Winter Woman
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With Trouble on the Range, Ranchers Wish They Could Leave It to Beavers
Critters, Once Reviled, Gain Popularity With 'Believers'; a Good Rodent Is Hard to Find
By JOEL MILLMAN
Clyde Woolery wants his beavers back.
Mr. Woolery's ranch on Beaver Creek outside Kinnear, Wyo., has been beaver-free for decades, but he could sure use their help now. A small beaver colony, he says, would engineer dams that raise the water table under his pastures, opening up drinking holes for his cattle.
The Beaver Solution Team live traps beavers on properties where they are causing damage and relocates them to places where they can chew up trees, build dams and help restore the water supply. WSJ's Joel Millman reports from Spokane.
So the 64-year-old rancher put himself on a waiting list this year hoping state officials would bring him a beaver or two. Wyoming's Game and Fish Commission periodically plucks the rodents from drainage culverts.
It's a bit of a turnabout in these parts, where beavers have long been considered something of a nuisanceblamed for everything from damming irrigation canals and gnawing fruit orchards to just generally wreaking havoc with agriculture. In many states, it's legal to shoot a beaver on private land. In Oregon, the Beaver State, the nocturnal creatures can be designated as "predators."
But their slick skill set is what many landscapes now need, says a cadre of pro-beaver ranchers and environmentalists who work on behalf of people like Mr. Woolery.
These beaver backers have a simple creed: Trapping, not killing, "nuisance" beavers, they say, can add value to wilderness reserves and farmland by increasing their water content.
That, in turn, restores fish habitats and native plants, which allow bigger species like moose, cougar and elk to thrive.
"We call ourselves Beaver Believers because we found beavers do restoration work better than people," says Celeste Coulter, stewardship director at the North Coast Land Conservancy, a Seaside, Ore., group that urges developers to set aside land for beavers.
View Full Image
Joel Millman/The Wall Street Journal This beaver will eventually find a home in Colville National Forest.
"We can spend $200,000 putting wood into a stream, cabling down logs. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't," she says. "Put in a colony of beavers and it always works."
The believers' beavers come from places like Tumtum, Wash., where Amanda Parrish checked beaver traps one morning early this month by the Spokane River.
"Hey, we got one over here!" shouted Ms. Parrish as she peeled back brush to check a trap she and her partner, Joe Cannon, laid the previous evening.
Caught inside a stainless steel "suitcase" trap, its rubbery tail and hindquarters sloshing in the rushing stream, a six-pound pup calmly nibbled willow twigs, seemingly oblivious to the humans and their mission.
Ms. Parrish, 25, is the team leader for The Beaver Solution, a program run by Spokane's Lands Council, a nonprofit group. The group scours lakes and streams in eastern Washington for beavers, relocating several dozen a year.
Dave Boswell adopted eight beavers from the group last summer and is pleased with their work at Mountain Meadows, his ranch near the Idaho-Washington border.
"It's fun to have a functioning beaver colony," says the Spokane real estate attorney. "They dam up the creek, and they impound the water, so it doesn't all flood out in the spring and dry out in the summer."
Joel Millman/The Wall Street Journal Amanda Parrish with a no-kill trap.
That's the wish this season of many Western ranchers, some of whom have been badgering the Lands Council for critters. Justin Burnett, a rancher in Richards, Texas, desperately wants beavers.
He blames low creek levels for a "red water" virus that is killing his Angus herd.
"Since we are in an extreme drought and there are no beavers to keep the water level sufficient, the water is stagnant and becoming deadly," he wrote the Lands Council. "The creek is constantly getting shallower. I just need beavers back at my ranch."
But pairing property owners who don't want beavers with others like Mr. Burnett who do isn't easy. States license exterminators to eradicate beaversit's called "lethal control" in the Beaver Statebut few specialists do live trapping or guarantee beaver will survive relocation. Moreover, ferrying live rodents, including beavers, across state lines is forbidden in much of the U.S., and even within states without a permit.
According to Spokane's Lands Council, nearly half a million beavers swarmed over eastern Washington in 1810, when Europeans first settled near Spokane. The beavers' abundance drew rival gangs of French, British and American trappers hunting for pelts.
Ultimately, over-trapping occurred, which upset nature's balance.
Storage ponds that filled in behind beaver dams turned into marshes, then grasslands, which withered during summer and stopped supporting the willow and alder stands beavers require for food and building material.
"Nowadays, you can pretty much bet in a place named Beaver Creek, or Beaver Pond, there are no beavers. They've been trapped out," says Ms. Parrish of the Lands Council.
Case in point: Mr. Woolery. The rancher was angered when poachers wiped out the beaver colonies along his stretch of Beaver Creek in the 1970s. He thought his beavers would come back on their own, but they didn't. In the 1980s he realized his water table had dropped. He worked hard to get his cattle to stop eating willow so groves could rejuvenate and bring his beavers back. But so far, that hasn't been enough.
The lone beaver he trapped on his own two years ago swam off to build a lodge on a neighbor's ranch downstream, surmises Mr. Woolery, "or else he got himself eaten by a bear or coyote."
Livestock sales in Wyoming generate a fee that the state uses to help pay hunters to rid the range of problem wildlife, like beavers.
"October's a busy month," Mr. Woolery says, sounding optimistic. "I'm hoping someone will trap a beaver alive, and send him to me."
Write to Joel Millman at [email protected]
Critters, Once Reviled, Gain Popularity With 'Believers'; a Good Rodent Is Hard to Find
By JOEL MILLMAN
Clyde Woolery wants his beavers back.
Mr. Woolery's ranch on Beaver Creek outside Kinnear, Wyo., has been beaver-free for decades, but he could sure use their help now. A small beaver colony, he says, would engineer dams that raise the water table under his pastures, opening up drinking holes for his cattle.
The Beaver Solution Team live traps beavers on properties where they are causing damage and relocates them to places where they can chew up trees, build dams and help restore the water supply. WSJ's Joel Millman reports from Spokane.
So the 64-year-old rancher put himself on a waiting list this year hoping state officials would bring him a beaver or two. Wyoming's Game and Fish Commission periodically plucks the rodents from drainage culverts.
It's a bit of a turnabout in these parts, where beavers have long been considered something of a nuisanceblamed for everything from damming irrigation canals and gnawing fruit orchards to just generally wreaking havoc with agriculture. In many states, it's legal to shoot a beaver on private land. In Oregon, the Beaver State, the nocturnal creatures can be designated as "predators."
But their slick skill set is what many landscapes now need, says a cadre of pro-beaver ranchers and environmentalists who work on behalf of people like Mr. Woolery.
These beaver backers have a simple creed: Trapping, not killing, "nuisance" beavers, they say, can add value to wilderness reserves and farmland by increasing their water content.
That, in turn, restores fish habitats and native plants, which allow bigger species like moose, cougar and elk to thrive.
"We call ourselves Beaver Believers because we found beavers do restoration work better than people," says Celeste Coulter, stewardship director at the North Coast Land Conservancy, a Seaside, Ore., group that urges developers to set aside land for beavers.
View Full Image
Joel Millman/The Wall Street Journal This beaver will eventually find a home in Colville National Forest.
"We can spend $200,000 putting wood into a stream, cabling down logs. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't," she says. "Put in a colony of beavers and it always works."
The believers' beavers come from places like Tumtum, Wash., where Amanda Parrish checked beaver traps one morning early this month by the Spokane River.
"Hey, we got one over here!" shouted Ms. Parrish as she peeled back brush to check a trap she and her partner, Joe Cannon, laid the previous evening.
Caught inside a stainless steel "suitcase" trap, its rubbery tail and hindquarters sloshing in the rushing stream, a six-pound pup calmly nibbled willow twigs, seemingly oblivious to the humans and their mission.
Ms. Parrish, 25, is the team leader for The Beaver Solution, a program run by Spokane's Lands Council, a nonprofit group. The group scours lakes and streams in eastern Washington for beavers, relocating several dozen a year.
Dave Boswell adopted eight beavers from the group last summer and is pleased with their work at Mountain Meadows, his ranch near the Idaho-Washington border.
"It's fun to have a functioning beaver colony," says the Spokane real estate attorney. "They dam up the creek, and they impound the water, so it doesn't all flood out in the spring and dry out in the summer."
That's the wish this season of many Western ranchers, some of whom have been badgering the Lands Council for critters. Justin Burnett, a rancher in Richards, Texas, desperately wants beavers.
He blames low creek levels for a "red water" virus that is killing his Angus herd.
"Since we are in an extreme drought and there are no beavers to keep the water level sufficient, the water is stagnant and becoming deadly," he wrote the Lands Council. "The creek is constantly getting shallower. I just need beavers back at my ranch."
But pairing property owners who don't want beavers with others like Mr. Burnett who do isn't easy. States license exterminators to eradicate beaversit's called "lethal control" in the Beaver Statebut few specialists do live trapping or guarantee beaver will survive relocation. Moreover, ferrying live rodents, including beavers, across state lines is forbidden in much of the U.S., and even within states without a permit.
According to Spokane's Lands Council, nearly half a million beavers swarmed over eastern Washington in 1810, when Europeans first settled near Spokane. The beavers' abundance drew rival gangs of French, British and American trappers hunting for pelts.
Ultimately, over-trapping occurred, which upset nature's balance.
Storage ponds that filled in behind beaver dams turned into marshes, then grasslands, which withered during summer and stopped supporting the willow and alder stands beavers require for food and building material.
"Nowadays, you can pretty much bet in a place named Beaver Creek, or Beaver Pond, there are no beavers. They've been trapped out," says Ms. Parrish of the Lands Council.
Case in point: Mr. Woolery. The rancher was angered when poachers wiped out the beaver colonies along his stretch of Beaver Creek in the 1970s. He thought his beavers would come back on their own, but they didn't. In the 1980s he realized his water table had dropped. He worked hard to get his cattle to stop eating willow so groves could rejuvenate and bring his beavers back. But so far, that hasn't been enough.
The lone beaver he trapped on his own two years ago swam off to build a lodge on a neighbor's ranch downstream, surmises Mr. Woolery, "or else he got himself eaten by a bear or coyote."
Livestock sales in Wyoming generate a fee that the state uses to help pay hunters to rid the range of problem wildlife, like beavers.
"October's a busy month," Mr. Woolery says, sounding optimistic. "I'm hoping someone will trap a beaver alive, and send him to me."
Write to Joel Millman at [email protected]
