The fur trade nearly wiped out beavers from North America in the 1800s. Now, there’s growing recognition that their absence changed landscapes for the worse, and many groups are working to bring beavers back.
These efforts, scientists say, hold great promise for the nation’s wetland ecosystems, biodiversity and climate resilience. But more beavers can also mean more challenges.
“On the one hand, they are an incredible benefit to our watersheds,” said Jackie Corday, a natural resources consultant in Colorado. “On the other hand, they cause conflicts.”
Beavers are expert engineers, working to alter their environments more than any animal besides humans. The ingenuity they use to construct dams and lodges also means they can sometimes be found plugging culverts, gnawing on crops or flooding property.
Thus, beavers are considered “nuisance” creatures in many states; property owners can kill them for causing damage. Additionally, many states do not manage beavers as a species of concern or as an important keystone species.
But more states are exploring new ways to manage beavers. Corday shared a summary of the trends in a presentation to hundreds of beaver enthusiasts at the third BeaverCon conference in Boulder this week.
Having a proactive statewide management plan, she said, can help educate the public about the importance of sustaining beaver populations, outline goals for their recovery and help foster coexistence with communities.
“A statewide plan can lay the foundation for how you do those things,” said Corday.
For example, the plans can lay out processes for relocating beavers from places where they’re causing trouble to areas where they can thrive.
“In some cases, being able to translocate them up into the watershed where they could do so much benefit and have so much less risk of conflict,” she said.
Yet, just a few states have beaver management plans. Utah adopted one in 2017 and, as a result of state legislation, California is drafting one now. Colorado wildlife officials signaled earlier this year that they were beginning internal work on the state’s first beaver management plan, which could be drafted over the next couple of years.
Corday is working with a handful of nonprofits on a report summarizing beaver management plans and said she plans to share her findings with Colorado officials.
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.
