High Country News is Beaver-friendly terrain. It’s the old stomping grounds of Ben Goldfarb and many of his friends. I’m never surprised to see a good article out of them, but I can’t remember seeing a beaver letter to the editor before. Especially from a Nevada neighbor who came to the beaver festival!

Letters to the Editor, December 2025

DON’T FORGET THE BEAVERS!

In the article “Conservationists make an (intentional) mess in Mendocino” (November 2025), there is no mention of adding beavers to the mix to improve the watershed. They provide a lot more benefits to the salmon than just playing with heavy equipment and logs.

Ponding behind beaver dams provides cover, food and slack water for the young salmon to thrive. They also improve groundwater levels and generate hyporheic flows, which tend to stabilize the water temperatures. They tend to regulate flows by storing water during high flows and slowly releasing it during periods of low flows. They reconnect the streams with their floodplains, which improves this buffering effect and also improves the riparian habitat for both vegetation and other wildlife. This encourages resilience to fire events, providing refugia and even fireabreaks.

You tell em’ Jim! Great points!

Best of all, the beavers will continuously maintain their work. They will rapidly repair their dams, dig canals to spread the water out on the floodplains and provide multi-threaded channels.

Beaver and salmon coexisted for millennia, and it is said that beaver taught salmon how to jump. 

Jim Shepherd
Sparks, Nevada

WONDERFUL Letter! Maybe there should be a big lineup of believers with scorecards like iceskating. This would be 9.9 all the way!