“It’s been so fun to watch all the changes. So many positive things have happened – things I never dreamed of,” Jay Wilde says.

Forest Service officials are excited about the positive changes, too.

“So these beaver dams, they do a lot for streamflow, and they do great deal for fish habitat,” says Brad Higginson, a hydrologist for the Caribou-Targhee National Forest. “As you can see, Birch Creek before was maybe 2 feet wide and a couple of inches deep. Now you can see how deep it is, and the amount of fish that would be these ponds.”

“Another thing these beaver dams do, is they elevate the water table,” Higginson continues. “So you see a lot of storage in the channel. What you don’t see is the storage that’s underneath the land. Now, you have all of that storage that occurs during spring runoff, where there’s excess water available, and in the later summer and early fall, that water continues to feed the stream, which helps the stream flow all year long.”

So far, Birch Creek is flowing for 40-plus days longer than it did pre-beaver.

Moose are among the many species of wildlife that like the extensive wet meadow habitat created on Birch Creek. (Courtesy Emily Wilde)

Wet meadow habitat around the beaver dams diversifies the habitat for insects and birds around the stream.

Fish life has rebounded in a big way, too.

“They’re Bonneville cutthroat trout, a really pure strain,” Emily Wilde says. “So it was really important to make sure they’re doing well. I did a fish count with the Forest Service, and we caught 132 fish in this pond.”

“You get pretty excited to see something this big, it’s just shallow scrappy habitat, they’re just scraping by. And we’ve gone from a fish density of 5 fish 100 meters to somewhere around 70,” Wheaton says.

Adds Lee Mabey, a fisheries biologist for the Caribou-Targhee National Forest, “It’s like a 10- to 20-fold increase in fish out there. Fish need water but they also need habitat. The beaver ponds, they provide a lot of habitat complexity that the stream alone itself doesn’t provide — over-wintering areas, holding areas, deep-water areas, they increase the productivity of insects which means more food for the fish, all the little edge-water habitat, little beaver channels, provide a lot of nursery-type habitat for young fish.”

Color me Happy. Color me tickled pink. Honestly it really shouldn’t be better when a rancher says “beavers are good” than when some tree hugger from California like me does but it is. You know it is.

Jay Wilde’s excellent land stewardship and grazing management also made the beaver project a success, officials said.

“I can’t underscore enough how important it was that good grazing management was a pre-curser to this story,” Wheaton says. “There’s a lot of places where we go to work, and you look at the riparian, and you’ve got to fix the grazing management first. Here, that had been done, and done so well, it makes it really easy to look good.”

Jay Wilde pays close attention to how he manages his cattle. He follows the Allan Savory technique of intensive grazing with excellent results.

Jay follows the Allan Savory system of grazing management, using intensive cattle grazing on small pastures for a short period of time, and then moving on to the next pasture. He shows us an example.

“I grazed this earlier this spring, and we grazed it down really close,” he says. “And this is the recovery we’ve got.”

The vibrant grass growth on Jay’s private land stands in contrast to a different property owner to the north, and Forest Service land to the east.

“We’ve been able to make it look like this without doing any seeding, chemical treatments, it’s all been done by the way we manage the range.”

Jay uses temporary solar fence to create small pastures, and he rotates the cattle to new pastures frequently throughout the grazing season.

I hope Santa is being extra extra nice to Jay this Christmas. And Joe Wheaton. And Emily Wilde. And all the merry men and women at the forest service who made this possible. And the author of this article too who deserves special attention. Steve Stuebner we are loving you too.

Jay closely monitors the range. A series of photo-monitoring pictures shows how Birch Creek has recovered from 2001-2010. At last count, there are more than 165 beaver dams in the Birch Creek watershed.

“It’s been a dream come true for me,” Wilde says.

Jay and Joe Wheaton have held numerous show-me educational tours in the area.

Beavers aren’t perfect; they need to be managed, Wilde points out, but they have a role to play as a keystone species.

“I grew up here hating beaver, always getting in irrigation ditches, one thing or the other, creating problems. That was the mentality back then,” Wilde says.

“We have to think of beavers as our friend instead of our foe,” he continues. “It’s what you have to call a paradigm shift. There’s a lot of people who changed their mind. They decided for these watersheds to be healthy, you need beaver.”

Now Wheaton takes Jay on the road for educational workshops about restoring streams. There’s a big need for more stream-restoration projects, and it’s a powerful thing for landowners to lead the way.

“I would love to replicate Jay’s story thousands of times over,” Wheaton says. “Jay has turned into a dear friend. He and I have done workshops in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Nevada, and Idaho. Jay, telling the story, to his neighbors, to other ranchers, this is what it means to him and his operation, it’s been huge, it’s inspired a lot of people.”

“I think there’s a chance that this will start growing really quickly,” adds Emily Wilde. “It’s incredible easy to implement. It can be pretty widespread if you want it to be.”

Ohh be still my heart. I love this. I love every single sentence and and quote. I love the punctuaton. Who ever you’re friends with that can NOT understand for the life of them why you’re so crazy about beavers, send them this.