The state of California has a historically tense relationship with the furry rodent, whose dam-building pursuits can block irrigation channels, flood backyards, fell trees, and overall just become a general nuisance. For decades, state agencies labeled beavers a non-native species, and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife issued hundreds of permits every year for landowners to kill the animals, few questions asked. “California used to be a joke at the beaver conferences because it represented one of the more backward approaches to beaver management in the world,” says Andrew Manning, a beaver coexistence professional, who runs an ecological restoration business in the Sacramento area called Leave it to Beavers.

But in the last two years, the state has begun to turn things around. Beavers have been decreed native, a new beaver reintroduction program has been established—and a wave of funding has arrived to help people learn, and practice, the delicate art of coexisting with Castor canadensis. Now, should you find yourself with a beaver problem, you can visit the Beaver Help Desk, a state-funded web platform run by the Sonoma-based Occidental Arts Ecology and Center, for tips and tricks. After you fill out the form, you will be connected with the next available beaver coexistence professional. Or if you’re looking for a career change, like Staychock, you can also become one. 

Here’s where I started to be worried that everything was going to look too easy.

The second California class of beaver coexistence professionals is set to graduate this July, courtesy of state-funded scholarships. BeaverCorps is—according to the national nonprofit Beaver Institute, which runs it—the only training program in the country that equips students with the fundamentals of beaver-human conflict management. These 15 newly certified graduates will join more than a dozen already at work statewide. 

They’re an “eccentric bunch,” Staychock says. Prerequisites for becoming a beaver coexistence professional do not include beaver experience. “Nobody grows up being like, ‘I really want to work with beavers,’” says Molly Alves, the supervisor of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Beaver Restoration Program. Past careers of beaver coexistence professionals span ecology, academia, and data analytics. The founder of the Beaver Institute, Mike Callahan, spent 20 years as a physician’s assistant before making the switch towards a more beaver-forward lifestyle. 

Beaver knowledge is an achievable goal, I get that. But still, is it a simple slam dunk?

Here’s what you do need—and can learn through the BeaverCorps training: technical savvy with the various kinds of beaver coexistence technology (such as the Beaver Deceiver, the Beaver Back Saver, and the pond leveler, which we will discuss below), a love of the outdoors, and “a real delight in both building things and reading what’s up with nonhuman intelligence,” says Manning. Which is to say, you also like getting into the mind of a beaver. (Like the plot of the movie Hoppers, but less sci-fi.) 

The final skill needed is interpersonal—or interspecies-al—because the beaver coexistence professional acts more or less like a couples’ therapist. But replace the couch with a water body. And replace the two feuding spouses with a fed-up land manager and a cadre of stubborn beavers, who disagree about what happens to the water body. 

In the case of the Cosumnes River Preserve, up the Mokelumne River in the Delta, wildlife biologist Clint Helms wants to drain the water out of the preserve’s 100 artificial wetlands when the seasons change so plants can grow for the fall’s migratory shorebirds to eat. The area’s dozen-some beavers, meanwhile, want the wetlands to stay wet. “They’re triggered by the sound of running water,” Helms says. This means his job, for multiple hours a day every day, every spring, turns into what he calls Beaver Crossfit—clearing beaver dams out of the water control devices that drain Cosumnes’ wetlands.

Mind you this entire article is punctuated with Cheryl’s amazing photos of the Martinez Beavers that had no help desk or beaver-Institute to help them stick around.

For a beaver coexistence professional, Cosumnes is an easy case. At least Helms likes beavers. In most other places in California, a beaver coexistence professional must change hearts and minds before any water flows. “I started working with ranchers, and I realized, man, people really hate beavers,” says David Krawitz-Greenspan, an ecologist who founded Wet Meadows Institute, another beaver coexistence service provider. Krawitz-Greenspan, who graduated from BeaverCorps alongside Staychock last year, says most of his clients are used to getting rid of beavers as soon as they got annoying—as beaver dams flooded client backyards, beavers cut down a client’s favorite trees, and so on. 

But now, before the state issues a depredation permit, CDFW asks that landowners consider coexisting first—which often means going to the Beaver Help Desk. Clients can be “hard-headed and upset” about the extra, state-mandated step, says Krawitz-Greenspan. But once they learn about the benefits of coexistence, he says, many come around. Grey Hayes, the manager of Occidental’s Beaver Coexistence Program, says only about 5 percent of the 70 people who have contacted the Beaver Help Desk so far gave up on beaver coexistence. 

Good are we going to talk realistically about the depredation permits?

For any given problem beaver, based on the state’s 2023 policy change, once a land manager has attempted coexistence, the state is still legally required to hand out a depredation permit. Heidi Perryman, who tracks statewide depredation permits through her Martinez-based beaver advocacy nonprofit Worth a Dam, says permit numbers remain high. Permits that allowed the take of 1,477 beavers were issued in 2025—up from 1,412 in 2024. “Just because the [Beaver Help Desk] is there, [that] doesn’t mean people come to the desk,” says Perryman. At Cosumnes, Helms hasn’t convinced rice-farmer neighbors that beaver coexistence is worth their while. “We invited them to the training last year,” Helms says. “Crickets.”

Nearly 20 years ago, Perryman fought to convince the City of Martinez to install California’s first flow device to save a family of beavers that had moved in. They flew out a beaver coexistence professional from Vermont for the installation. “I’m a child psychologist. I worked with prisoners, I worked with child molesters, I worked with really difficult people,” Perryman says. “The hardest thing I ever did was save the beavers in Martinez.”

Count this among my favorite paragraphs ever written. when I read this my life suddenly makes a little sense.

But beaver coexistence professionals can count on the field expanding as beavers do, and as “beaver believers,” like Perryman, continue to spread the good beaver word. Alves, who’s leading beaver reintroductions, is bullish. “We need hundreds and thousands of [beaver coexistence professionals],” says Alves. “Coexistence is the way forward.” 

Should you be ready to commit to the beaver life, the hard work ahead may get easier if you see beavers as not just a source of employment, but as mentors. That’s what Staychock, the career-changer, says he does: “Hear the water, address the problem, and take it one stick at a time.” 

If saving beavers was easy everyone would do it. And Every one SHOULD. Keep at it people.