Top Notch: Beavers

When I answered the phone, I heard my brother Uriah’s Southern drawl. “Hey, I found your beavers.”

Earlier that week, I had asked if he knew of any beaver dams we could scout out while I visited family in South Carolina last November.

“You know, I trapped beavers for years,” he said. “I’ve done everything you can with beavers: trapped ’em, skinned ’em, ate ’em, made a hat out of ’em.” He paused, thinking through the local beaver haunts. “Let me see what I can find.”

The Monday before Thanksgiving, Uriah delivered. “I saw the water from the road and thought, ‘Mmhmm. There’s beavers in there.’ They’re on game land. I’ll stop and get you an orange hat, and then I’ll be right over.”

(Left) The author’s brother surveys a creek from atop a beaver dam.

Half an hour later, when I had managed to hoist myself into his truck, he turned down the country music and started answering my questions. When Uriah worked for the city water department, trapping beavers was part of his job.

“A lot of them were on the sewer and water right of ways. If those stay flooded long enough, the pipes will actually start coming to the surface.” He jerked his finger toward the road we were passing. “There for a while they were damming up the spillway underneath Hart Cut Road. The water was coming over the road. They don’t know how destructive they are.”

We chatted for a while about trapping beavers. Turns out, they’re easy to bag because they do the same thing over and over in the same place. He lowered his voice almost respectfully. “That’s why they’re so good. They create a large ecosystem that creates a lot of life that wouldn’t be there otherwise.”

Uriah gets beavers—and I don’t just mean in his traps. He understands their tenacity, skill, and contribution to their surroundings.

He’s not alone. In the past few years, beavers have become bucktoothed bourgeois. As the arid Western US battles drought and floods, even farmers and ranchers who once despised the meddling mammals are reevaluating their solutions to significant environmental challenges.

As humans have obeyed the Creator’s command to fill the earth, we haven’t always taken time to understand the creatures in our care. God created the beaver kind around 6,000 years ago on day six of creation week with the other land animals, yet scientists continue discovering the widespread ways beavers better the world. As we more fully understand their exceptional design by the ultimate Engineer, we can rethink how we might work with beavers to steward creation.

Signs of the Beaver

Uriah parked on the side of the road and pulled short wading boots from the truck bed. A minute later, we were crunching through the forest, stepping over fallen saplings and sidestepping sticker bushes.

When we reached the creek’s edge, I spotted the dam. The three-foot mound of branches and muck spanned the 50-foot creek. “This is beavers,” Uriah proclaimed, smiling at the expanse. “All beavers.”

He pointed to several openings in the bank across the creek. “If I had to bet, that’s probably their lodge. They always have more than one exit.”

Beavers are crepuscular creatures—they work mostly at dusk and night. We wouldn’t be seeing them that day, but we could see where they had been.

I peered into the creek, noticing where the river had worn a path in the bed lower than the current water level. The creek hadn’t always been this wide.

While I inspected the creek’s edge, Uriah clambered onto the dam, his neon orange hat reflecting starkly in the pooled water. He wiggled some of the logs and branches, notching up the nearly silent trickle to a dull splash. “Maybe that’ll bring ’em out.” He chuckled, beginning his descent from the braided woody mound.

Along the bank, wooden spikes jutted up from the ground like sharpened pencils, their bark stripped clean with telltale teeth marks. Uriah pointed. “You can tell this one’s old. See how dark it is?” He knelt next to another and pressed his thumbnail into the wood. “This one’s real fresh.”

He straightened and placed his hands on his hips, surveying the wetland. “Look there.” He pointed a few feet away to a glossy black turtle sunning on a fallen branch. “This kind of place is just so cool because you never know what you might see.”

One thing is for sure: there’s more to see because beavers live nearby.

Better Because of Beavers

Beavers are the world’s second largest rodents, outsized only by the South American capybara. They are, as a New York Times article recently described, “the size of basset hounds” and live throughout most of North America. Across the Atlantic, European beavers—a separate subspecies—look and act almost identically.

As a keystone species, beavers create an ecosystem that other organisms rely on. If you’re a woodland creature, you welcome these ready rodents into your part of the forest because their home-building projects totally renovate the neighborhood. They’re not called ecological engineers for nothing. Like house flippers, beavers see a place for what it could be. But the one thing they absolutely need is water.

The beaver’s semi-aquatic lifestyle protects it against predators like wolves and bobcats, who don’t fancy a swim to snag their meal. Beavers need water deep enough to cover their underwater lodge openings. When the water is too shallow—no problem. Beavers move in with a plan for re-engineering the location.

Building the Dam

First, beavers fell a tree across a flowing stream or float a tree to the spot they want to place a dam. Without a lumber delivery service or a pickup truck, beavers transport their building materials by digging channels out from the main body of water. That’s why, when you look at aerial photos of beaver land, the water seems to spread out in deltas.

Next, they carry small stones to mound on the tree, then add mud, plants, and leaves. On top, they stack branches and sticks. Beavers build dams thicker at the bottom for support with a slight slope against the current to let the flow of water compress the dam’s foundation even further. Once the dam slows the water to a trickle, the water depth above the dam deepens into a reservoir-like pond.

Beavers can maintain the same dam for decades, doing daily inspections and listening for the sound of water to detect a leak. Flowing water really gnaws at beavers. In fact, in a 1960s study, beavers built a dam over a radio speaker playing the sound of running water.

Sometimes, they just keep building additions. In Alberta, Canada, some very eager beavers constructed a sprawling 2,788-foot- (850 m) long dam—so large it’s visible from space. Based on past satellite and aerial photos, researchers believe this dam was a generational project since the 1970s.

Waterfront Living

Once they have deepened the water, beavers build a lodge where they will live. (Unless, of course, they tunnel into the riverbank.) They mound sticks and branches and then pack mud and muck from the river bottom to seal out the cold air and keep in the warmth. Next, they crawl under the mound and chew out the chambers. The dam features a quintessential mudroom—a shelf a few inches above the water where they dry their fur. In a higher chamber, they carpet the floor with shredded wood and grass for comfort and warmth.

For the winter, beavers stash their favorite branches in the water near the lodge. When they’re hungry, they slip out the underwater exits, gnaw off a portion of branch, and bring it back to the lodge. Not exactly the warm tea and sticky marmalade rolls that Mrs. Beaver serves the Pevensie children in Narnia, but for a beaver, a branch is as good as a feast.

Here Comes the Neighborhood

In the process of creating their ideal habitat, beavers inadvertently make a promised land for many other creatures. When they chew down trees for food and dam materials, beavers open the forest canopy, allowing light to filter in and increase plant growth, an enticing buffet for animals like deer and rabbits. The dead and fallen trees swiftly become home to wood-boring insects, a tasty attraction for woodpeckers.

Over time, a beaver pond morphs into a meadow.

The expanding water increases the wetland habitat for muskrats, otters, frogs, salamanders, fish, and aquatic insects to lay eggs and raise young. Wood ducks live in the hollow trees and dine on the vegetation ever present in a beaver pond. Migrating waterfowl use beaver land as a rest stop, and beaver lodges provide a safe place for geese to nest. Even sea life benefits from beavers. Along the West Coast, beavers create healthy streams where salmon can spawn and later travel out to the sea, where they feed orcas.

Over time, a beaver pond morphs into a meadow, encouraging shrubs to grow and provide shade for tree seedlings. Those seedlings will mature into forests. But it all begins with a beaver.

Back in Style

Two-hundred years ago, people admired beavers, but not for their adorable waddle or their work ethic.

To really be someone in the 1800s, you needed one thing: a top hat. And for a top hat, you needed a beaver pelt. The beaver’s underfur is durable, waterproof, and warm—the perfect material for hats worn by British gentlemen along with monocles and pocket watches.

In Europe, trappers drove the beaver to near extinction, looking to turn a profit from the fashion industry. When they could no longer pilfer pelts from that side of the Pond, hatters cast their eye to North America.

Eager to cash in on beaver bounty in the New World, pioneers started hunting the land’s abundant beaver population. And were beavers abundant! Some naturalists estimate 60 million–400 million beavers might have once marshed up much of the continent. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, only roughly 1% of the beavers’ historic numbers remained.

Thankfully, by then, people were no longer obsessed with wearing beavers on their heads. And by the 1940s, efforts commenced to bulk up beaver populations in their original locations. In 1948, one of the most bizarre relocation efforts went airborne in Idaho. As more people migrated to rural areas, beaver encounters became more frequent. Understanding the beavers’ crucial contribution to the environment, wildlife managers decided against killing the critters. Instead, they packed 76 beavers into custom-made boxes and attached them to parachutes leftover from the war. They then released the boxes from planes, allowing the beaver battalion to glide safely down to their new locations.

Today, far from being a fashion statement, between 10–15 million beavers busy themselves across North America, a comfortable population well outside the endangered range. (That’s one beaver for every resident in New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles—but who’s counting?)

Hydrological Heroes

These days, we’re beside ourselves over something else the beaver offers: water. Water equals life for almost everything on earth. When the wet stuff gets scarce, people start scrambling for solutions. And when it comes to water management, you can’t beat beavers.

Currently, America’s western regions face increasing water shortages, raging wildfires, and damaging floods. In fact, across the nation, America’s waterway infrastructure could use refurbishment. But that can get pricey quickly. Joseph Wheaton, a geomorphologist at Utah State University, says a river restoration can cost about $500,000 per mile. He said, “Even though we spend at least $15 billion per year repairing waterways in the US, we’re hardly scratching the surface of what needs fixing.”1 The larger waterways require big equipment and large teams to refurbish and maintain. But for smaller waterways? Better call beavers.

Bringing Back Beavers

Emily Fairfax, an ecohydrologist at California State University, claims that the value for beaver water work services is around $69,000 per square kilometer annually. In one year, a beaver couple with their kits can overhaul a mile of stream. Over a beaver’s 12-year lifespan, the work—and value—really adds up.9

The Golden State has bought into this beaver bang for their buck. In September 2022, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife posted its first job listing for a beaver restoration unit responsible for finding natural solutions for these environmental issues. Wade Crowfoot, California’s secretary of natural resources, proclaimed last year, “We need to get beavers back to work. Full employment for beavers is a new state policy.”

In the absence of beavers, other states are mimicking the critters’ river restoration techniques. Beaver Dam Analogs (BDAs) are built by pounding posts in the ground and weaving willow branches and other materials around them to capture sediment and raise water levels similar to actual dams. Sometimes BDAs entice bona fide beavers to move in and take over.

Letting Beavers Be

Not everyone relishes the rodents taking up residence on their land. As Uriah and I headed back from the dam, I spotted a sign at the head of the trail that indicated the hunting season for the animals that live there: doves, deer, rabbits, foxes, squirrels, bears, hogs. Each listed a seasonal range. But for beaver season, the sign announced, “Year-round.”

Like any part of the fallen creation, beavers and humans sometimes clash, mostly because beavers don’t bother to get building permits—they just do their thing. Beavers are the only creatures that engineer their surroundings as drastically as humans on both water and land. But just as human development often interferes with wildlife habitats, beaver building projects sometimes interfere with ours. Anyone with a house or land in beaver territory might find roads flooded or eroded, septic systems damaged, and healthy trees fallen or drowned.

Beavers make themselves a nuisance simply by doing what they do best. But beavers aren’t just busy—they’re bull-headed about it. Humans want water to flow; beavers want the flow to stop. Move a beaver, and he’ll waddle back. Bust his dam, and he’ll rebuild. Kill a beaver, and more will move in.

People who understand the integral role beavers play in the environment employ ingenious, non-lethal methods to beat the relentless rodents at their own game.

Still, most people believe it is easier to kill a beaver than to try to negotiate with it. In 2021, the US Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services killed 24,000 beavers to mitigate human-wildlife conflict. Though exterminating beavers is an option within our dominion mandate to rule over creation, wise and righteous stewardship at least considers alternative options (Proverbs 12:10). And with beavers, intention is key.

A farmer could battle a beaver long term, but if instead he planned to relinquish some farmed portions of his fields beside a river to beaver ponds, that sacrifice will get him greener pastures and drinking ponds for livestock or irrigation. Though farmers cast a squinted eye, beavers can actually be a boon to agriculture, filtering out pollutants caused by chemicals in pesticides and fertilizer.

People who understand the integral role beavers play in the environment employ ingenious, non-lethal methods to beat the relentless rodents at their own game, from wrapping trees in wire or coating them in sand paint, to implementing contraptions that outsmart the beavers (some with delightful names like the Beaver Deceiver and Beaver Baffler). Landowners can run a pipe through the troublesome dam, allowing water to silently drain below the dam and covering the pipe above the dam with a large metal cage. Predictably, the beaver will rebuild over the pipe, but water can still flow through to lower the water level in the pond.

Consider the Beaver

Like the ants that Solomon tells us to consider (Proverbs 6:6–8), beavers work with the efficiency of an excavation crew, yet they have no foremen, no unions, no oversight committees, just a tenacious God-given instinct that the Creator uses to benefit the earth, other creatures, and us.

As the stewards of God’s creation, we sometimes need to understand and work with nature to address our problems. Instead of automatically considering beavers a nuisance when our worlds flow together, we can survey their craft as wondrously created and often harness their unique skills to a broader advantage. Even when we bust their dams or redirect their waterways, we can value the intricacy of the beavers’ busywork. These ecological engineers are undeniably engineered to maintain the Creator’s earth and to point to his glory.

Leave It to Beavers

As we trudged back to the truck, I spotted five different kinds of lichen, an enormous holly bush, and, carpeting the ground, a verdant type of plant that I had never seen before. I imagined that in spring the barren trees would rustle with leaves and the silent forest teem with wildlife.

As I clicked my seat belt, I said, “I’d love to see the beavers working.”

Uriah shrugged. “I’m comin’ duck huntin’ here early tomorrow. You can come with me.”

But the next morning, I stayed in bed, while my brother waited for his duck decoys to lure a quacking target. At the dam, the beavers were busy patching the hole Uriah had made the day before. They slapped the water with their tails, as if warning him against further vandalism. A few hours later, he packed up his gun and gear and headed back to the truck. He’d be back to hunt ducks again another day, and as for the dam—Uriah would leave it to the beavers.