Years ago, and I mean more than a decade, I befriended filmmaker Mike Foster who was following the beavers of the San Pedro River. He was one of the few folks I knew at the time who had spent as much time as I had watching beavers. Our correspondence eventually tricked off as I got more involved in the beaver community and apparently the beaver population did too. Because this morning I came upon this headline:

Dam shame: Beavers face second extinction on San Pedro River

Twenty years after their triumphant return, beavers have nearly vanished once again from the San Pedro River.

No beaver dams have been recorded within the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area for the past three years, and only a few individual animals have been spotted along the river 85 miles southeast of Tucson. Experts fear the remaining population is now too small to sustain itself.

“There are beaver down there. We don’t know how many, but there has been a decline,” said Scott Feldhausen, local district manager for the BLM. Officials from the Bureau of Land Management and the Arizona Game and Fish Department said they simply don’t know why the animals are disappearing or how many of them might be left, because they long ago stopped monitoring the population.

And stopped paying Mike to film them. It’s hard to imagine beaver not being hardy enough to survive, but maybe they’re being killed? Or maybe climate change made their lives harder? And maybe they would have preferred BDAs along that river to help them get a foothold on a landscape that has been without them for 300 years?

The bad beaver news comes as state and federal wildlife officials are studying whether to introduce beavers into another Southern Arizona watershed, Las Cienegas National Conservation Area near Sonoita.

An early version of the plan reportedly called for as many as nine beavers to be turned loose along Cienega Creek, within the 45,000-acre conservation area.

An environmental assessment of the proposed release was on track for completion late this year or early next, but Feldhausen said he is considering shelving the project as a result of questions raised by the Arizona Daily Star about the status of the San Pedro population.

He said his agency has not followed through the way he thinks it should have when it comes to monitoring beavers on the San Pedro, and he doesn’t want to see that happen again.

“If we are going to do these efforts in the future, we are just going to have to make sure the time and effort are worth it,” Feldhausen said. “It’s incumbent on us to find out if it was successful or not, and if not, why not.”

Maybe from a bureaucratic point of view you need to monitor your project, but from a beaver point of view you most likely don’t. They’re going to survive or die off whether you count them or not. I definately thin BDA’s would improve their odds, though.

A growing number of ecologists and environmentalists now celebrate the animal for its role as a keystone species and a restoration specialist for damaged landscapes. Simply by doing what comes naturally to them, these furry engineers improve the overall health of watersheds and create new habitat for a host of other species, beaver backers say.

The beaver’s contributions to nature were chronicled last year in Ben Goldfarb’s award-winning book, “Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter.”

Now the animals and their advocates are the subject of a documentary called “The Beaver Believers,” which premiered in Tucson late last month at a fundraiser for the Watershed Management Group.

About 250 people turned out for the Sept. 27 screening. The beaver-themed event raised roughly $15,000 for the conservation group’s riparian restoration work in and around Tucson.

Watershed Management Group Executive Director Lisa Shipek said she didn’t know anything about the plight of the beavers on the San Pedro until someone mentioned it during a panel discussion before the movie was shown.

“It was surprising for sure,” Shipek said. “There have been positive impacts from (the beaver’s) reintroduction … but I think we’re still learning. That’s why we need to keep tabs on how they’re doing in the watershed.”

I don’t have a lot of tolerance in my heart for people who say they didn’t know how good things were until someone came in and told them they were valuable, BUT I’m glad Ben and Sarah are making an impression. I guess sometimes you need to “antique road show” your environment to find out that that river left to you by your great great grandfather is actually worth something!

“Oh that old thing is valuable? We’ve been using it for years to keep cans in!

Mark Hart, spokesman for the Arizona Game and Fish Department in Tucson, said the agency followed the beavers for the first five years or so, but it is not a species they generally track. Once the population seemed to be established, they turned their attention elsewhere, he said. “As far as we were concerned, the reintroduction had taken.”

So where have all the beavers gone since then?

It’s a question Feldhausen said the BLM hasn’t even tried to answer at this point.

Some speculate that drought and groundwater pumping have reduced the river’s flow, leaving the mostly aquatic creatures with little more than stagnant puddles of warm, dirty water during the summer months.

Others suspect the beavers are being wiped out by mountain lions or even poachers.

Ironically, perhaps, the BLM just approved a new resource management plan for the national conservation area that opens much of the San Pedro to beaver trapping under Arizona Game and Fish regulations, though Feldhausen said he doubts there are enough animals left to attract serious trappers.

GEE YOU THINK THAT MIGHT HAVE HAD SOMETHING TO DO WITH IT? I mean, in addition to the fact that you drained their watertable and that probably affected the riparian tree diet, and without food or shelter  my population would decline too.

Filmmaker and naturalist Mike Foster thinks what’s happening to the beavers could be part of a normal population cycle and that the numbers will rebound on their own.

“They’re pretty tenacious. I would be surprised if they’re gone completely,” he said.

AGREED! Wonderful to hear from Mike. People who spend time actually watching beavers know a lot more than we give them credit for.