Leave it to Beavers

Introduction to the episode

0:00You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast.

0:30In January of 1915, Ernest Shackleton's ship, Endurance, became encased in the ice in the Weddell Sea. Through determination, grit, and savvy, Shackleton would lead his men through a brutal winter, then over hundreds of miles of Antarctic ice, followed by 800 miles across some of the roughest waters in the world. It is one of the most extraordinary and inspirational journeys in the history of exploration. Find this story and many others at the Explorers Podcast,

1:03available wherever you get your podcasts or at explorerspodcast.com.

Reevaluating the beaver

1:17We think we know beavers. They are the industrious tree-gnawing, dam-building, river-flooding rodents. Cute, but generally a nuisance. That's their reputation, at least. We probably don't associate them with the future of environmental restoration. We have a history of thinking of them as problematic instead of understanding that they're playing this incredibly critical role in the ecosystem. Welcome to Big Picture Science. I'm Molly Bentley.

1:48Right around the corner is an iconic beaver lodge. We'll go take a look at it. In this episode, we traipse through soggy meadows in Connecticut and with each step challenge many of our assumptions about beavers. A little more than a century ago, the fur trade had nearly driven the animal to extinction. Now beaver populations are soaring. And in some river habitats across the country, the paddle tails are being actively reintroduced. Beavers are the only animal apart from man that creates the habitat that they need to survive. And

2:22lucky for us, it's water. So they're out there repairing the river system, the river network that we damaged for over 300 years. They're just doing it. And we would be so much better off if we let them keep doing their work or supported it. The return of the beaver comes as our nation's wetlands are disappearing and new federal policies are stripping protection for many of those that remain. Meanwhile, the planet is getting hotter, our need for water more pressing. Some think that an animal once valued only for its lush pelts

2:56could have a critical role to play in building our ecological resilience. This episode is Leave It to Beavers. In some ways, we've always recognized the beaver's love for water. Even comic portrayals of the hard-working buck-toothed rodent draw on that theme, like this moment in the movie Lady and the

3:27Tramp. Hey, look! A beaver! There's the answer to our problem! Let me see here... Pardon me, friend. I wonder if you'd do us a little... Yeah! Busy, Sonny! Busy! Can't stop the gossip now! This'll only take a second of your time... Only a second? Listen, listen, Sonny! Do you realize every second 70 centimeters of water is wasted over that spillway? Yeah, but gotta get this log moving, Sonny! Gotta get it moving!

4:02Back then, we didn't recognize the profound ecological benefits of the animal's compulsive water conservation. After all, the beaver's reputation as a pest has cast a long shadow. For example, beavers gnaw down trees, even fences. Their dams can flood farms and roads. And why do they build those dams anyway? But environmentalists and engineers are seizing upon the beaver's extraordinary behavior to help with environmental restoration. One journalist remembers when the ecological possibilities hit her like a thunderbolt a few years ago during a daily walk with her dog,

4:38Kota. And I never thought about beavers, but one day we were walking right here and Kota froze. So I froze and suddenly we heard this crack of a tail slap. I didn't know it was a tail slap, but it was a beaver going BAM warning me to stop. I was so used to just walking by because there was nothing here but just dry grass. There was really nothing here. I was used to not even paying it. No, never mind. But then when I looked, I thought, oh my gosh,

5:08holy cow, it's full of water. That's when I saw there was this beaver swimming there and just had this instinctive feeling something amazing is happening here. I just felt it. A lot of our problems with water today are a result of devastated river systems and wetlands. Beavers have always been essential to healthy rivers by creating pools of surface water and deep reservoirs below that feed streams even during drought. Their efforts keep water supplies robust. Places where beavers are being reintroduced

5:43are figuring out how to manage conflicts of interest with the animals while letting them do their beaver thing. My name is Leela Phillip and I'm the author of Beaverland, How One Weird Rodent Made America.

The biology of beavers

5:54Her encounter with the tail slapping female beaver inspired the book. I spent a couple days walking through the woods with Leela talking about the animals near her home in Woodstock, Connecticut, where to her delight new beaver ponds had recently popped up. But she says that the odd appearance of the largest rodent in North America defies the heroic stereotype. So beavers are wonderfully weird. They have these charismatic bear-like faces, these winsome bear-like faces with little ears, and then you go down they

6:27have these dexterous forepaws, but that mammalian kind of beauty ends right there because they've got a kind of pear-shaped body. And then you've got these big feet that are sometimes as wide as the beaver's head, so huge goose feet, and then this crazy paddle tail, which has to be the most distinctive feature of the beaver. Looks like it's been run over by a tractor, leaving indentations, which actually are an incredibly adaptive, cool feature. Yeah, say more about how that tail works. There are sensors in the tail.

7:01Yeah, so people have thought that the beaver tail has scales, but those indentations are actually just indentations indentations in the skin that create more surface area. And the tail is filled with blood vessels. So think of the tail as a water sensor. So the beaver through all those blood vessels can figure out whether the water pressure has gone down. The beaver can also figure out whether the water flow rate is. So one of the most amazing things about beavers is that they will only build when the current is optimum

7:33for them to build a dam. So they're not going to go out when the river is rushing so fast that it's going to wash away their sticks. They go out when bingo, it's exactly perfect for them to build. Not too slow, not too fast. How do they do it? We figured out it's because they sense the water flow through their tail. It's also their refrigerator throughout the winter. They live off fat stored in the tail because they go into torpor. And in the summer, it's their air conditioning system. So all those blood vessels

8:03in the tail actually help cool them down in the summer. What do you mean they go into torpor in the winter? They actually slow down their blood chemistry so that they need only very little oxygen and very little food. Does that mean that they are swimming around in a state of torpor or they have to sit in one place in a kind of suspended animation? I mean, can you continue to move when you're in torpor? Oh, yeah. Well, that's such a great question. So actually, here in New England, under the ice,

8:34beavers are actually swimming. There's oxygen trapped under the ice. So they breathe a little bit and go to their food cache, which is like a big pile of sticks under the ice, eat a little bit, and then swim back into the lodge and go back to sleep. So they eat a little bit, breathe a little bit, swim a little bit, rest. Speaking of eating a little bit, here is one of the strangest facts about beavers. We have all probably eaten beaver castor produced in the castor sacks of both male

9:04and female beavers. So the castor are the internal glands and beavers mark their territory with castor. It's a kind of, it's a kind of oil they excrete from their gland. And they, it, you know, people call beaver castor mounds. They make a mound of mud and they excrete an oil on it from the castor gland. They call them the beaver telephone system. That's how they communicate a lot of things with one another through scent. They can hardly see, but they can smell really well. So in the era of Pliny, back in the medieval and ancient world, even before the medieval world,

9:37beaver castor was really sought after as a medicine. So beaver castor was believed to cure everything from epilepsy to insanity to headaches. But today it is used in perfumes. It is used in high-end vodkas, but it also is an additive in raspberry and strawberry ice cream and candy. So if you've eaten Twizzlers or raspberry ice cream or strawberry jello, you have eaten castor because FDA doesn't identify it as castor. It's just considered a natural ingredient.

10:09So if you looked on that bag of licorice and you saw beaver castor on there, you might not open it. You might not, you might not open it, but you know, they have cleverly just listed it as a natural food additive because it is natural. But beaver castor enhances the flavor of raspberry, strawberry, and vanilla. So vanilla ice cream, strawberry, raspberry, all those ice creams and candies probably have castor in them.

10:36No, is that, is that the tick stuff? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Let's spray that.

10:43Now you're saying this is our path because I'm not seeing much of a path. I'm seeing ferns, ferns up to our chest. Like a week ago, this was a clear path. This is the rate of growth right now in early June. As we walk through the woods, Leela pointed out the obvious clues of beaver presence, like a lodge or a dam, and those that called for a trained eye. See this dead bit of tree? That's part of the old dam. So that's a tree a beaver took down and brought over here as part of the dam. How do you

11:16know that a beaver took that tree down and that tree didn't just wash up here? Because there just wouldn't be enough storm surge from a tiny little creek and all the mud there. And you can see the indentation, which is about the size of the belly of a beaver. This is a beaver belly right there? It's like a slide, an old slide where they would go in. That's a large animal. That's a big belly. Yeah, think about a small Labrador. That's a beaver. Nice fat belly going in and out.

The history of beaverland

11:45Long before the first ships left Europe for the New World. By some estimates, as many as 400 million beavers, species name Castor canadensis, are estimated to have roamed North America. The busy animals shaped the landscape, turning rivers into ponds and creeks into fertile wetlands. It was a different land then, one unfamiliar to many of us today, a place that Leela Phillip calls beaverland. If we imagine back to beaverland, we first of all have to imagine back to when the river networks

12:17were functioning fully as they need to. So you need to imagine water pulsing through the land as vast arteries of water. And in each of the headwaters of the river system, you had beavers. Scientists estimate 400 million beavers were living in every watershed throughout the continent. So they were our original river keepers. So they'll build a dam, swell the water, move downstream, do it again, do it again. So if you look at that creek or stream from above, instead of being like a thread, it looks like a

12:51string of beads on a chain. That's a tremendous amount of water just spread in here in the east through the woodlands. So that's what North America once looked like. Lots of water. Native Americans lived and hunted across the soggier land, of course, where beavers, often considered sacred, were a source of food and thick fur. A postage stamp-sized square of beaver fur has 126,000 individual strands of fur.

13:23That's as much hair as you or I have on our entire head. So that's just a little stamp-sized section of beaver fur. Just imagine how thick and lustrous that fur is. And there's an underlayer of fur as well. What does it feel like? It's kind of rough on the outside because the outer layer has to be really durable, but the underlayer is incredibly soft. And in fact, you know, poets opined about the wonders of beaver wool. It's called the underlayer. And the indigenous peoples who have always lived here

13:55made coats of beaver fur.

14:01When the Europeans arrived, though, they seized on the profitability of those lush pelts. What began as trade with indigenous people turned into a lucrative fur-lined enterprise when beaver fur became the height of European fashion. The engines of America started on beaver pelt and the beaver fur trade. So between 1600 and 1900, the beaver fur trade pretty much wiped the beavers out. Our first multimillionaires like John Jacob Astor got their start trading beaver fur, and empires were

14:36built, economies were built, and that was just the start. Beaver fur was critical for making beaver felt. So a beaver felt hat in the 1500s and the 1600s was incredibly important for warmth. It was the Gore-Tex of its day. Think of it that way. So it was a lot of beaver fur crossing the Atlantic from North America to London to China, throughout the world. But when you overextract a resource and you don't let it replenish, you wipe it out. And that's what happened.

15:08By the 1900s, the widespread hunting and trapping of beaver for purposes of trade and extermination had driven the animal to near extinction. The population of upwards of 400 million beavers had plummeted to an estimated 100,000 individuals. But things have been looking up for the paddle tail since the fur trade ended. Beaver conservation efforts kicked in in the mid-20th century,

15:38and more recently, the semi-aquatic animal is being reintroduced to areas where populations haven't recovered yet, areas thirsty for beaver engineering. Today, approximately 15 million beavers are lumbering around North America. They are here on the East Coast, while also being reintroduced in places out west, for example in California, Oregon, and Utah, including on indigenous lands, as people turn to the animal to help conserve water in drought-prone landscapes.

16:09And it's hard to overstate just how adept beavers are at pooling their water resources. We are in Woodstock, Connecticut, and we're looking at a really beautiful beaver pond. This does not look like a pond. I think of a pond as something that, you know, maybe I could throw a rock across. This looks like a lake. This is millions of gallons of water that have been impounded. And so beavers have filled this low-lying area with water, which is what beavers do. They will come to a stream or a creek, they will build a dam, or they'll use a natural barrier, a stone wall, a berm,

16:44in this case a human road, and they'll build upon it. So they've extended it, and they will stop the flow of water, and it will swell out. And what's incredible about this is not only is it a stunning basin of water that we see, but the average beaver pond here in the east holds at least three times as much water that we can't see underneath. Leela, what do beavers want? What do they want with millions of gallons of water? I think the way to think about beavers is they are water farmers.

17:15So they need water to survive. And the thing about beavers is they are the only animal apart from man that creates the habitat they need to survive, which is incredible. So everything comes out from that. They feed on aquatic vegetation. It's a myth that they eat trees. They only eat the underlying bark of trees when they don't have aquatic vegetation. They survive mainly on all the aquatic plants that are living in a pond like this. But Leela's beavers didn't stop there. To my astonishment, never having

17:53seen a beaver pond or even a beaver close up, we continued to a second pond where I learned just how industrious beavers are. And I can see cattails off in the distance. So if there are cattails there, there must be a pond close by. That's the start of it right there. So that's actually a lot of water there. There's just so much vegetation we can't see it. Oh, what? So there's a wild cherry tree. You see how they've just started working on that? That's interesting. The bottom of the tree has been

18:25gnawed off. Yeah, so they're interested in taking that down. Will they succeed? They will. And what's really interesting about this was so four months ago when they were ponding this or making this,

18:42there was no food for them except what they could get from the underlying bark. So they were living off these trees and whatever energy resources they had. Are you saying there was no water here four months ago? They did all of this. They built a dam and this is the result a few months later. Absolutely. I came down here with someone from the Beaver Institute in March and we measured it. We figured it was three feet deep in some places and there were millions of gallons of water impounded in just

19:13three months. It's just astonishing. Are you not astonished still? I am astonished. This is all new for me. This is an astonishing amount of water. I can't believe that this was dry five, six months ago. And we just came from a pond where you said there were millions of gallons of water. So we've been to two ponds now where millions of gallons of water have been retained because of the work of these rodents. Yeah. And I mean, there are just two beavers here, two beavers that we estimate are two years old. So

19:45if you think of the value of beavers in the river network, their value is just incredible. And the good they can do if we bring them back, if we learn to coexist with them is really phenomenal. Just two beavers created this pond. Please confirm two. We're talking two. We are talking two. I mean, I've had wildlife cameras on this pond for months now in different locations. And I've had people watching with me and there are two beavers here.

20:17Coming up, the concept of paleo rivers. And we see how beavers weave branches into dams, all while keeping hope alive that will catch a glimpse of the animals themselves. We'll be a little quiet here because the beavers could be right over there. This is very exciting. Of course, we're pretty noisy moving through the woods, but we'll try.

20:42This episode considers what happens to the environment if we leave it to beavers. Close your eyes and picture a healthy river. You might imagine a ribbon of blue water rushing unimpeded toward its destination. It's idyllic and wild, but it's missing one thing.

Understanding river networks

21:15Beavers. Beavers are the original river engineers. And reintroducing them to habitats means embracing a definition of rivers that is unfamiliar to many of us. My name is Denise Birchstedt. I'm a research scientist. I have a PhD in fluvial geomorphology, and that means that I study rivers. We think of rivers as something that's the water that we see. So that's one place that people really don't quite realize that most of the water is flowing

21:45below what you see. It's flowing through the riverbed, and it's flowing through the banks. So even where exactly the water of the river is is often not even in the spot that you're seeing. It's often in the ground below and to the side. But this, I mean, this is what really blew my mind when I was researching the book and when I was traipsing around trying to understand what a river was. This idea that a river is largely the water we can't see, that's incredible. And so here we're standing over the river,

22:16right? Because here where we stand, the water is flowing through below our feet to reemerge downstream. And I'm sure if we walked along the edge here, we would see water rising up in little springs. Human-built dams have made rivers orderly, containing them within their banks, but rivers long to be free. Dr. Birchstedt has identified sprawling ancient river networks she calls paleo rivers, where water once flowed but are now dried, or their tracks buried, and are not flowing today. They are the remnants of historic river systems that

22:49existed before the traders and hunters knocked out beaver populations. And they can be revived. Dr. This paleo is, you know, 100 years ago, 200 years ago. Doesn't need to be when there were mastodons, but there are paleo rivers of any time. It's a term that I've been using to apply most recently to a place in the White Mountains in New Hampshire, where the rivers were flowing before the beavers were extirpated probably in the 1700s. As I understand it, the way to think about it is like a big artery

23:23system, like a vascular system. So you have a mighty river like the Connecticut and this vast vascular system of tributaries that feed into it. And we've lost so much of that circulatory system that feeds the river. And that's the paleo river network that we've lost. And we don't even know where a lot of it was because we've built over it. We've buried it. We've channeled it. We've canaled it. We can't even find it anymore. And that's why it's so important to protect what we still have. And that's why beavers are so

23:57important, because they're out there repairing each of those ephemeral and intermittent streams. Beaver dams encourage rivers to return to their natural state, which is anything but orderly. Rivers are messy. Not only is the water flow messy through the ground, but stuff falls in the river. It can be trees and it can be mountainsides when there's a landslide that partially block flow. And the organisms that live in the water have evolved under those conditions and their lives depend on it.

24:29The young require areas that are sheltered where they're safe from storms and from predators in the water. And so those are going to be shallow off river areas where they can be protected. They also require free flowing areas as well. That's where there's lots of oxygen available and the fish need that too. You see that kind of green glow in the water? That's just life. That is so much richness of microbial life. And did you see the heron? Blue heron, perhaps?

25:03Yep. That's a great blue heron.

25:10That's beautiful. See, now you just won't hear that on most ponds. I mean, you can go to little ponds and they are absolutely beautiful. But that kind of biodiversity, that kind of sound, that's rich. That's a beaver altered wetland, a beaver pond that's rich with life. It's so tranquil. Oh, look, there's some water birds over there. Those are wood ducks. That's the other thing. A tremendous amount of waterfowl comes to these ponds and wetlands. So this is a migratory landing spot now for all kinds of birds

25:46passing through. We really need to look at wetlands and ponds like this and think of them as our coral reefs. These are the coral reefs of North America. So if we want pollinators and we want songbirds and we want all the kind of biodiversity that we need to survive and grow food, we need wetlands like this. But these richly productive homes are threatened and disappearing due to climate change, human constructed dams and the development of wetlands. We've lost 50 percent of our wetlands, something

26:20like 50 to 70 percent. And we didn't know in 1850 when the Great Swamp Act was passed that said everybody could fill in their wetlands, how valuable they were. But now we do know, especially now with climate change, how incredibly valuable they are for us. So it's tremendously important that we protect the ones we still have. But under the 2023 Supreme Court ruling that limits the EPA's power to enforce the Clean Water Act, wetlands have fewer protections due to a more restricted definition

26:51of a wetland. So while the scientific definitions of rivers and wetlands are expanding, the legal definition is narrowing. The danger of the recent Supreme Court decision is that it leaves upper reaches of the river network like this vulnerable. They're no longer protected the way they were. So someone could come and build on them? Theoretically, because if you only protect water that you can see and you no longer protect intermittent streams or wetlands with subsurface water, then you really are leaving your wetlands at risk.

27:28And along with providing a habitat for plankton, plants, birds and other animals, the beaver's role

Water storage and drought

27:36as a water farmer pooling local water resources provides other benefits in a hotter world. But if we want to survive the kind of storm events that are coming at us with increasing frequency with climate change, we need the kind of water storage that's created because this is a giant sponge. So there's the basin of water we see, but three times as much water is being held underneath this. So every one of these beaver-created wetlands and ponds that is happening along a creek or a little stream like this

28:10is creating a huge amount of water storage in the upper reaches of our river network. Maybe the most obvious because we're standing here in the heat. We need water for drought. So last summer we had quite a drought here and this part of the river network did not dry up. So three miles down in Putnam, they were on water rationing. We were not because we have a lot of water here, we have beavers here, they're storing all this water so the river network didn't dry up.

28:43Could you say more about that and how it helps the river network? So the water is here. The reservoir is deep and it's filled with water. As you said, it's like a giant sponge. When the drought comes, how does this replenish or how does this keep the river going? Well, literally this little stream or creek will draw upon that sponge. So instead of that creek completely drying up, it will have some flow in it. But also, that means that the water is slowed down so it can actually have groundwater exchange and get into the aquifer. So the water

29:20has time to sink into and fill the aquifer. If the water just rushes off, it doesn't matter how much rain you get, it just rushes through the creek system, the river system, and goes out into the ocean, which is what's been happening with our degraded river networks.

Flood protection and dam design

29:35And perhaps counter-intuitively, a beaver-created wetland protects against floods. The loss of wetlands in places like the Mississippi River Delta is one of the reasons that that area has been vulnerable to hurricanes and storm surges. Denise Birchstedt says that beaver-engineered wetlands protect habitats inland too. So this area, what we're looking at here, to a hydrologist who cares a lot about floods, this is flood storage. So in the sense that you're able to store or hold onto water in a flood.

30:09And so all this area that you see when the rain comes, if you have a really big rainstorm enough to generate a flood, that water is going to come down and it's going to be able to spread out here instead of moving downstream. And so because we have this connectivity that the beavers have provided by creating this dam, connecting the river water to the edges, we now have this place for flood water to go and protect places downstream. So this is one of the many ecosystem functions that are provided

30:41by beaver dams. There's this water available for later and also the potential to catch more if there's too much. It just sort of buffers the extremes. There's too little water. There's still some available here. There's too much water. Like in a flood, it gets caught here.

30:57Look, there's something moving in the water, but I don't think it's a beaver. See there? Just by the edge? I think those are just big water bugs. It might be a snake. Let's go see. Oh yes, let's let's let's go see if it's a water snake.

31:16Can we walk closer to this dam here and you could just describe what you're seeing here, because it's really an extraordinary collection of twigs and branches and other bits of green stuff. Describe for us what we're looking at. These are actually saplings and lengths of wood branches and saplings. They've gnawed them at different lengths and they've actually interlaced them. So what's really interesting about this is that they are placed laterally. So they go right to left, but also you can see there's a lot of branches that are being placed so that they are going against

31:53the current. So they're actually basically propping the whole structure up. So that may look like kind of a chaos of sticks. But if you actually analyze it, you've got sticks placed at all different angles so that no matter what force the water presses on these sticks, those sticks are going to jam in and become stronger. So there's mud and there's mud at the bottom there. And there's mud all in between and there's also rocks. But I think of a stick as being maybe the length of my forearm. Some of these

32:25sticks look like branches that are six feet long. Are you telling me that the beavers carried the branches here? Oh yeah. I mean, they can trail saplings that are 10 feet long. They are incredibly strong. So Lila, do you think that beavers are artists, engineers, or are they architects? Oh, I think they're definitely all three. I've seen the most amazing construction. Some of them feel like they have a kind of whimsy to them. One December, I saw that the beavers had put a line of holly branches along

32:59the top with red berries. Was that coincidence? I don't know, but it was just fantastic. We're going to walk through. Well, I just have questions. On our walk to a second dam, Denise Birchstead joins us to admire the construction. And then look over here. They've started putting stones along the top to buttress this part. Look at this. How do they carry stones? Seriously, how do they carry stones? They carry them with their hands, yeah. A beaver will carry a good-sized stone. And this is how they make those messy,

33:31complicated rivers with multiple channel threads, because the water keeps getting pushed to the side.

33:39And, you know, water's the story of our century. So if we want to survive climate change, if we want to have water to grow food, if we want to be able to mitigate flood and fire, we need beavers in the landscape. So from pelts to pests to providers of water. Yeah, that's nice. I mean, beavers need a rebrand. I mean, I really think that we should have Smokey the Beaver in terms of wildfire. And, you know, there are programs throughout the West that are working hard to bring beaver back. They

34:14understand that if they can get beavers in the upper reaches of the watershed, they're going to be a lot better off in places like California, Colorado. Lila and I go looking for the beavers again while she continues to teach me how to spot the clues. What do we look for in the water? Well, we're going to see a brown head. Look for a silver V. A silver V. It looks like a silver V is creasing the water. Now I see that your eye has gone to that, to that dam up there. Do you see something? Yep. I see a movement in the water over there. Okay, let's get closer. That's very exciting.

34:51All right. So we got very close. We thought we saw a beaver. Looks like it was a false alarm, but we're going to keep looking for these beavers. The lodge is that teepee-shaped pile of sticks over there. That's where they live in the winter, especially. River beavers tend to live in banks, but here in woodland ponds like this, they'll build that iconic teepee shape of sticks, partly for protection. Bears, bobcat, a lot of things would like to eat a beaver around here.

35:27Coming up, the beaver's other sometime foe. What stands in the way of humans finding a new productive coexistence with this wild animal, long considered a pest? That's next. This episode of Big Picture Science looks at what happens if we leave it to beavers.

Indigenous perspectives on beavers

36:09If the environmental benefits of beaver-engineered rivers come as a surprise, one reason is that the loss of beaver dams and the animals that made them has meant that their ecological contributions have been poorly understood. But now we do understand. So what's keeping us from letting beavers repair our damaged river systems? Well, the practicality of bringing back the paddle tails requires compromise and a shift in mindset. When North America resembled what Lila Phillip calls beaverland, where sprawling river systems laced the continent, the beaver was

36:43sacred to many indigenous tribes that relied on the animals for food and fur. But some modern indigenous people have an ambivalent relationship with the animal. In the Great Lakes region, for example, the ancestral home of the Anishinaabe tribe, getting along with beavers means first confronting a fraught history. Michael, if we can begin with your name and your title, please. Okay. So, greetings everyone. I just introduced myself and my ancestral language, Anishinaabe. My name is

37:31Michael Price Wasaijic. I am Anishinaabe, and I serve as the traditional ecological knowledge specialist at the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission in Odena, Wisconsin, in the heart of Anishinaabe country. Well, from my knowledge, we've got different things going on in different parts of the country. I know that out west, because of climate change, they are experiencing wildfires and drought and flooding in the spring and summers.

38:05And therefore, people out there have learned that the beavers can bring benefit, you know, to helping them to control their hydrology. We have a little bit different case in Wisconsin. We have lots of water here, and we also have lots of beavers here. And so there's a different relationship between beavers and human society in Wisconsin, as opposed to what's going on out west. Michael says that many people in the Great Lakes region consider the animal a nuisance. Beaver dams can negatively impact trout populations and flood agricultural lands.

38:40But he's been grappling with some recent insights. The one thing that really shocked me is that I found out that there are a lot of Anishinaabe people, too, that also regard the beaver as a nuisance. As Anishinaabe people, as indigenous people, I feel that we need to redefine and revisit our relationship with a mick. A mick is the name that we give to beaver, the one who eats the trees. And so I had to ask myself, well, why is it that we

39:11don't have a stronger relationship with a mick? And I think that relationship with Anishinaabe people and a mick goes all the way back to the 1600s and 1700s during the fur trade. And during that time, we as indigenous peoples assisted fur traders from England, from Europe to come over from France to come over and harvest beaver pelts. And we assisted in that almost near extinction of the beavers. What was the relationship with the beaver or the understanding about the animal that was

39:44lost, in your opinion? Yeah, I believe that the fur trade introduced us to a commercial industry where we now could sell furs for profit, for money. And prior to that, we didn't have that kind of economy. We had a trade economy, but we didn't have a commercial economy where we could actually accumulate wealth. And that really changed, I believe, who we were as a people. The establishment of reservations and residential schools forced further assimilation to Western

40:16culture. It included forbidding the use of indigenous language and, until 1978, conducting religious ceremonies in public. Michael says that efforts by Anishinaabe people to recover lost languages and traditions, including the once sacred relationship with the beaver, is the first step to recognizing the animal's ecological benefit. And as we became more proficient in our language and our cultural ways, we began to realize that, you know, we've got some holes in our knowledge base,

40:48knowledge gaps. A lot of the people who have our traditional teachings, we know that Amik is our relative that needs to be honored and respected. And of course, our sacred wild rice, which we call Manomen, actually needs these wetlands with cold water, with a very slow-moving current. And in these types of waters, wild rice can thrive and proliferate.

41:19I think in moving forward, we need to identify a path of how can we coexist with the beaver and the things that they do. And also at the same time, be able to mitigate and minimize what we need to do to coexist. And I think lethal management and using dynamite to blow up dams is, it's obsolete and it's cruel. There are other ways to be able to coexist with beavers besides taking these extreme steps.

41:50And that's my opinion as an Anishinaabe person. I don't speak for the other, the other nations. It makes me very happy to see that Western trained scientists are recognizing that the behavior of the beaver can actually be a benefit to a potential crisis related to climate change. And that they're actually honoring and respecting what the beaver brings to the table and how we could make our lives better as human beings if we humble ourselves and recognize those gifts from our non-human relatives.

42:24Michael, thank you so much for talking to us. Michael Wasagic-Price is a Traditional Ecological Knowledge Specialist at the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission in Odena, Wisconsin.

Restoration and flow devices

42:40My name is Clay Fraser. I live in Dane County, Wisconsin, which is South Central Wisconsin. I'm a principal ecologist and co-owner of Native Range Ecological. I'm a restoration ecologist and my background is wildlife ecology and botany from an academic standpoint. What we're really doing are working with landowners in areas where beaver already exists or have historically existed. And we're trying to essentially create a situation where they can either come back or they can remain on the landscape. That is a far more economical thing to do. It's far more

43:13sustainable long-term because you're dealing with genetic cohorts of populations that existed previously and we're not reintroducing animals that came from a different place in the state with very different dynamics of their habitats that they exist in. His team works to persuade landowners to leave beaver dams in place and to limit trapping so the animals can return on their own or with a little help to the waterways, a practice called re-beavering. But if humans want to enjoy the benefits of beaver-restored wetland, Clay says,

43:47they must compromise. For example, although individual trees can be protected with metal caging, a few trees are going to come down. But the biggest practical question is how to control that unwanted flooding. Clay says his team has a host of wildland plumbing tricks. For example, flow devices like pond levelers that regulate water height. Essentially, things like pond levelers are relatively simple devices that exist in the water. Once we

44:18install them, they're there for about 10 years before they have to be replaced. But if they're designed with, you know, a lot of thought that goes into the hydrologic aspects of the watershed, they can be quite effective and they work very well. And that's on the same line, along the same lines with things like culver protection devices that we're installing. Okay, can you give us an example or just a mental schematic of what a flow device or a pond leveler looks like and how it works? Yeah, absolutely. So, ultimately, beaver want to have that, you know, two or three feet of water in the waterways they live in.

44:53And so, the goal of these devices is to allow that level of water to be maintained. But even if the beavers continue to dam or build up higher on the dams that exist, the water level cannot exceed any further than where that pipe is moving through. So, conceptually, what a leveler is is an intake dome made out of galvanized wire mesh with a PVC pipe that runs through the bottom of it collecting water. And the other end of that pipe is set in the dam, is set in the beaver dam itself. So,

45:26essentially, we're notching out the beaver dam, replacing the pipe, and wherever that elevation of that pipe ends up sitting, which we can adjust up or down depending on how, you know, where we want those water levels, that is where the surface water elevation will go to and will stay to. And so, at that point, the beavers can continue to dam, they can continue to build up on the dams that the leveler is in, and the water can only reach a certain height. And so, that's the compromise that we're after. Clay, we can't restore rivers to their state 300 years ago, of course, and

45:59returning or reintroducing beavers can't work everywhere. Can you give us an overview of where it works best? Sure. I mean, simply stated, Molly, in areas where watersheds are relatively intact of what they were pre-settlement. Waterways are allowed to re-meander through flowage systems and wetlands and massive wetland complexes and floodplains. Those are the areas where it's most easy to re-beaver, to use that term. It's not, I didn't coin that phrase, but I certainly like to use it. In places

46:33where we have altered hydrologically, and to your point, sometimes to a point that we really can't restore it to what it was a few hundred years ago, we can still, in a very isolated manner, we can either mimic the behavior of beavers, which we're doing with things like beaver dam analog structures that are man-made beaver dams, essentially. Or we can, in just smaller watersheds and sub-watersheds, we can allow beaver to exist that are still there. Have you ever held a beaver? Have you ever picked

47:05one up? I have. What is that like? What is that experience like? You know, they're a wild animal, number one. They're unpredictable. But, you know, they're a lot more docile than people think, generally speaking. They're not really super aggressive. They're very curious animals. As a biologist, you kind of get trained classically to extract your emotions from these things, right? What we're really trying to do is manage populations of wild species. We're really less concerned with individual animals. But it's still fun. It's interesting, right? And it's exhilarating to be

47:38able to really handle animals that have such a remarkable and profound impact on our landscape and our world. So given that, can you give us an idea of what a beaver reintroduction or return to a landscape looks like? Now, I'm imagining that you take two beavers, maybe a mating pair, you put them in a cage, take them to the river, open up the cage, and let the beavers go and do their thing. I'm sure that's a very simplistic sketch of what you do. But what does that moment look like? Yeah, I mean, it's actually not a lot more complicated than you just described, Molly. I mean,

48:13these animals are trapped. They're live trapped. Typically, they're selected from populations that are quite robust, maybe even in places where they're overpopulated. And they're, you know, they're brought into similar habitat and similar hydraulic conditions of where they were trapped and relocated from. So it's really important to think about what potential conflicts could exist in an area where they're going to be relocated. That probably is the number one consideration. The last thing that any biologist wants is to go through the process and the procedure, which is

48:44extensive, of just getting the permits and getting the regulatory approvals to do it, to do it correctly, and then have those animals depredated or killed or trapped off because we didn't really think, you know, holistically enough about what potential conflicts might exist. So most commonly, reintroductions are done in very remote places where they're less likely to come across human conflicts with roads or agriculture, right? And in our state, that's a very rare situation.

49:14You know, there are people on roads and culverts are everywhere, right? And so it's a huge consideration to think about what potential impact are these animals going to have when they start to recolonize areas they haven't been into for a couple hundred years or more. When you let the animals go, just so we can picture this, do they walk right to the river? I mean, maybe you put them down in the river and then they get to work right away? Or do you know if there are a couple days of disorientation or what's it like from the animals? What does the animal do?

49:46Yeah, and that's a great question. I mean, ultimately, a lot of these animals are fitted with radio collars with transmitters and you're tracking their movements maybe for a few weeks just to ensure that they're actually, you know, going where they're supposed to go and not going where they're not supposed to go. But yeah, you open up a trap and generally speaking, they, you know, they're a little bit apprehensive. They might hang out in the trap even when it's open for a couple of minutes. They may run out. It really beaver are like humans. I mean, they're, they have individual personalities. And so some of them will run right to the water innately and others will be very shy

50:22and sit in the cage and kind of wait to be kind of nudged out or, you know, or coaxed out of that, of that trap. So it varies a lot. And finally, how do you persuade landowners who haven't already decided to introduce beavers or reintroduce them or return beavers to do so? Yeah, that may be the best question yet, Molly. So, I mean, ultimately, what we are very much in the business of right now is changing the culture. We are trying to win hearts and minds, literally one

50:56project, one landowner, and one agency person at a time. The people that are moving through these permit systems because in our state, in Wisconsin, we don't yet have a specific permit to install flow devices. We are begging and borrowing and square pegging into round holes every time that we are going through a permit process, right? And most of the time, the DNR folks, because they're not used to this, this is a relatively new idea to them, their knee-jerk reaction is to say this can't be done, right? And that's kind of why I say the people that we're working with in these early years are pioneers.

51:31They're the first people going over the hill and, you know, people think their heretics are crazy to a degree until they realize, well, wait a minute, now you're saving money, you're not having to trap all the time, and you're getting all these ecological benefits of having them on the landscape, having the beaver there, right? So, it literally is region by region, county by county, trying to change the culture and make people aware that, yes, they can be here. It's exciting for us because it's a challenge to solve this problem that exists on the landscape between humans and beavers.

52:06Clay Frazier, thank you so much for talking to us. Absolutely. Clay Frazier is a restoration ecologist and the co-owner of Native Range Ecological in Wisconsin.

Spotting wildlife in the wetlands

52:17Well, my weekend journey with Lila Phillip and Denise Birstedt looking for beavers was coming to an end. Although we saw tantalizing evidence of their near presence in the form of dams, a lodge, trees whittled to pencil sticks, and the impressions of their bellies left in the mud, but the animals themselves remained elusive. I hadn't yet seen a beaver up close. Lila, Denise, and I walked to one

52:48more pond. Is that a fish? Something's swimming around. That's not an insect. That is not an insect. That is not a snake. And they're circling. They're circling. That's a mammal. That could be a beaver. So we are seeing an animal swimming. It is circling in the middle of the pond. Yeah, I think there's two. Should we sneak down? Yeah. There they are. Look, far. Over in the far. Over the far. Kind of moving quickly, which makes me think it could be an otter. Otters love to follow beavers.

53:27Otters be another species that the beaver ponds encourage? Yeah, the otters are absolutely supported by beaver ponds. They're very much neighbors, the beavers and the otters. And the otters use the beaver ponds for their habitat, for their food. And otters will go from pond to pond. They have a wide territory. I'm going to say otter. Yeah, I'm thinking otter. There's one that just came up again. Sinuous. Look at them. Really sinuous. That's the right word. And you know, here it comes. There it comes. That's an otter, for sure. That's such an encouraging sign, because it means that life is coming back or, you know, it's being supported as it had been by the beavers.

54:03This is the biodiversity that people talk about, which is why you want beavers apart from the water. Look at that. Isn't that beautiful? Well, in the end, I never saw a beaver, but the otter sighting was thrilling. The beavers remained elusive, yet the fruits of their hard work were everywhere. In the great pools of water, the lush grasses, the stunning diversity of wildlife that the animals water farming had encouraged. So for two days in a pocket of Connecticut, I could begin to imagine the beaver land of many centuries ago.

54:39How long ago was this a field? Was there no water here? This is new water. I think it was a smaller body of water, but when I interviewed the landowner, he said there had historically been beavers here as long as he could remember. And when I looked at the old maps, the beavers had been working this stream for a long, long time. So yeah, they're going to have been here since the climate allowed them to be here once the glaciers melted. And they're just beginning to sort of reclaim this valley here from what had been here for thousands of years and has

55:16not been here for a couple hundred and is now being restored. This is, this is a great spot to be a beaver.

Credits and acknowledgments

55:26This show would not be possible without the industriousness of producer Seth Shostak, senior producer Gary Niederhoff, assistant producers Brian Edwards and Shannon Rose Geary, and the editorial consultants of Seacon Ackbon. I am the executive producer of Big Picture Science, Molly Bentley. Much thanks to river scientist Denise Birchstedt and a special thanks to the author of Beaverland. Writer Leah Phillip, who is generous with her time and tick spray as we traipse together

55:57through the woods looking for one wild, weird, and as I came to learn, wonderful rodent. Also a big thanks to our listeners and our Patreon supporters. The original music in the show is by Dewey DeLay and June Miyake. This episode of Big Picture Science that examines what happens when we partner with a wild animal to help the environment is called Leave it to Beavers.

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