Suppose you had a distant cousin. Suppose she had thick brown hair and dark, bright eyes. Maybe her teeth kind of stick out and she has an appreciation for woody flavors. Suppose she takes pride in her young family and lives beside a stream in a lodge of her own design.
Suppose she is a beaver.
“If people could just be respectful of them and not hassle them, the beavers and I would really appreciate that,” said Ed Galindo, a beaver advocate and University of Idaho researcher. “They’re just trying to make a living and understand how to live.”
Galindo said beavers have a long history in the Palouse region, but the population took a hit when people started trapping beavers for their pelts. That was just the beginning of humanity’s impact on the river-dwelling mammals.
“There’s a lot to be learned about Mr. and Mrs. Beaver,” Galindo said. “They only get in too much trouble to this day when beavers and mankind collide.”
Beavers living in the Paradise Creek Watershed encounter people on a more regular basis, because of their proximity to Moscow and UI’s campus. Beavers raise their young in streamside lodges, Galindo said, and the kids stick around for a year to help raise the next generation. After that, the newly independent beavers set off on their own to find their place in the world.
“They’re a lot like teenagers that I know about,” Galindo said. “They like to go and have fun and explore.”
During the spring they’re especially visible, on the prowl to test a new set of choppers. Galindo said young beavers run into mankind more often than their parents do. These interactions have potential to escalate, but so far UI landscapers have maintained a diplomatic relationship with their chew-happy neighbors.
“The only time there’s an opponent is when these beavers start taking trees on campus, which they will — it’s what they do,” Galindo said.
Galindo sad he’s already received calls from UI maintenance and facilities workers who observe the aftermath of juvenile beavers gnawing their way through newly planted trees. Galindo said landscapers want to protect young plants without harming local wildlife.
Last fall, Galindo got a call from Chris Dixon, who helps manage an 8-acre patch of wetland west of campus. Dixon and her students have been developing Stateline Wetlands since 2006, and she understood the sudden appearance of beavers as proof of their success.
“I’m really happy the beavers are there,” she said.
Students in her class take on individual projects that range from building an observation deck, to designing informational signs, organizing outreach programs, planting native species and raising grant money. The group has earned nearly $40,000 in small grants to support the project, and Dixon’s passion for the space is unflagging.
“We want to make that place as amazing as we can make it because they want so little,” Dixon said. “They thrive when just we let them.”
Jessie Balbiani, a student in Dixon’s class, said the 120 species of birds, the family of geese, and even the mink caught on a motion-detecting camera were less remarkable than the beavers’ arrival at Stateline.
“It’s a small creek to support such — what I consider to be — a large mammal,” she said. “I guess it must be pretty healthy to sustain them.”
Galindo said the beavers probably moved downstream after recent construction on upper parts of Paradise Creek turned grassy banks into concrete culverts.
“(The wetland) is a gorgeous area where the water can collect and grass can grow,” he said. “Now there’s beavers and there should be, but they like to chew things and the problem is they started to chew some of the young trees.”
So beavers and people crossed paths again. This time, though, death was not the consequence for a beaver’s masticatory lifestyle. Galindo suggested steel cages to protect the pines that lack natural defenses against beaver-caliber bites.
Dixon said beavers have been known to fell giant trees, only to nibble the tender, topmost branches and leave the stripped trunk untouched. Native willows and cottonwoods, with their persistent and abundant shoots, are beaver-proof and grow happily strong while the dam-builders munch away at just the newest sprigs.
“They just have a different management technique,” Dixon said. “They’re managing for brush and we’re managing for trees.”
Beavers look at trees as a food source, Galindo said, and their wood-eating habits intrude on human structures across the state. They flood roads, chew expensive saplings, fell trees over homes and everyone calls Galindo to take care of the pests.
“Whatever humans don’t like, that’s what beavers will do,” he said.
Instead of killing the animals, Galindo said he’s found alternate ways to solve the problems beavers make for people. Steel cages protect most trees, but in some cases the whole family has to be removed. Galindo is working to improve the process of live trapping and relocating beavers.
“Sometimes when we transplant them, they don’t tend to stay,” he said. “I can sit down and say, ‘This looks like a good place for a beaver,’ but we didn’t ask the beaver.”
Sometimes there may not be enough water or food in an area, and other times there may be too many predators. Galindo said he’s also looking into how closely related beavers from different regions are, because such a drastic move could negatively affect non-native species. He said beavers wouldn’t naturally travel such great distances.
“It would take a long time for a beaver to walk from Southern Idaho to the U of I campus,” he said. “It’s stressful on the beavers … we don’t want to stress our beaver friends out if we don’t have to.”
Galindo said beavers are what biologists call a keystone species. Their dams collect nutrient-rich sediment, which plumps up riparian plants, which shade the water, making it cooler for fish and aquatic insects, which birds like to eat.
“They’re just a really good, gentle animal,” he said. “What they do affects many, and usually in a very good way.”
Native cultures consider beavers a sacred animal for many of the same reasons. The Shoshone Paiute tribe of Southern Idaho holds beavers in a special place, and Galindo said respect for the tribe’s four-legged brethren remained unchanged even when they plugged up the path to higher ground.
Beavers are a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but the big-toothed, paddle-tailed, camera-shy creatures have made it clear that, for now at least, they are Moscow residents.
Dixon recalled a quote from a Native American friend, “These aren’t resources, these are relatives.”
Written by Victoria Hart