Technical Session 23: Good Things Come in Small Mammal Packages

Beaver dammed road culverts are a significant problem across North America, damaging road infrastructure, creating safety hazards for the motoring public, creating hazards for road crews, and diverting limited road maintenance resources. As the North American beaver population has increased so hasn’t the number of conflicts with our transportation infrastructure.

Historically nuisance beavers were trapped and killed when road flooding problems occurred, and road crews were left to clear the damming obstructions. This can be a heavy burden on a highway department’s manpower, machinery and budget.

In contrast, it is now widely accepted that the dams that beavers build can provide immense ecological benefits to wildlife, stream health, clean water, and reducing wildfire damage. So whenever possible it is desirable to keep beavers on the landscape.

Fortunately, we can now protect our infrastructure and coexist with beavers at the same time. Properly designed and installed water control devices (e.g. flow devices, Beaver Deceivers™) can protect nearly every road. They are cost-effective, long-term methods to prevent infrastructure damage by beavers. As a result, many State and Municipal Highway Departments are now utilizing these best management practices to protect infrastructure from damage, saving time, money, and improving road and worker safety in the most environmentally friendly manner possible.

The presenter Mike Callahan is the President of the Beaver Institute. Since 1998, as the owner of Beaver Solutions LLC he has nonlethally resolved over 1,750 beaver – human conflicts with these innovative devices. He will share his wealth of experience resolving beaver conflicts for local and state highway departments, and how audience members can learn to do it also.

The Beaver Institute offers extensive Self-Help instructional materials as well as a professional online course for those interested in doing this work professionally. Since 2019 Mike and Beaver Institute have been training professionals across North America how to be successful doing this work themselves.

 Wonderful Mike! How did it go? How many attended? And who paid attention? I’ve had a few emails in the past work from shy CDFW workers who found the beaver summit online and are working their way through the presentations. Interesting they are frustrated with CDFW’s beaver posture overall and one even thought we were close to a tipping point.

I’ll believe it when I see it.

I worked yesterday on the last slide for the Colorado Beaver Summit. In it I am trying to show our goals for California’s future management of beavers. What do you think?