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The US is bringing back nature's best

firefighters: beavers
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(Image credit: Getty Images)

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By Lucy Sherriff 11th January 2024

For decades, beavers were

 considered pests – trapped and
shot on sight. Now the attitude
towards nature's best engineers
is changing, and farmers are
working to bring them back.
ay Wilde stared at the dry creek on

J the ranch his family had owned for

decades for the umpteenth time
that week. He was trying to
remember what had changed on the land –
when he was a child, Birch Creek would run
year-round. Now he was lucky if they got six
months' worth of water. Wilde had been away
from his southern Idaho ranch for 30 years,
returning to run cattle in 1995. And the cows
needed water.

"Without water, it was becoming really hard for

me to manage the ranch," Wilde explains. "I
eventually put in a water system for the cows
to drink from, but it seemed wrong to me that
the stream should be drying up. There's a lot of
life that depends on that water."
The issue
puzzled him for
years. In 2006,
up to the Future Earth
Wilde was
to get essential climate news contemplating
hopeful developments in your inbox that dry
streambed,
y Tuesday from Carl Nasman. This
wondering what
l is currently available to non-UK he could do
ers. In the UK? Sign up for about it. "I had
sletters here. an epiphany," he
laughs.
"Suddenly, it
dawned on me that when I was growing up we
always had beavers in the watershed. And there
were no beavers when I came back.
"It got me thinking, beavers had something to
do with it," he says.

A historical hatred

Beavers are vital to ecosystems, as their dam

building habits spread water through parched
landscapes. This can not only help to regulate
the flow of water, it provides another important
service – keeping fires under control. Beavers
are nature's firefighters.

Beaver dams can help improve water quality

which benefits fish and other wildlife
populations (Credit: Emily Fairfax)

Despite their monumental impact on the

environment, beavers were almost wiped out in
the US during the fur-trapping trade. And the
land, like Wilde's, has suffered greatly due to
the decimation of beaver populations.
Attitudes that beavers are a nuisance, because
of the damage they can cause to human-built
structures – such as flooding culverts, the drain
pipes that channel water through roadways
and other structures, and felling trees – also
prevailed long aer beaver fur hats went out of
fashion. For decades, the animals were trapped,
shot, poisoned, and their dams dynamited – all
to eradicate the keystone species from their
native lands. Landowners simply didn't want
them messing with the ecosystem. Since the
battle against beavers began, numbers have
shrunk from millions to thousands.

Now, the tide is beginning to shi, and beavers

are making a comeback.

"From the 1950s until this year, beavers have

been listed as predators in Oregon," explains
Jeff Baldwin, a geography professor at
California's Sonoma University who has
published numerous studies on the advantages
of recolonising beavers in the American West.
"And in Oregon, if an animal is a predator you
can kill it."

A "beaver believer" bill was passed in Oregon

in 2023, changing the animals' status to
furbearers, meaning they cannot be killed
without a permit. The bill highlighted beavers'
role as a keystone species "that serves as
nature's engineer…[Their] habitat has the
ability to provide refugia, stimulate the
recovery of other species, and foster resilience
on landscapes impacted by climate change".
But, the bill wasn't popular with everyone –
especially farmers.

"[The bill] creates an unnecessary and

complicated system of beaver management for
private agricultural landowners," says Lauren
Poor, vice president of legal affairs for the
Oregon Farm Bureau, an agricultural advocacy
organisation. "Our opposition to this needlessly
complicated piece of legislation is no reflection
on the value beavers play in the ecosystem or
the benefits they have on repairing floodplains,
however, the great value of beavers to our
environment is best suited for public lands, not
privately managed agricultural lands."

Once numbering anywhere from 100 to 200

million, their numbers shrank to as few as
100,000 by the 20th Century, primarily due to
the fur trapping trade which erupted during the
late 1600s and lasted two centuries. Thanks to
public support and awareness, the population
has grown to around 15 million.

A drone shot of a beaver-dammed Wyoming

landscape aer a wildfire shows the impacts of
having beavers on the land (Credit: Emily
Fairfax)

Even aer the demand for their fur dwindled,

the killing of beavers continued. "Logging
companies hate beavers," says Baldwin.
"Because beavers like to block culverts. So
there's this culture in Oregon, especially in
rangelands, of killing a beaver whenever you
see it."

A turning tide

Oregon's legislative change is indicative of

what is unfolding across the American West.
For many years, bureaucracy has been a huge
hurdle for pro-beaver groups hoping to bring
back the animals. But the years of "beaver
believer" PR work is paying off.

"There's been a rapid turnaround and increase

in the understanding of the importance of
beavers in our ecosystems," says Peggy Darr,
who runs the non-profit Defenders of Wildlife's
Southwest programme, and has been working
on beaver reintroductions in New Mexico for
the past six years. Darr is talking about the
attitude of government agencies, but also says
the public's perception has shied too. "There
are a lot of misconceptions about beavers, but
that's starting to change." Misconceptions
include that beavers eat any kind of tree, when
they are actually very picky, and that they
compete with farmers for water, when beavers
can in fact bring water back into the
ecosystem.

"We've found that just through opening

channels of communication, understanding the
rural farming community's concerns, and
showing how we can address the negative
things that come with beavers really helps,"
says Darr.

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The floating homes built for floods

Something as simple as installing pond

levellers – dubbed "beaver deceivers" – can
prevent beaver ponds from flooding houses or
other structures, Darr explains. The leveller is a
large pipe with a cage around one end that is
inserted into a beaver dam. The cage means
the beavers can't plug the pipe up, and so the
beaver pond water can't rise above whatever
level the pipe is inserted in at. "A lot of times
we saw they came back the next day and
started patching all around the pipe," says Darr.
"But no matter how much they patch on the
pipe or try to build the dam taller, the water
level will stay at the level of the pipe."

We just have to show people

what beavers can do for other
wildlife and humans – Peggy
Darr
In northern New Mexico, Darr has seen farmers
"drastically" change their perception of
beavers. "They were pretty hesitant, but they
saw first-hand how the beavers provided
sustained, reliable water sources throughout
the year, even during the hot dry summer we
had. To see it is to believe it. We just have to
show people what beavers can do for other
wildlife, and humans."

In December 2022, beavers were released into

the wild in California for the first time in
almost 75 years.

Common misconceptions include that beavers

compete with farmers for water, when they in
fact help bring water back into the ecosystem
(Credit: Getty Images)

State government-level change, like in Oregon

and California, is a great first step, says
Baldwin, but the reality is that public attitude
towards beavers still needs work. In many
states, beavers cannot be relocated, even
across private land – and historically
landowners have simply killed them. "I'm afraid
that on the ground it may not mean as much as
we would like," he says. "There's a lot of
anecdotal evidence of people [in Oregon] just
driving by beavers and seeing them and
shooting them."
 Ongoing hurdles

There are also mountains of bureaucracy,

especially for Native American tribes, for whom
the beaver is a culturally significant species.

Reintroducing beavers is something Kenneth

McDarment, a member of the Tule River Indian
Tribe in California, has been fighting to achieve
for years.

Aer a particularly brutal year of drought in

2014, when the tribe's drinking water reserves
fell to dangerously low levels, the tribe was
desperate for a solution. McDarment turned to
the tribe's ancestors for guidance. "I looked to
our Tribe's pictographs, which have a beaver in
them for answers to our water issues. From
that point on we made friendships and
partnered with many people and organisations
to find a way to start the process to bring the
beaver home to the Tule River."
McDarment
BON COUNT decided to
launch a beaver
project – to
missions from travel it took to report bring back the
tory were 0kg CO2. The digital native species
to his ancestral
sions from this story are an estimated
land, and revive
to 3.6g CO2 per page view. Find out the watershed.
about how we calculated this In 2020, he
submitted a
grant
application to
the US Fish and Wildlife Service for beaver and
meadow restoration. They were successful, and
in 2022, California set aside funds for the
state's Department of Fish and Wildlife to
develop a comprehensive beaver management
plan. McDarment's project became the pilot –
and future poster child – for beaver
reintroduction in California. A date was set –
 December 2023 – to release the first beavers,
but at the last minute, McDarment was told his
tribe would not be the pilot project and
another location had been picked.

"We were bumped out by a different pilot

project and told we would not be getting
beavers this year because now it's too late," he
says. "Once again, the Tule River Tribe is let
down. We expect nothing less of the broken
promises and treaties…because this is the way
that the government has always treated tribes."

The Department of Fish and Wildlife did not

respond to the BBC's request for comment.

The Klamath Tribes in Oregon have faced

similar hurdles, and have instead taken a "build
it and they will come" approach. The tribe
brought in a river restoration crew to do the
work historically done by beavers. The crew has
been constructing beaver dam analogues –
manmade beaver dams – on several streams to
capture sediment and repairing degraded
riverbeds to revive riparian vegetarian, which
will provide a food source for beavers. "It will
take a few years to see a response," says Mark
Buettner, director of the tribes' water
programme, "but we are confident if we create
the habitat and food for the beaver they will
come back."

An aerial shot shows lush, green beaver

habitats in an area scorched by wildfires in
 Wyoming (Emily Fairfax)

The tribes hope that doing so will eventually

boost fish populations, as beavers are known
to improve fish habitats, and therefore help
threatened fish populations recover.
Relocating beavers is the next option – a
lengthy process that involves applying for a
permit from the state. Signatures from every
landowner within four miles (6.4km) of the
proposed site must be obtained, testifying that
landowners have no objection to the new
arrivals.

California's beaver reintroduction programme

is a promising a step in the right direction,
though, says Kate Lundquist, director of the
Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, the
organisation which led the pilot programme.
"We're very hopeful that this is the beginning of
a new era of proactive beaver conservation,"
she says.

Nature's engineers

For centuries, Native American tribes

understood the importance of having beavers
on the land. Not only do the wetland beavers
provide a habitat for other animals, such as
otters, turtles, and fish, they are also extremely
efficient at protecting landscape from
wildfires. Beavers create deep ponds by
building dams, but they also dig long, thin
canals that gradually spread water throughout
landscapes. The slow flow of water allows the
ground time to absorb it, which both
encourages the growth of plants and
flourishing of wildlife, but also acts as a
firebreak as the ground is wet. In fact beavers
are so great at shaping ecosystems, they're
oen referred to as nature's engineers – as
well as firefighters.
Ecohydrologist Emily Fairfax studies how water
interacts with its surrounding ecosystem.
Fairfax examined years of aerial photographs
from Western states where major wildfires and
droughts had occurred. Amid the black,
charred landscape following a destructive
wildfire, Fairfax could see vibrant patches of
green. Her study found that beaver-dammed
riparian corridors are "relatively unaffected" by
wildfire compared to other areas without
beavers, and the animals play a "significant
role" in fire resistance.

"Beavers are a major solution to helping us

adapt to future climate change effects," Darr
says. "They're amazing creatures that can help
us a lot if we just learn to live with them."

We're very hopeful that this is

the beginning of a new era of
proactive beaver conservation
– Kate Lundquist
Realising how important beavers were to his
landscape was the catalyst for Wilde to embark
on a two-year-long enterprise to obtain
permission from the US Forest Service to bring
beavers back to the land. Wilde read everything
he could get his hands on to educate himself
about beavers. It was a stark change for the
rancher, who always considered the animals
pests.

"We have to realise the good they can do for

us," Wilde says. In 2008, Wilde was finally given
the green light from Idaho's Fish and Wildlife
Office to relocate beavers onto his land
(wildlife laws vary from state to state). Aer
several failed efforts to bring in beavers – they
don't always stay, or survive, when they're
relocated – Wilde teamed up with Joe
Wheaton, a fluvial geomorphologist at Utah
State University, who had decades of river
restoration experience. In 2015, the pair built
19 beaver dam analogues to encourage the
next group of beavers Wilde brought in to stay.
And finally, the plan worked.

"It's become a poster child of beaver

restoration," Wilde says. "They've transformed
the habitat."

In 2019, Wilde counted 170 of the formerly-

threatened Bonneville Cutthroat Trout species
in a 100m (328 ) stretch of his creek –
compared to five in the early 2000s. And this
year, for the first time since Wilde could
remember since he was a child, the creek ran
all year long.

Changing public attitude is key to beaver

resurgence, and Wilde now travels around the
US, speaking to anti-beaver ranchers about the
successes he has had. Several of his own
neighbours have already followed suit.

His next goal? Bringing back fire to his ranch –

and Wilde and McDarment, whose tribe has
practiced cultural burning for centuries – are
swapping notes.

"It just tickles me," says Wilde, "I couldn't be

more happy with the way it turned out. It's like
a dream come true."

--

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