Because the beaver isn't just an animal; it's an ecosystem!

Category: Beavers and climate change


There are articles about the installation of BDA’s that fill my heart with dread: clearly when real beavers stroll into the project they will be trapped outright because they’re destroying their trees or ruining their hydrological experiment. But every now and then one comes along and makes my heart sing…

Returning to past practices for future water management

In 2014, John Coffman arrived in Wyoming as The Nature Conservancy’s new steward for the Red Canyon Ranch and quickly encountered an unforgettable lesson. “We were trying to figure ourselves out on some new country and trying to make sure we were on top of getting the hay meadows irrigated. An intern was having trouble with a beaver plugging a headgate,” he says, preventing water from getting to the fields. They opted to get rid of the pesky beaver, as agricultural operations have done for a long time.

The following year, high spring flows washed away bridges and crossings from the fields, forcing Coffman and his team to restore irrigation ditches and pipes, a resource-intensive process. In a different part of the ranch, however, a stream system that still had beavers showed more resilience to the spring flows. “Instead of those streams eroding away, the [beaver] ponds slowed everything down,” says Coffman. “The ponds filled with sediment and are now growing willows and lush grasses.”

Seven years later, during a mid-July visit, Coffman showed me this historic beaver complex, still thriving after those floods. For twenty feet on either side of the stream, floodplains were green with grasses, willows, goldfinches, and a rattlesnake we were lucky to hear first. Coffman chuckled; he had cautioned me earlier that they’re after the rodents abundant in the area. Four beaver dams bridged deep, still ponds. The beavers built with no regard for clean, neat lines or straight waterways—challenging my understanding of what streams should look like.

After the consequential floods in the spring of 2015, Coffman says, “We came to the observation that there were some serious benefits to having beaver dams and beavers in place.” This beaver complex serves as a model for the conditions that he hopes to restore several streams to. Across an increasingly parched and degraded West, land managers and researchers seeking effective and efficient water management solutions may benefit from the same realization. Perhaps, it’s time to end recent antagonism against beavers and instead form an alliance with nature’s most effective, once prolific waterway engineers.

Wha-a-a-a-t? You mean maybe the beavers had the right idea all along? And maybe when you work for the freakin’ Nature Conservancy you should know better than to kill them anyway? Isn’t that funny? It’s almost like beavers know more about how a stream should work than YOU do!

“None of us in our lifetimes have seen how common beavers would have been,” says Niall Clancy, a PhD student at the University of Wyoming surveying fish diversity in beaver ponds. Before the arrival of Western settlers in the early 1800s, there were as many as four hundred million beavers in America, creating wetland mosaics that covered almost three hundred thousand square miles of land in serene greens and glittering blues. Beavers dam up slower streams to form deep moats around their homes, creating refuges not only for themselves, but also for plants and animals that rely on, and co-evolved with, these dam structures. Series of dams spawn floodplains, wetlands, and ponds—so called “beaver complexes.” Sheltered pools of standing water provide safety for young fish, invertebrates, and amphibians. They are also havens for threatened or rare birds, like sandhill cranes. “The more complex the types of habitats you have, the more types of wildlife you can support,” Clancy says. “Messiness is good in ecology.”

Messy can also be how land looks when humans are stewards. “When we think of the past, we need to add Indigenous people,” says Rosalyn LaPier, faculty in the history department at the University of Illinois and enrolled member of the Blackfeet tribe of Montana and Métis. “When the first settlers arrive in the West, what they are seeing are these ecosystems that have co-evolved with plants, animals, and humans.” To survive in water-limited environments, Indigenous communities living between the plains and Rocky Mountains studied and manipulated natural processes. LaPier says that they managed beaver populations to manage water; beaver ponds provided a water source for Native peoples as well as the animals they hunted. Beavers were so important that the Blackfeet considered them sacred and divine. Thus, humans developed a close, symbiotic existence with beavers and their natural worlds.

Isn’t funny how the white man moved in and displaced all the “primative” natives and built their farms and factories and ultimately their universities so that their masters candidates can suddenly report that science shows that maybe those backwards peoples weren’t so backwards after all?

It’s almost like people who lived in harmony with the land for thousands of years knew something we didn’t.

In their places are thousands of miles of down-cut streams like the ones that caused Coffman and his team so much trouble a few years back. In straight, unobstructed waterways, controlling transportation to agricultural fields is the main objective. The force of water travelling quickly does not allow water to collect in the soil or for nutritious sediment to be deposited, so incised banks become unable to support plant life. Without roots to hold the banks together, exposed soil dries and crumbles in the heat of summer, eroding the streambanks.

Braided stream systems shrink to a single water channel, drying the surrounding land. This cycle eats away at floodplains and wetlands, which otherwise accumulate nutritious sediment, retain water underground (resisting evaporation), and promote biodiversity. With nature’s “sponges” gone, water and nutrients wash out to the ocean, leaving behind arid land and lost habitat.

Reconnecting waterways, reducing erosion, and replenishing groundwater is difficult and expensive. When I asked Coffman about solutions for managing and retaining water on Red Canyon Ranch, he emphasized the hefty costs of bringing heavy machinery and hiring engineers and landscape architects. Such disruption could also set back ecological processes, displacing invertebrates, mammals, and birds alike. The integrity of the ecosystem could take years to recover. Not to mention the challenge of maintaining such an elaborate construction when faced with the unpredictable nature of rivers and streams, which change their courses over time. All in the hope of mimicking the effortless effects of floodplains and wetlands.

Nationally, hundreds of millions of dollars have been allocated toward the labor and materials required to develop water resiliency projects in the West alone. These interagency developments prioritize the storage and protection of water in reservoirs and groundwater, as well as the restoration of wetlands and waterways. Though this large sum recognizes the importance of restoring ecosystems, humans cannot accurately replicate natural processes.

“What [modern] restoration practice has done is borrow from empirical observations and produce average conditions. We are crap at designing for variability and complexity,” explains Joe Wheaton, an ex-civil engineer studying nature’s engineers at Utah State University. Nature, he says, does not adhere to averages but is rather unpredictable. The movement of water and how streams change course are challenges that researchers and engineers cannot account for. Unlike scientists, though, beavers instinctually adapt to and engage with the changing courses of water. They foster jigsaw ecosystems, supporting critters that are co-dependent on one another in ways that scientists often overlook and would be hard-pressed to reproduce.  That makes beavers cost-effective tools for maintaining and helping manage the natural water systems that so many people, industries, plants, and animals rely on. For Wheaton, beavers are tools of restoration that engage natural processes, balancing the “mismatch between effort and scope of problem.”

In the most degraded waterways, beavers and their accompanying biodiversity will not return on their own, but we know how to entice them. Clancy’s team facilitates the return of beavers by installing beaver dam analogs, commonly called BDAs). He and his collaborators strategically select for where a beaver’s work is required, targeting heavily eroded streams devoid of life and too deep for cattle to cross. Spanning the width of these channels, they weave sticks and logs, and pack mud to mimic dams. These barriers slow the force of water as it moves downstream while creating pools, the goal being to create a habitat appealing to beavers. Should beavers move in, they build upon and maintain these structures without need for human labor and constant surveillance.

And planting willow right? Lots and lots of willow.

In places where beavers have been reintroduced, ranchers and researchers alike have seen streams flowing anywhere from an extra week to an extra month. Beaver restoration can also replenish groundwater, often a key source for municipal water use. Meanwhile, burying plant materials during the damming process sequesters carbon, preventing it from entering the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas. And in some once-degraded sites where beavers have been successfully introduced, their restoration effectively increased the variety of habitats and the abundance of critters they could support.

Exploring a symbiotic relationship with beavers is still a new but growing practice that has not been without challenges. Coffman says, “Since that situation years ago, we got beavers back creating messes: damming up ditches, plugging up headgates. But we’re trying to approach it a lot differently now.” Rather than treating beavers like nuisances, his management approach centers around the balanced relationship between beavers and stewards. Like Clancy, he is installing beaver dam analogs throughout streams on the ranch—a project that started with five and expanded to over forty structures. Though there are headgates and irrigation ditches where damming is undesirable, Coffman still allows beavers to exist under his watchful eye. After all, early dams can be dug out and individuals relocated—but beavers’ effectiveness in retaining water and restoring floodplains cannot be replicated.

Beavers may not be the ultimate clean-cut solution for our water resource problems. Messy, multi-faceted tools, they challenge the modern concept of controlling water. But researchers and land managers alike have found that nurturing an alliance with beavers, adapting to their activities, and integrating science with natural processes—the way Indigenous peoples have—can help build resiliency in the face of dynamic environmental challenges.

My my my. Beavers are messy little balls of magic. They do grand things in a very cluttered way. This isn’t your father’s concrete channel or shooting stream anymore. It’s a braided wandering tangle of obstructions and sinks. And it’s much much better than you or your engineers could create.

Let it Beaver.


Lately it seems like everyone is just waking up to the idea that beavers perform beneficial tasks. Beavers clean water, they proclaim. Beavers can mitigate climate change! Beavers can make up for the snow pack. Everyone is SO surprised.  I can’t help feeling a little affronted that it took them THIS long to notice.

Where ya been guys?

People in Montana are constructing artificial beaver dams to re-create their ecological benefits and, hopefully, attract the animal back to the area.

The reason they’re doing this is that the ecological benefits of beaver dams have been lost. Going back to the 1800s. Trappers have reduced the number of beavers there. And because the snowmelt is rarer with climate change, with warmer temperatures, with a recent drought, and without beaver dams, it’s actually changed the environment, and made areas less marshy because water runs through more quickly. And there have been several beaver dams constructed by humans to replicate the environmental benefits of dams built by actual beavers. And there’s actually a hope that the existence of beaver dams built by people will help draw back actual beavers.

Goodness gracious! Actually wanting beavers back in Montana? Will wonders never cease? Next think you’ll be telling me is that some farming state thinks they’re worth while.

Beaver dams:             Beneficial for watersheds?

AMES, Iowa – A novel research project investigating beavers and the dams they build is exploring the influence of this industrious, little-known animal on water quality and hydrology (water movement) within Iowa watersheds.

Beck is leading a project to learn more, with assistance from Andrew Rupiper, a graduate student in natural resource ecology and management. Their three-year study, supported by the Iowa Nutrient Research Center, is looking at beaver dams across north-central Iowa’s Des Moines Lobe region, with a focus on dams at two locations. One is along Prairie Creek, at the Smeltzer Farm near Ft. Dodge — a larger watershed almost entirely in row crops, where the stream is more steeply incised, and the water runs faster. The other is along Caton Branch, near Woodward, Iowa — a smaller, wider stream with more tree cover, in a watershed of about 70% cropland. 

“We’re really starting from scratch to try and understand if these fascinating rodents have an appreciable impact on our watersheds, and if so, what it might be,” Rupiper said.

Beck and Rupiper will discuss their study, ”Beavers: Superheroes for Water Quality?” at a free, virtual field day on Thursday, Feb. 9, from 1-2 p.m. The event is hosted by the Iowa Learning Farms in partnership with the Iowa Nutrient Research Center and the Conservation Learning Group.

What in tarnation is going on here!?! You mean the rat trap of those measly rodents that my cousin Asher just blew up on his corn field do good things for the water and soil? Do you have a screw loose? Are you pulling my leg?

Beavers: How Nature’s Engineers Are Making a Comeback

To some, the beaver is an important symbol of North America’s diverse wildlife. Others revere the animal for its productivity. (You’ve no doubt heard the phrase “busy as a beaver!”)

To others, though, the beaver is simply a pest to be dealt with. Over the years, this bucktoothed critter has gained a bad reputation among landowners for its tendency to chew down trees and craft intricate dams capable of stopping a rushing river and flooding agricultural land. 

Although people sometimes complain about beavers chewing down trees, they actually create more habitats than they destroy. Landowners have also voiced fears that beavers can damage valuable salmon stocks in local rivers. Beavers don’t eat fish—though plenty of people think they do—and landowners mistakenly imagine their dams could cause problems.

Well not mistakenly exactly. Dams CAN cause problems. Just like tires can get flats. But smart landowners FIX the problems rather than throw the entire car away. There’s enough good that beavers can do for us that it’s worth a little effort to keep them around.

Not only do beaver-built waterworks create habitats for wildlife, but they also improve water quality and mitigate the threats of climate change, such as drought and flooding. American Indians referred to the beaver as the “sacred center” of the land, because this magnificent critter creates such rich, watery habitat for other mammals, fish, turtles, frogs, birds and ducks.

Maybe beavers are like love itself. Life would be easier without them or if we didn’t need them, but it would be much less rich and rewarding. All in all beavers might just have their uses, but for most of the world they’re still hoping that something better comes along… 


Last night I heard from retired USDA hydrologist Suzanne Fouty that she was working with Adam Bronstein of Western Watersheds Project on the final touches of a letter to president Biden asking him to officially prevent beaver trapping on federal public lands as part of the climate change and biodiversity crisis response. They need support from non profits and professionals to sign on. You can read the letter here, and sign on below.

Dear Potential Signatories,

A coalition of non-profit organizations, scientists and concerned citizens has drafted this letter (also attached to this email) to President Biden asking his administration to issue an executive order banning hunting and trapping of beaver (with limited exceptions) on federally-managed public lands as an emergency climate change response.

Beavers are ecosystem engineers that create rich wetlands offering us an important nature-based remedy for carbon drawdown. In addition to climate benefits, beaver dams and meadows provide vital ecosystem services such as water storage and filtration, natural firebreaks, and fish and wildlife habitat.

State fish and game agencies have failed to sufficiently protect beaver across the country. Banning beaver hunting and trapping is the one single factor that we can control to help their populations grow and recover. The urgency of the climate and biodiversity crises now calls for bold action at the executive level of government.

Sign-on Disclaimer: University and agency affiliations will be listed on the letter for informational purposes only to indicate the credentials of the cosigners.

If you represent an organization or are a scientist and would like to sign on to this letter, please fill out the form linked below by 2/17

Beaver Letter Sign-on Form 

Please forward this sign-on opportunity with your networks.

Sincerely,

Adam Bronstein
Oregon/Nevada Director
Western Watersheds Project

Suzanne Fouty, PhD
Hydrologist/Soils Specialist
retired USDA Forest Service

You can read the entire well-written letter here and please share with your contacts.

Biden Beaver Letter

This year as I was thinking over how to educate children at the festival I thought why just rely on exhibitors, why not enlist their parents too to deliver the message? Teaching them means they can help their child AND learn something in the process. Two birds with one stone? I thought I’d make some kind of primer or cheat sheet that they could use to ‘guide’ their child through the climate change superheroes activity, Yesterday I finished it and shared it on the Facebook beaver management forum.

All ideas usually seem equally good in my head. That’s just how I’m built. It’s only when they get out in the air and sunlight I can see which ones were clunkers and which ones chimed – If I’m lucky. I never expected the response I got for this. 144 likes and 125 people have shared it with their friends so far. (On wednesday over a 1000 if you count my personal page too.)

I guess it educated some folk.

The only one of the six I saw some confusion on was hypoheic exchange. I may tweak that wording a little. But lets just say I’m keeping it. Thanks Erika for those perfect little illustrations.


Raining cats and dogs? Raining goats and elephants more likely. Yesterday was a deluge in every way possible with exciting thunder to boot. Martinez has been relatively lucky compared to some. And all that water overfilling our reservoirs and  rushing down rivers to the ocean makes drills in the point again and again: We need more beavers!

Yesterday’s heart breaking story of the little boy washed away in San Miguel creek in San Luis Obispo county made me remember the sad heroism of our own beaver dams, who stopped the floating body of an old man who had died and slipped into the creek, washing down stream lost to his home and family. I wish there were more beaver dams to help that poor little one who was on his way to school in Paso Robles or at least to bring comfort to his family by letting know where he ended up.

Maybe Martinez and San Luis Obispo have more in common than we think. Because this great upcoming event of the Santa Barbara Perma Culture Network bore an unexpected drop of our name. I only hope things settle enough for it to happen, because yesterday lots of the city was told to shelter in place or prepare to evacuate due to truly unbelievable 6 inches of rainfall on top of already wet soil.

Beavers On the Landscape

Saturday, January 21, 2023 – 18:30 to 20:30

Santa Barbara Permaculture Network

Dr. Emily Fairfax & Cooper Lienhart
Saturday, January 21, 2023
6:30 – 8:30pm FREE

Santa Barbara Community Arts Center
631 Garden St, Santa Barbara CA 93101

Beaver dams are gaining popularity as a low-tech, low-cost strategy to build climate resiliency at the landscape scale. Emily Fairfax

Join Santa Barbara Permaculture Network for an evening with Dr. Emily Fairfax, PhD and Cooper Lienhart as they share their work & passion for beaver, a keystone species that until very recently was vastly underrated as the ecosystem restoration hero it is.

With extended droughts and catastrophic fires plaguing California and the West, in recent years Dr. Fairfax began focusing her research on the impact of beaver on wildfires. Where beaver and their dams and pond complexes are allowed to flourish, water tables naturally rise, and keep the surrounding vegetation and soils hydrated. Dr. Fairfax’s observations on the positive aspects beavers have in controlling wildfires with the wetlands they create, prompted her to coin the phrase “Smokey the Beaver.

Well this seems like a good time to focus on their benefits to FLOODING because it’s going to be foremost on everyone’s mind for a while.

As a part of the evening, Cooper Lienheart, a recent environmental engineering grad of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, will share how as a student he became interested in beaver. Like many young people Lienhart became increasingly concerned about climate change, and learned about wetlands and their ability to act as carbon sinks sequestering carbon, and the role of beaver in creating these wetlands.

Of course beavers and human settlements are often at odds. But in communities like Martinez, CA, where a popular Beaver Festival takes place every year, they have demonstrated these conflicts can be managed with clever strategies, good for the beaver and the community. And with these kind of beaver management strategies come new jobs, especially good for the next generation, many who yearn for positive livelihoods.

Let that be our legacy. We were a testcase for beaver management in the west. And we excelled at our job thanks to Skip Lisle and every one in town who made it a MAJOR news story. To tell a really new story to an unbelieving audience you need to be wildly compelling and shout it from the roof tops over and over.

Dr. Emily Fairfax is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Resource Management at California State University Channel Islands. Dr. Fairfax double majored in Chemistry and Physics as an undergraduate at Carleton College, later earning a PhD in Geological Sciences from the University of Colorado Boulder. She uses a combination of remote sensing and field work to research how beaver activity can create drought and fire resistant patches in the landscape under a changing climate.

Go tell it on the mountain! We will all be there in spirit!

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