The glossy headline caught my attention but as I read through I found it had many righteous paragraphs I truly appreciated. That doesn’t often happen. Much respect, Corey Buhay.
Beavers Are Having a Moment
Long considered a nuisance, these furry construction experts are finally being appreciated for their role in healthy ecosystems.
Over the last 20 years, Oregon’s wilderness has suffered big time. Salmon have disappeared, wildfires have scoured the hills and drought has parched once-fertile soils. Years of small fixes — a little forest thinning here, a little fish-ladder installation there — have helped, but not nearly enough to keep up with the destruction.
By the start of the 2020s, Oregon had more ecologically impaired waterways than almost any other state, and environmentalists were ready for a serious solution. Something bold and risky. Something that would dramatically resculpt the landscape — and potentially correct decades of human development. In a word: beavers.
Ooh I just got a little shiver, didn’t you?
Around that time, scientists started to look for solutions, launching a frantic effort to figure out what, exactly, salmon needed — and what they were missing. A handful of Oregon State University scientists stumbled upon a clue: They discovered that regions with beaver ponds had vastly higher salmon productivity than those without. Further studies have echoed those findings.
“Beaver ponds and alcoves represented only about nine percent of the habitat but accounted for 66 percent of the coho salmon found in the system,” land managers later wrote in Oregon’s Beaver Restoration Guidebook. Another study from British Columbia showed that the survival rate for young coho salmon that overwintered behind beaver dams was 60 percent or more — significantly higher than the regional average.
The research was compelling, but it took a long time to catch on. That’s because beavers in Oregon had to overcome more than a century of bad PR.
Ain’t that the truth!’
Beavers’ greatest strength is also their least-beloved characteristic. Masters of heavy construction, they’re constantly rearranging the landscape, whether or not their human neighbors approve. The critters have been known to flood roadways, submerge crop fields and decimate sections of forest. That’s a tough sell for most of modern humanity, which has gotten pretty used to controlling the environment.
“Beavers have been maligned for much of history,” says Maureen Thompson, a wildlife biologist and the program manager for Oregon environmental nonprofit Beaver Works. “For most of the last century, they’ve been considered a pest — even though they’re on the Oregon state flag.” In fact, beavers only became legally recognized as wildlife in Oregon in 2024. Prior to that, they were classified as a nuisance species.
True. Beaver were the cure we mostly didn’t want to take, as the Texas cattleman wrote a decade ago.
hat started to shift 10 to 15 years ago. Thompson says a number of the beaver advocates and volunteers she works with cite reading Ben Goldfarb’s 2018 book Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter. Around the same time the book came out, Oregon started grappling with more destructive wildfires and serious drought, which Thompson suspects was a wake-up call for many Oregonians.
Yeah Ben! Yeah Ben! Sometimes the science needs a little art to break through the noise.
“I would say we’re in the middle of a beaver conservation movement,” says Brian Sullivan, the coordinator of the Wetlands for Wildlife grant program at Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW). Ten years ago, Sullivan saw one or two grant applications for beaver-related restoration projects every year. Now, half of the applications he processes have to do with beavers or beaver dam analogs — logjams designed to kickstart wetland formation and attract beavers to an area.
“Those wetland habitats make up just two to three percent of the landscape in Colorado, but 80 percent of our wildlife species utilize them,” Sullivan says. “That makes the conservation of these habitats key to biodiversity.”
The article goes on to talk about the UK and the beaver enthusiasm going on there. I think it gets the sequence a little wrong because England was excited about beavers long before California. But not everyone is a beaver advocacy historian like us.
I LOVED this part especially.. I wish it was included with every single beaver aricle Like the warning label on cigarettes.
One of the most rewarding things about beaver reintroduction, says Bowen, has been that kind of enthusiasm — and the sense of problem-solving and collaboration that has come out of it. Beavers are constantly changing the world around them, which means conservationists and communities have to band together to mitigate the effects without getting in the beavers’ way.
Boom! That paragraph is everything I hope people take away from the Martinez story. It makes me so happy I might NEED one of those cigarettes.
And it’s working. Over the last few years, Oregon salmon populations have rebounded, in large part thanks to these kinds of habitat improvements.
“Beavers are on the upswing. People care about them, and there’s so much research showing that they benefit almost everything you could possibly care about,” says Thompson. “There are so many things in ecology that are demoralizing and depressing, but not beavers. Beavers are good news every day.”
A-n-n-d-d-d Scene. Perfect end to a perfect Article. Well done.
