Oregon is winning all the prizes at the moment.

Oregon’s beaver renaissance: Conservation efforts help landowners coexist with the ultimate keystone species

Beavers are making a comeback in Oregon. No, we’re not talking about the beleaguered OSU football team—but the fuzzy, semiaquatic rodent species: the North American beaver.

Beavers are nature’s ultimate “ecosystem engineers,” but the structures they build aren’t always embraced by humans because of threats of flooding or other damage. Now, conservation groups are helping people learn how to co-exist with beavers.

The Mid-Willamette Beaver Partnership is a regional group of partners that works to promote healthy landscapes and communities by restoring and enhancing beaver habitat; addressing beaver-human conflicts with alternatives to trapping; and showcasing positive relationships between humans and beavers.

Where the wild things are

At a remote site outside of Sweet Home, a beaten trail leads to a marshy pond lined with pussy willows. Two men are sloshing through the water in chest waders.

“We are on private timberland in a remote area called Berlin,” said Tyrell Styhl, Ecological Projects Coordinator for the South Santiam Watershed Council. “It’s about equal distance between Sweet Home and Lebanon at the foothills of the West Cascade Mountains.”

Styhl gestures to a long structure of earth and sticks.

“It’s an historic beaver dam. It’s really old,” he explained. “A legacy beaver dam, maybe? It’s been here for decades. It’s about 125-150 ft long, 6 to 7 ft tall, and it retains about a 3/4 to 1 acre pond behind it.”