Trains passing through the nearby railyard were about the only thing breaking the calm in downtown Laramie early on a Sunday morning in July.
Inside the charming Night Heron coffee shop and bookstore, a team of beaver researchers was getting coffee, a quick bite and putting the day’s plan together.
Black coffee and a croissant was Emily Fairfax’s order. She’s an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota’s Geography, Environment and Society department, and a leading scholar on the relationship between beaver-dammed riverscapes and wildfire. She said our fellow mammalian architects are misunderstood, and shared her “top three most hated beaver myths.”
“Number one, that they eat fish,” she said. “Beavers don't eat fish.”
Some think they’re disease-carriers, like rats.
“They’re not,” Fairfax rebutted.
“Number three, least favorite beaver myth is that they reproduce like rabbits and that you can get really overpopulated with beavers when actually, they're slow reproducers, and very territorial,” she continued. “So you don't get like 100 beavers in one property. That just doesn't happen.”
But Emily and her team didn’t come to Wyoming to dispel beaver myths. They came to better understand the role the borderline absurd, long-toothed, flat-tailed rodents can play in wildfires.
Surviving megafires
The team piled into a rental SUV and headed southwest toward the Colorado border. In 2020, the Mullen Fire burned nearly 180,000 acres on both sides of the state line.
“Within this fire scar, there are about a thousand satellite-visible beaver ponds that provided fire refugia during the fire,” she explained.
Fire refugia are parts of wildfires that burn at low intensity or don’t burn at all, and are where animals and plants are much more likely to survive.
“You'll see, especially in the megafires we have today, that you have devastating burns where entire stands of trees are wiped out, populations of animals are destroyed,” Fairfax said. “By having these refugia patches, you have sort of a nucleus of mature breeding adults and mature trees that can repopulate and spread back out. And in some cases, that can help reseed the landscape with native plants instead of invasive plants.”
Fairfax’s research has shown that beaver-dammed riverscapes are particularly effective as refugia. The dams and canals beavers construct slow water down and spread it out – creating wetlands. In a paper published earlier this year, she and her co-authors found that 89% of such waterways constitute refugia while just 60% of undammed waterways do.
That paper wasn’t the first to demonstrate the protective power of beaver-dammed rivers, but it was the first to show that it persists even “during the extreme wildfire behaviors common in megafires,” Fairfax and her co-authors wrote.
“A lot of the fire refugia we had in the past are not able to withstand the type of fires that we have today,” Fairfax explained. “With climate change raising the temperatures and increasing drought stress and everything else like that, the beavers are somewhat unique in that they are still maintaining and creating these fire refugia that can withstand the forces of today's megafires.”
Bird’s-eye view
As the team neared the ponds on a Forest Service dirt road, blackened stands of lodgepole pine came into view, speaking to the fire’s intensity. Because of the engineering beavers do, the team suited up in waders and other waterproof gear.
Before trudging down into the canyon, they launched a pair of drones from a high berm above the creek to get a wide vantage point. The image that emerged was an almost picture-perfect encapsulation of Fairfax’s findings: a long, wide strip of bright green wetland stretched into the distance on the drone controller’s digital display.
“But on either side of it, I am seeing a complete devastation of the landscape and an enormous amount of burnt and fallen down trees,” Fairfax said.
Fairfax and her colleagues argue that beavers “can be part of a comprehensive fire-mitigation strategy while offering additional benefits to biological communities, including humans, even when fire is not an active threat.”
“Beaver conservation, beaver coexistence strategies, and beaver-based restoration should be strongly considered for inclusion when planning fire risk-mitigation strategies, and when developing or updating watershed and land management plans,” the paper concludes.
‘Wall-to-wall beaver dams’
These arguments are finding an audience inside of federal agencies. Ashley Hom, a longtime Forest Service hydrologist who’s now in a leadership role on the Tahoe National Forest, had something of a beaver awakening several years ago.
As many as 400 million beavers may have lived in the vast majority of North American watersheds before the fur trade decimated them.
“Now every time I go out in the woods or if I'm driving by a stream system, all I can think of is like, ‘Oh my word, every perennial stream that's at a lower grade used to be wall-to-wall beaver dams,’” she said. “These big, beautiful, hydrologically connected systems of beautiful, lush riparian valley floors and wetlands. And now they're very constrained to these single-thread, meandering little streams.”
She was involved in a major restoration project in Colorado that deployed beaver dam analogs (BDAs), which try to mimic the large rodents’ hydrological work and its many benefits. They can also eventually attract real beavers, as many of the BDAs in this project likely have, according to Hom.
She agrees with Fairfax that beavers could be potent allies amid the wildfire crisis: their wetlands could help buffer communities from encroaching blazes and firefighters could incorporate them into their strategy. She said her agency doesn’t have a formal strategy regarding beavers, but she and others have been holding regular meetings with colleagues to make the case for their fire-fighting prowess.
“If you ask most people in the Forest Service, ‘What tools do we have for the wildfire crisis?,’ they're going to be like, ‘A, prescribed fire and B, fuels reduction,’” Hom said. “But how do we get that third one in every conversation? Like, we're doing prescribed fire, we're doing fuels reduction and we're bolstering our wetlands.”
Messy work
Beaver field work is slow. And messy. Michelle Andruss, a researcher in Fairfax’s lab, was trudging across the muddy bottom of the first pond of a string of them stretching down the valley.
“Hitting gravel is … 135 centimeters,” she shouted out to her colleagues to be recorded.
Depth readings are important because they show how much water and sediment the ponds are holding, according to Andruss. She moved around with relative ease compared to this struggling reporter, but shared that even she has gotten stuck in the muck.
“I had to army crawl my way out,” she said.
Postgraduate researcher Nevé Baker had an even messier job. Sporting a pair of large goggles and latex gloves to prevent contamination, she dove into the murky depths and emerged with samples from the pond floor.
“Then we can extract DNA out of it and see what all has been in and around this pond,” she explained. “It gives you a really broad picture of the biodiversity.”
The team methodically repeated this sampling at each pond they passed. Taking a brief break in the shade on the way back to the vehicle, Emily shared what she would want the public and policymakers to see there.
“Standing right here in this moment, looking at the beaver ponds, I see a healthy landscape,” she said. “And if I don't lift my eyes up and I don't look at the horizon, I wouldn't even know a fire was here.”
Beavers thin fuel like land managers, she noted, and make landscapes harder to burn, like chemical retardants.
“The work isn’t novel,” Fairfax said. “What’s novel is it’s a big rodent doing it.”
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Colorado and KANW in New Mexico, with support from affiliate stations across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
