to try and catch a tadpole. (She missed, though her agility showed she’d done it before.)
Dams, constructed by beavers or their imitators, are critical, because they help make mini-wetlands. Filling a meadow with water in this way can raise the water table, slow erosion, support wildlife, and serve as a natural fire break, said Pope.
“We want groundwater to rise up, we want surface water to spread out and we want the whole water to be backed up to create…we like to call them green glaciers,” Pope said.
To better understand the role of meadows in the Sierra, it’s also important to know where they are.
So Pope and other ecologists taught computers how to find them from satellite images. Using a form of artificial intelligence known as “machine learning,”they identified thousands of meadows, many never observed before, covering three times more land area than previously estimated.
But most are in bad shape. Many, lost altogether — overgrown, obliterated by wildfire, or destroyed by mining or other industry.
“About 5% are actually functioning in any proper, sustainable, productive way,” said Sierra National Forest Supervisor Dean Gould. “So clearly we have a large task ahead of us.”
Optimism, despite the challenges
Karen Pope is optimistic that meadow restoration can happen on a larger scale.
She recently co-founded a group to promote and carry out this work, called the Process-Based Restoration Network, and she said hundreds of people have already gotten involved.
Lower Grouse Meadow – this little pilot meadow off of Highway 168 – shows what’s possible, she said, and how restoring meadows could benefit the whole Sierra.
“I have to admit that this is the most exciting work I’ve ever done,” she said. “It absolutely makes me feel like I’m not just doing research but actually doing something to help.”
Gould is hopeful, too.
“I'm really putting out a call for folks to get engaged,” he said. “It's fairly low tech, it can even be fairly low cost, all it takes is some people that care and some people that have that vision to see what this forest will be.”
Kevin Swift has that vision. He said he’s built more than 2,600 beaver dam analogues since founding his process-based restoration company, Swift Water Designs, in 2017.
He loves this work. Still, he said, seeing so much degraded land is tough.
“I tell everybody, if there's another way you can make a living, do that, because this is hard on the soul,” he said. But then, a bright green frog the size of a grape hopped out of the grass in front of him and into a stream.
Swift continued his thought: “Or it is, until you see a meadow like this recover. Then it's easy again.”
