With their penchant for transforming their surroundings, humans and beavers tend not to see eye-to-eye as neighbors.

When their proximity becomes too close for comfort, Jakob Shockey aims to “help the monkeys outsmart the rodents” without resorting to traditional lethal methods.We’re pretty good at it if we put our minds to it,” he said.

As executive director of the Project Beaver nonprofit, Shockey has found both species can benefit from nonviolent approaches to resolving conflicts over territory.

I have to say Jakob, you get yourself and beavers some mighty good press. Something about the “Sorry he’s married, ladies” tone of this piece reminds me of the admiring tones we used to only see in certain trapper profiles.  You have become the healthy outdoor face of co-existence, and thats saying something.

By using peaceful strategies, humans can mitigate the damage beavers cause while directing their energy toward improving stream health and wildfire resilience, he said.

In his experience, Shockey has found beavers can restore watersheds more effectively and less expensively than humans.

“I quickly realized beavers are doing a better job and doing it for free,” he said. “The most effective thing I can do is defer to the professionals. Beavers are professionals at moving water around.”

Even among landowners who entirely lack affection for the furry engineers, conciliatory methods provide more long-term stability than deadly ones, he said.

Such rosy tones are usually reserved for rugged outdoor trappers. Good work Jakob you’ve cornered the market.

“They’re just ready to get off this treadmill of trapping every year,” he said.

If a landscape appeals to beavers, sooner or later, new ones will be drawn to the area vacated by those that were removed, so trapping isn’t a permanent solution, Shockey said.

“You’ll just get more beavers moving in,” he said. “If they come in once, they will come in the next year and the next year.”

When beavers are attracted to a site where they’re repeatedly killed, it also acts as “population sink,” or “black hole” for the species, Shockey said.

Beavers aren’t in jeopardy of extinction, but their numbers remain too small to provide ecological services everywhere they’re needed, including areas where friction with humans is unlikely, he said.

“We need to stop killing just so many of them,” Shockey said.

A good.looking young young man gets a lot of permission to talk, I’m just saying.,

With the exception of irrigation canals, where any blockages are intolerable, most waterways can support beavers without endangering human dwellings or structures, he said.

If a beaver dam backs up enough water to threaten private property, landowners can deploy a device called a pond leveler to reduce flooding.

A pond lever consists of a flexible plastic pipe, which is inserted into the pond while the other end is placed downstream of the beaver dam. Water will then flow through the pipe and decrease the pond’s level to the elevation of the outflow.

“You’ve capped how much flooding a beaver can do at that site,” Shockey said.

The beaver will search for a breach in its dam without realizing it’s actually the tube that’s reducing the pond’s size. A cage around the pipe’s intake prevents beavers from getting close enough to detect the leak’s true source.

“They will tolerate it. I can’t claim they’re happy about it,” Shockey said.

The trick is to shrink the pond enough to prevent excessive flooding but not so low that beavers can’t hide underwater from predators, he said.

If the dam’s entrance is uncovered, for example, that will make a beaver feel vulnerable and compel it to build another dam downstream, which just recreates the problem, he said.

Are you thinking I’m exaggerating about  the “crushy” tones of this article? How about the stats at the end,: