The press loves itself some beaver reintroduction. I’m not sure what exactly about it grabs their fancy. Any easily photographable moment they don’t have to wait for I guess, or a classic story of redemption, but from the Lands Council to Molly Alves and the Tulalip tribes, we’ve seen it again and again. In the New York Times. In the Washington Post. In the Smithsonian, Even in the Wall Street Journal. The Press loves stories about releasing beavers.
Even the ones that got away.
In 2019, a small group of biologists trekked to a shallow pond in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument carrying heavy burlap bags. Jacob Shockey, executive director of the Beaver Coalition, set his bag on the ground, and out popped a beaver. Docile, soft brown, and surprisingly large, it waddled toward an opening in the reeds and slid into the water, suddenly graceful. The group watched hopefully as the beavers, all rescued from the same suburban field in Medford, explored their new home.
The pond, one of the Parsnip Lakes, is also home to a rare amphibian called the Oregon spotted frog. The frog needs open water to lay its eggs, but since beavers were trapped out over a decade ago, the pond had been leaking water, and cattails were taking over. The biologists hoped this relocated beaver family would reverse those trends.
It’s hard to believe that such an unassuming creature can shape entire watersheds. Beavers and their constructions impound, clean, and slow the flow of water; fix eroded banks; create habitat for fish, birds, and bugs; and even mitigate climate change.
Unassuming? Who you calling unassuming! Beavers are so import they deserve to be plenty assuming. We should throw a fricking party whenever anyone spots them on their land. It’s like winning the beaver lottery to have them on your property.
With the Beaver Coalition, Shockey and his partners hope to drive this message home, in part through storytelling and demonstration projects on a variety of lands—private and public, urban and rural, ranch and forest.
“Our goal is to help facilitate a paradigm shift in how people interact with beaver,” says Shockey.
Thanks to a cooperative agreement between the Beaver Coalition and the Bureau of Land Management, Shockey is working with ecologist Charlie Schelz on a plan to “re-beaver” the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in southwestern Oregon. A convergence of three mountain ranges has created a tapestry of landscapes in the region, from cool north-slope forests and sunny oak savannas to spring-fed meadows and rocky scarps. Although the monument is biologically diverse, its lands are not pristine. Beavers, once abundant, now persist only at the fringes, and as a result, many wetlands have dried and degraded.
Paradigm shift. I like that. I never use that word but I like it. I guess the story of Martinez happened backwards. We felt differently about our beavers and that caused us to learn new things and try something different that happened to work and make a big difference in our town. In Oregon Jakob is hoping that people learn new things and that will cause them to feel differently about beavers.
It’s worth a shot.
The beavers Schelz and Shockey relocated to Parsnip Lakes in 2019 didn’t stay. Maybe they were trapped (Schelz is lobbying for a monument-wide beaver trapping ban). Maybe they were eaten by cougars. Maybe the early snow shocked them downstream. But that same year, Schelz and Dr. Michael Parker, the biologist who first discovered Oregon spotted frogs in the pond, built some low-tech structures there. They cut willows and dogwood branches and drove them into the ground at the pond’s outlets. They wove more branches around the posts. The branches sprouted and grew. The water level came up and stayed up, even during last summer’s soul-crushing drought.
Schelz is optimistic that beavers will eventually thrive there. He says, “If we create the right conditions, the beavers will come.”
The beavers will create the right conditions. You just need to provide the tools so their hard work can pay off. Enough willow, No trapping. A workable amount of water. Every place they live they view as a starter home. A fixer upper that they will need to repair day after day.
Beavers invest in real estate and home restoration. Extreme makeover. Beaver edition.
Jakob Shockey, founder of the Beaver Coalition, has spent years researching and working to preserve, restore, and understand beaver habitats. He discusses with Bret the rarely discussed impacts of Beavers on all aspects of our world, and how we have thrown this equilibrium out of balance by trapping beavers and industrializing north America with little regard for preserving the factors that made it as hospitable as it has been.
