One of my favorite parts about reading Ben Goldfarb’s book was coming across delightful and unknown characters I hadn’t ever met before. Think about that. I write about beavers every day – 365 days a year – for the last decade and still these were not names I was familiar with. And of all those wiley wonderful new characters, Dr. Rebekah Levine of Wyoming was one of my very favorites.

Now you get to meet her too.

Once considered the scourge of agriculture in the West, ranchers are now building beaver dams, and welcoming the creatures home

John Coffman learned the value of beaver dams the hard way.

When a beaver was plugging a head gate on a ditch on the scenic Red Canyon Ranch near Lander, he had a ranch hand shoot the animal, as

But the next two years brought heavy flood waters. Banks along the creek with no beavers eroded and the stream bed washed away until the head gate was several feet in the air and could no longer be used for irrigation.

A twin creek on the property that had about 40 beaver dams in one mile stayed together.

“We were talking and thought, maybe these guys weren’t only important for the ecosystem, but also the ag operation,” said Coffman, the land steward for Red Canyon Ranch, a property owned and operated by The Nature Conservancy.

Hey how about that! Beavers do useful things besides just causing problems! That must come as a shock to the frickin NATURE CONSERVANCY. What do you know?

“Beaver activities are not really welcome where humans live because beavers make rivers really messy,” said Rebekah Levine, assistant professor of environmental sciences at the University of Montana Western who has spent her career studying streams and beavers.

“We want them to be very stable, so stable, in fact we use them as borders. But that dynamism in rivers maintains the riparian forest and riparian vegetation that are so crucial to wildlife and critters in the western U.S. where riparian forests make up about 3 to 4 percent of the landscape, and at least 70 percent of wildlife depends on riparian habitat for some portion of their life history.”

Levine provides the science behind thinking about using beaver-like structures in areas where either beavers had been eliminated or where they were no longer desired for restoration. Her main idea was to improve wetlands for natural water connectivity and storage.

Instead of runoff and snowmelt rushing down a stream to its ultimate end in a river or field, the water seeps into the ground and then slowly seeps back out as summer seasons dry.

“We don’t have a lot of control over weather or climate, but can we increase the resiliency of watersheds that have some water now? How can we help watersheds make it through this tough little time?” she said. “Beaver dams are one way that you can naturally store some water.”

Beaver dams can also help maintain cooler water temperatures during warmer months – a necessity for cold-water fish species like trout.

While the work is still relatively new, results are beginning to support the hypothesis that beavers dams, and beaver-like dams, could be a critical part of maintaining tiny pockets of water an arid landscape.

What an article to come across. It wasn’t even tagged as a beaver article so my alert didn’t pick it up. I saw it by chance on Facebook, which is a perfectly fine way to share beaver news. The Ranch on Nature Conservancy land has started installing BDA’s.