Artificial beaver dams saw juvenile coho salmon survival rates go from 8% to 60%
discoverwildlife.com
discoverwildlife.com
Later on, the government brought him some beavers from elsewhere, and they flourished.
But it feels like there’s a bit of surprise to the idea that the environment takes on the form it takes on. And if you take away a part of it, it’ll take on a different form. And if you put that part back, it can take on the earlier form. There is no correct or canonical form.
They also provide an invaluable service slowing floods, creating fisheries for humans, and increasing touristic appeal from a location (we are naturally attracted by the aesthetics of watching water). Ponds also create relatively safe sanctuaries where wildlife, cattle and humans can retreat in case of wildfires.
So, yes, there are many cons, but also many pros. Beavers compete with us for low places and shouldn't be allowed everywhere, but to eliminate them from every place is also a mistake.
I believe this is called "Process-Based Restoration".
https://practical.engineering/blog/2026/8/18/are-beavers-act...
And also for your simple, matter-of-fact tone.
1. https://www.science.org/content/article/beaver-dams-without-...
I'd recommend Leila Philip's Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America. It's a great work of narrative science writing.
I think we deeply underestimate the profound impact beavers had on the landscape in North America. We truly live in a post-beaver geography. The beaver hat fad in Europe was the primary driver of their population going from hundreds of millions to less than 100,000.
some apps have gotten sneaky though and made every shared URL an apparently unique one :/
Also `pp`.
Lost cost, high reward. Not sexy enough to get the attention it deserves.
This year was bad in terms of drought, yet it seems it wasn't as bad as the one we had a few years ago (2018 or 19? I don't remember exactly) because they allowed the water table to go higher a bit, used the ijsselmeer as a giant fresh water reservoir, closed / limited locks, etc. After this year and the rapidly accellerating / worsening effects of climate change, like the drying out (ok, low water levels) of the Rhine, I'm sure they're working hard to do more. They can for example choose to allow the flood plains to flood even when there's no flooding, to (locally) add to the ground water. Granted, it takes (iirc) decades or hundreds of years for that to end up in the aquifers but better now than never.
Other projects I've heard of involve allowing rivers and streams to meander again, undoing the work of straightening them to get rid of water faster and / or optimize shipping traffic.
Los Angeles seems to be waking up to the issue: https://www.ladwp.com/who-we-are/water-system/sources-supply...
But beaver dams also capture sediment, one of the problems is that rain on loose soil forms deepening gullies.
Another big part is the wetlands, which helps water refill aquifers if the soil is permeable. And a charged aquifer provides springs.
I have no idea why I am so obsessed by aquifer recharge.
There’s a fair number of greening the desert YouTube channels using Beaver Dam analogues funded by the state.
Maybe humans have an instinct for water management like beavers do.
>There’s a fair number of greening the desert YouTube channels using Beaver Dam analogues funded by the state.
I enjoy some of these too. There's also water management focused regenerative agriculture projects that are cool like food garden pond systems in Hawaii[0]
We absolutely do. For both water and fire management.
> But beavers can only thrive if landowners allow them to.
We live in a society. I can’t build a helipad on my roof in the middle of Seattle. Technically that’s a limitation on my personal liberty. We accept it because of the cost to the people around me.
It is entirely possible that our current way of living, including the idea of “private land” as it exists today, may not be conducive to our long-term survival.
The forces of nature care not for our political and philosophical debates.
My environment was improved to an unliveable asphalt/gravel sprawl from edge of city with woods with frog and birdsong...
Environmentalism is in direct conflict with densely packing "stuff" onto land whether that's people or industry. If you want to preserve nature embrace the "concrete jungle" and the density it brings.
Look at historical small towns vs modern build outs of the same population. Despite building maybe four stories high at most 50k people in some New England or Midwest mill town fit on a tiny fraction of the developed area of the same modern population simply because environmentalists weren't around to mandate engineered drainage ditches and green spaces and setbacks and require every podunk business have fire lanes a drunk could back a lowboy into and all planters in their parking lot and the other stuff
Building one or two small permanent structures on many acres of forest is not destroying it by a long shot.
They should of done a better job purchasing land.
Someone, definitionally, owns all the privately held land in the US. Large landowners in rural areas are on average more politically connected and wield more political power in their communities.
Telling them that any sort of work on their own land—no matter how small—requires extensive oversight might be well-intentioned but pisses off a lot of people who will then become bitter opponents of even well-designed environmental legislation. Telling them they should have made better purchasing decisions just motivates them even further.
What actually ends up happening is these people then do it anyway with zero oversight, because the amount of land involved is too vast to enforce these things on. You also get large concerted efforts to overturn any and all environmental protection.
I didn't say they can't do anything with their land, but if you live on land with beavers you should know how beavers and beaver dams work so you don't do something stupid, like building a structure in the flood path of a stream or river full of beavers, or killing the beavers so that you can and then complaining about the beavers coming back.
Complaining about how beavers work and what beavers are doing on your land is the same as building on a historic floodplain and then complaining about it flooding. Or building in hurricane territory and complaining about hurricanes. Or building in the woods and complaining about deer eating your plants and trees falling on your driveway. One person's lack of foresight is not and should not be everybody and everything else's problem.
Do your research before you buy things. Only an asshole buys and/or builds next to an area with long established feature X and then complains about feature X existing and how its "unfair" they can't have it taken down or destroyed at will.
I agree with this kind of oversight. But as someone with a friend who is both an environmentalist and does own land adjacent to a river and land managed by the national forest service, the latitude for what you can actually do without serious oversight is essentially nothing. Luckily what he wants to do is essentially nothing, but even the very minimal bits he does want to do—which includes making fire breaks in a populated area which is wildfire-prone—is questionable.
It’s been eye opening to see the lengths he’s had to go to in order to stay on the right side of things. And it’s given me a decent perspective on the burden it puts on even those who want do to be responsible landowners.
It’s also been interesting to learn about the perverse incentives it does put on those who own this kind of land. One example is that new paths generally can’t be cleared, except when a wildfire happens, if you can justify it as part of firefighting or fire prevention efforts. So if and when there is a fire nearby, bulldozers come out in droves. I’ll leave you to connect that to what might be the root cause of some of these fires.
Wetland regulation also acts like a ratchet. The soil will change from being underwater and so land that would have been considered upland before the beavers will be considered wetland after them even if the plants go back to how they were before the beavers.
Pretty much all the "hey, that's obviously dumb and non-optimal why the F does that make financial sense" stuff you see in land development comes from the massive third rail that is wetlands.
My parents have 100+ acres of bush in central Alberta. When they bought the property it was logged out and mostly in a bad abused state and mostly dry. Over a few years, beavers moved in and transformed a formerly semi-marshy spot into a full pond. And then another. And another.
Eventually though, without a lot of predators around (there's some skittish bears, coyotes, that's it) they begin to overpopulate. And any efforts to keep the water level at a certain point starts to get tricky. In order to keep access to some parts of the property my dad ended up having to put in some sneaky culverts with various tricks to stop them from plugging them. (I forget, but he eventually figured out a beaverproof trick).
Even then, every few years the need to "remove" some of the beavers, because they just get to be too many, they run out of poplars near their lodge and start to cause more problems for downstream and upstream neighbours.
They've done amazing things for the property. But when my parents pass it's going to be hard to maintain this property with the beavers actively trying to transform it constantly.
It is interesting that we see our infrastructure as 'valid' or correct, but the work these engineers (beavers) put in as a nuisance. In an ideal world, the benefits to local biodiversity and ecosystem health should be balanced with the cost of relocating roads when necessary.
My dad is a crazy old German retired machinist/tool&die maker. I think he enjoys the challenge. Not everyone would.
I've heard the tail is particularly tasty and easy to skin and cook.
Maybe part of the problem is that humans in North America are largely not hunting beavers anymore?
We're very capable of being the predators that keep animal populations in check, and plenty of people do still hunt, but I don't think I've ever heard of anyone hunting beavers in my life
When I got my hunting license, part of the safety course was about trapping. The impression I got from that was that trapping is basically torturing animals to death and infinitely worse than shooting them with rifles.
Just like our fellow humans. Godzilla to the rescue!
they are very persistent buggers and breed like... rodents
Tons of vacant land owners would be happy to allow beavers and everything else if not for the fact that it destroys any prospect of doing anything on the land.
The other real fucked up thing is that most of it is state/local implementations of federal rules but that's insane because California has a completely different relationship with swamps and water than the Carolinas.
The worst of it will probably get unwound when the courts adopt a "no you idiots, a fractional taking is still a taking pay the F up" doctrine but that might be a century from now. There's sooooo much money tied up in it though.
We had a beautiful set of beaver ponds, but the town won. Now it's just underbrush with a stream running through it. I'll never forget though: don't let your laws get in the way of doing the right thing.
So natural predators for small rodents keep their numbers in check but that will be a long time because "won't somebody think of the children"..."and the farmers"
The error you make is that there is only one, global ecosystem, and it sorts itself out. We won't be matching the power of the dinosaur comet anytime soon, and even that gave rise to mammals and eventually space travel so just chill... We dont need to do a thing
Great, biodiversity will be restored in 100 million years, just in time for my great-great-great-great......grandchildren to enjoy.
> biodiversity will be restored
Restored? What are the appropriate levels of "diversity"?
Some facts humans cannot handle: - lifeforms suffer unimaginable agony every single day. - life is finite - humans are not beyond the natural order, human made global warming is natural, it won't end the planet or even us. - humans think because suffering makes them sad, suffering must be the bad. (Apart from when we don't like the other person or they've transgressed us in some way, were ethically clear to mete out violence)
And?
My guess is that trees are not there in numbers enough to support beavers. Or maybe they don't want beavers chopping the trees.
But done right, they help restore wetlands that absorb and retain water rather than causing lots of issues with flooding downstream when it rains. Wetlands have a lot of bio diversity, insects, birds, plants, predators, and all the rest. They also capture a lot of carbon All good stuff. Mostly the beavers take care of all of the heavy lifting of building dams and maintaining them. It's a lot cheaper than trying to emulate what they do with a lot of human labor. But of course keeping beavers confined to where you want them is maybe a bit hard. So, artificial dams are a good alternative.
Sometimes beavers are a big mistake. Hazelnuts and willows can be chopped to the ground and just will return stronger and more dense. Poplars will regrow from the roots at some distance. Argentinian trees they will vanish instead. This happens because temperate South American forests never evolved with beavers. On this places they may done more harm than good.
Another example: Beavers are native from Sweden, but beavers on Sweden should be removed.
* https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_copybook.htm for anyone who doesn't recognize the reference in that last sentence. Most people will, I hope, but there's always the lucky 10,000. (https://xkcd.com/1053/)
For reals though, the straightening of rivers has led to less habitat, less lost curves that host the most important animals.
This really made laugh for some reason, just imagining a beaver typing away at HN specifically.