[Animals] The US is bringing back nature's best firefighters: beavers

[Wolf.17]

 

For decades, beavers were considered pests – trapped and shot on sight. Now the attitude towards nature's best engineers is changing, and farmers are working to bring them back.

Jay Wilde stared at the dry creek on the ranch his family had owned for decades for the umpteenth time that week. He was trying to remember what had changed on the land – when he was a child, Birch Creek would run year-round. Now he was lucky if they got six months' worth of water. Wilde had been away from his southern Idaho ranch for 30 years, returning to run cattle in 1995. And the cows needed water.

"Without water, it was becoming really hard for me to manage the ranch," Wilde explains. "I eventually put in a water system for the cows to drink from, but it seemed wrong to me that the stream should be drying up. There's a lot of life that depends on that water."

The issue puzzled him for years. In 2006, Wilde was contemplating that dry streambed, wondering what he could do about it. "I had an epiphany," he laughs. "Suddenly, it dawned on me that when I was growing up we always had beavers in the watershed. And there were no beavers when I came back.

Beavers are vital to ecosystems, as their dam building habits spread water through parched landscapes. This can not only help to regulate the flow of water, it provides another important service – keeping fires under control. Beavers are nature's firefighters.

Despite their monumental impact on the environment, beavers were almost wiped out in the US during the fur-trapping trade. And the land, like Wilde's, has suffered greatly due to the decimation of beaver po[CENSORED]tions. Attitudes that beavers are a nuisance, because of the damage they can cause to human-built structures – such as flooding culverts, the drain pipes that channel water through roadways and other structures, and felling trees – also prevailed long after beaver fur hats went out of fashion. For decades, the animals were trapped, shot, poisoned, and their dams dynamited – all to eradicate the keystone species from their native lands. Landowners simply didn't want them messing with the ecosystem. Since the battle against beavers began, numbers have shrunk from millions to thousands. 

Now, the tide is beginning to shift, and beavers are making a comeback.

"From the 1950s until this year, beavers have been listed as predators in Oregon," explains Jeff Baldwin, a geography professor at California's Sonoma University who has published numerous studies on the advantages of recolonising beavers in the American West. "And in Oregon, if an animal is a predator you can kill it."

A "beaver believer" bill was passed in Oregon in 2023, changing the animals' status to furbearers, meaning they cannot be killed without a permit. The bill highlighted beavers' role as a keystone species "that serves as nature's engineer…[Their] habitat has the ability to provide refugia, stimulate the recovery of other species, and foster resilience on landscapes impacted by climate change". But, the bill wasn't po[CENSORED]r with everyone – especially farmers.

"[The bill] creates an unnecessary and complicated system of beaver management for private agricultural landowners," says Lauren Poor, vice president of legal affairs for the Oregon Farm Bureau, an agricultural advocacy organisation. "Our opposition to this needlessly complicated piece of legislation is no reflection on the value beavers play in the ecosystem or the benefits they have on repairing floodplains, however, the great value of beavers to our environment is best suited for public lands, not privately managed agricultural lands."

Once numbering anywhere from 100 to 200 million, their numbers shrank to as few as 100,000 by the 20th Century, primarily due to the fur trapping trade which erupted during the late 1600s and lasted two centuries. Thanks to public support and awareness, the po[CENSORED]tion has grown to around 15 million.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240111-the-us-is-bringing-back-beavers-because-theyre-natures-best-firefighters