I’ve been in the beaver biz a long long time, I’ve seen folks amused, curious, frustrated, angry, or protective of beavers all across the hemisphere and beyond. But there are a few things that really surprise me and make me tear up. Reading about beaver benefits in the NYTimes, watching our beaver story on London TV, and getting in the congressional record all spring to mind.

But this surpasses all of them.

First a little background. Years ago when Mike Callahan finished his beaver solutions DVD one of his first buyers was the ‘Skunk Whisperer’ from Oklahoma. He’s a remarkable wildlife defender that really wanted to know how to solve beaver problems so that folks would be able to stop killing them.  He watched the video, talked to Mike, and learned about flow devices. And he waited.

And waited.

Seems no one in the state would hire him to do this work and save beavers. It was much easier to kill them. Never mind the drought. Never mind the fish. Just kill them every time. Ned was committed though. He decided he’d offer to do the installation for free just to show that it would work.

Still he waited.

Turned out, no one in is entire state could see any reason to try coexisting with beavers when it was so easy to shoot them. Really. Even the universities in OK teach classes about how bad beavers are. No one wants them. Not the farmers, or the duck hunters, or the fisherman. They are not welcome.

So you can imagine how surprised I was to find this:

I have a brand new beaver dam!

I am so ridiculously happy tonight you would not believe! Yes, this is the world’s dumbest little beaver dam, built by the world’s most juvenile and optimistic beaver. I will TOTALLY take it! Tonight I went out to the back corner of the property to look for oyster mushrooms. Instead, I found a beaver dam.

I live in central Oklahoma on 40 acres of land that belongs to my inlaws. Nobody has loved this land since before World War II, although there’s been constant activity in the form of a grazing lease and a couple of ancient but still producing oil wells.

There’s only one willow tree on the whole property, which I now plan to make the ancestor of an entire battalion of willows in the service of bank stabilization and erosion control. (My fantasy is that if I plant enough willows from cuttings, maybe some day the beaver will come back, build dams, and turn my dead ravines into beautiful pools. There’s beaver sign on this land — cut stumps — but none of it’s newer than ten years old.)

Late last summer I came upon one beaver stump near the property that was fresh enough that the chips were still visible by in on the ground. But the chips and the cut were weathered and grey, several months old at least.

Then today I was on county road that crosses the stream that’s in our ravine. The place where the road crosses is about 50 feet upstream from our property boundary, and it’s a culverted ford where the road surface serves as a shallow spillway when the water level is up, as it has been lately. Right in the middle of the road, left by the steam water, I found a fresh-cut beaver food stick!
That dumb little dam I found tonight is less than 24 inches high. It won’t survive the first rain event, I don’t think. I imagine it’s built by one juvenile beaver. But you know what? There’s a pond behind it that extends more than 200 feet up the ravine. And if you look closely at my blurry photo, there’s a black mark at the far end of the dam. That’s water, soaking upwards into dry soil. That’s my dumb little beaver dam already rehydrating the landscape.

It’s wintertime. I hope there are two beavers, busily making a whole family of beavers. That dam won’t survive the spring flood, but i want them to build it back six times as high.

I have felt for some time that given the available resources (not many), beavers were our only hope of rejuvenating the deeply-notched ravines that cross the middle of our property. I don’t care how many trees they eat — we weren’t using those trees anyway.

We have a beaver dam! My glee is probably out of proportion, but it’s just as real for all that. We have a beaver dam!

Dan from Oklahoma! Excited about beavers! As if it wasn’t enough to stumble on the excitement of the sole human glad to have a beaver dam on his property in OK, other folks actually responded to him with excitement on the same page! It’s a permaculture forum so folks were from all over, Michigan, British Columbia, Wyoming, Nevada New York, Idaho and one from Texas! And the responses weren’t “ew those rodents cause disease, kill it” or “this is the kind of dynamite you need to blow up that dam“. They were “Oh that’s wonderful! Beavers are so good for the water and land! Here’s a website I found on how to keep them!”

Honestly, it was like the entire internet was my Easter Egg Hunt and I just found the winning golden egg.

The post was dated 8 months ago, so of course I wrote Dan  and asked about the dam. He wrote back that it failed in some hard rains and the little builder hadn’t been back unfortunately. But he was still eager to attract more and was thinking about planting willow along the bank to get them started. This morning another fellow from Las Vegas wrote how excited he was that the thread had started up again because so many states were using beavers to help save water.

So it turs out, some folks in Oklahoma are excited about beavers after all. I can’t wait to tell Ned.