Why live with beavers? I can think of plenty of good reasons, and so, apparently, can BEEF magazine in Idaho. Yes you read that right.

Beaver power provides year-long water to Idaho ranch

Beavers? You read that right. Here’s how four-legged engineers helped restore an Idaho ranch.

Jay Wilde summarizes ranching simply: “Cows need two things—something to eat and something to drink.”

He speaks from experience. In 1995, when Wilde started ranching his family’s high-elevation property in Idaho’s Rocky Mountains, both food and water were hard to come by for livestock. Today this ranch is wealthy in forage and flowing streams, thanks to Wilde’s determination, many helpful partners … and beavers.

Oh yeah you know when an article starts off like this it’s gonna be good. Get your coffee and settle in. Remember it was the former director of Beef producer in Oklahoma that gave us one of our finest articles by Alex Newport: “Beavers: The cure we don’t want to take”

Today this ranch is wealthy in forage and flowing streams, thanks to Wilde’s determination, many helpful partners … and beavers.

Wilde was raised on the property with his siblings, where his parents grew grains. Jay had always dreamed of running a cattle operation and began putting in place conservation projects that would provide his livestock with reliable sources of forage and water.

Wilde remembers fishing and swimming in Birch Creek all summer long as a kid, and tried all sorts of tactics to restore year-round flow. Nothing worked. Then one morning over his pre-dawn coffee, it struck him: “Beavers! That’s what’s missing!”

Big grin. Just about nothing is better than a beaver AHA moment. We here at Worth A Dam collect them.

Beavers are some of nature’s best engineers. They gnaw down trees to create intricate dams and lodges as their shelter. In turn, their dams act to slow the flow of a stream, creating ponds that recharge the floodplain and raise the groundwater level. This allows water to trickle downstream long after snowmelt and rain taper off.

At one time, there were enough beaver ponds in the U.S. to submerge California, Oregon and Washington. But decades of trapping and hunting beavers decimated their populations. Thousands of streams deepened and straightened, and many wet meadows, small creeks, and floodplains disappeared across the country.

Many ranchers still think of beavers as ditch-clogging nuisances. But others—like Wilde—now realize that getting rid of beavers also reduces the amount of water available for livestock operations.

“Do we want to eliminate beavers and eliminate the water coming out of the canyons, or do we want to live with the beavers?” asks Wilde. “Keeping beavers around makes good common sense when you get down to the science of it.”

And a rousing chorus of HUZZAH broke out around the land! YES! Let’s listen to a rancher because no one like to listen to the scientists. I mean if the message is the same that works for me.

In 2014, Wilde came across an article about people using Beaver Dam Analogues (BDAs) to create habitat for the rodents before re-introducing them to a watershed. BDAs are simple, low-tech structures that mimic real beaver dams to provide the initial building blocks that help beavers recolonize a stream. BDAs are easily built by hand using mud, cobble, and root wads, or by weaving small branches through posts pounded into the stream bed.

Wilde promptly called up the two professionals mentioned in the article, who worked at Utah State University and Anabranch Solutions. They helped Wilde build 19 BDAs in 2015. Wilde then partnered with the USFS and Idaho Fish & Game to relocate five beavers into Birch Creek—who happily set up shop using the BDAs as home base.

The next year, Wilde hosted a training workshop on beaver-assisted restoration for over 40 natural resource professionals from across the West. Sponsored by the NRCS-led Sage Grouse Initiative, his ranch was a model for why it’s worth investing in low-cost, low-tech methods for restoring streams on private agricultural lands. Workshop participants helped build

First the BDA’s then the beavers then the water then fish. You see how it work.

“When you see the results, it’s almost like magic. It makes the effort worthwhile,” says Wilde.

Re-beavering this Idaho ranch created more water for livestock. And it also resulted in more water for fish—Birch Creek’s Bonneville cutthroat trout populations are 10 to 50 times higher in the ponded sections of the creek than before beavers returned.

By restoring these natural engineers, Wilde’s ranch and its surrounding public lands now boast luscious wet meadows with nutritious forage, healthy riparian habitat for wildlife, and floodplains that are more resilient to fire, drought, and erosion.

Now, Wilde is spreading the word about the benefits to livestock producers of using beavers to fix streams. He’s presented at dozens of workshops and talked to hundreds of other ranchers about what’s possible when you “get onboard with beavers.”

Perfect Jay. We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. What a great way to spread the word. I wish you could come to the beaver festival and talk to folks about what you’ve done. Come to think of it I wish there could be huge displays at the festival about all the good things folks are understanding beavers can do.

Maybe I was a little bit right about late October. Yesterday we got some wonderful beaver articles. I’ll save the delight from Cows and Fish in Alberta because we already know about them. This was a bigger surprise from Idaho of all places!

Beaver bring back Birch Creek watershed

Necia P. Seamons

Two beaver families are making homes in Birch Creek. It may not seem to be earth-shattering news to some people, but the tale of their return to the creek reveals several powerful concepts. The critters represent a decade of effort and many more years of personal growth on the part of one dedicated Mink Creeker, and the benefits his efforts will have for people that will never know him.

Twenty-one years ago, Jay Wilde returned to the home he had been raised in as a child– the last house before the Forest Service border on Birch Creek. He always had a dream to raise and sell cattle, but life had taken him away from his hometown and his dream.

“I had to do something to get the stream flowing so the cattle could utilize the feed the land was producing,” he said.

Now you might have guessed already how this ends. But read on anyway and follow his misguided effort first to “Rip out all the cottonwood trees because they were too thirsty” and eventually go to Utah state to ask their advice. The article doesn’t say but I confirmed this morning that lucky for all of us he happened to connect with Joe Wheaton and Nick Bouwes, who suggested the answer might just be a little more flat-tailed than he suspected.

But something was bothering him. He remembered from time he spent in the hills as a boy in the ‘50s that water should be running year round from Birch Creek.

“There were all sorts of plants and animals that depends on that stream having water in it. …We just can’t throw our hands in the air and walk away. That’s not fair to all of the life that depends on that water,” he thought.

“One morning in 2006 I was sitting at my kitchen table at 4:30 a.m., waiting for the caffeine from that first cup of coffee to kick in when it dawned on me… there was no beaver activity in the drainage,” he wrote.

“My family and friends spent much time fishing, swimming, and watching the activity in the beaver ponds. Now in 2006, those ponds are all gone and there’s no sign of the rodents that built and maintained them. Could it be that the absence of those critters with their ponds and harvesting the woody species in the riparian areas was contributing to the demise of our stream?” he wondered.

Ooh ooh I know! Call on me! Now shhh Heidi, sometimes people need to work out answers for themselves. Jay was on the right track and he just needed a little nudge to get there.

The questions fueled further research and Wilde contacted anyone he could find with knowledge of beaver and their impact on an area. What he discovered was that when beaver dam up an area, the water table around the dam is raised significantly. The ground acts like a big sponge that keeps the water cool and slowly releases it as the season progresses.

“We don’t actually see any more water created. What we see is a change in the timing that it is released,” he wrote.

Through much trial and error, including the disappearance of 13 different beaver he transplanted in Birch Creek, over several years, Wilde said he finally found the right group of hydrologists, biologists, and agency directors to help him create an environment in which the beaver would stay. (He estimates over 100 people have been involved in the entire repopulation process.)

In 2014, they created 19 mini-dams to encourage the beaver families they imported. He discovered that beaver are highly family-oriented and won’t stay put without their complete family unit,

So Nick and Joe was the one that introduced those beavers and gave him ideas about BDAs to make the water more beaver friendly. And eventually it all paid off.

Last year, beaver were introduced to the area again, and this time, they were still there when Wilde returned last spring to look for them. The creatures had transformed one grassy meadow into a series of terraced dams, with water flowing out each side of them.

The beaver have built up some of the temporary dams, ignored others, and built their own dams. They are in the process of building a lodge on one of them.

Now, in late October, water is still running in Birch Creek and native cutthroat trout have found their way into the dams.

Last fall, he and some of the professors from USU held a meeting to let his Birch Creek neighbors know what was going on.

“About 20 people came,” said Lyla Dettmer of the Franklin Soil and Water Conservation office. “

And Scene! That may be the very best journey of realization I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a few I can tell you. This is a lovely article to tuck away and read again or share with your disbelieving friends.Thanks to the beautiful writing of the editor Necia P. Seamons, it also has the very good sense to end with a paraphrase of a quote we will recognize from our good friend John Muir.

Wilde has learned much in the pursuit of improving the Birch Creek watershed, and his efforts offer much in understanding the impact one person can have, the power of education and the importance of a lifelong pursuit of education, the value of knowledge carried by a community’s older residents, the effectiveness of cooperation, and that all life is connected.