Click the link to read the article on the Alamosa Citizen website (Owen Woods):
August 31, 2024
On a cold, wet Monday morning, hidden away in a tall aspen stand, Rosalee Reese and Connor Born whisper so they don’t disturb the nearby rehabbing bears and bobcats. They walk into a large chain-link enclosure. In one corner sits a stock tank filled with murky water. In the other corner is a den-like structure of hay. A piece of plywood is laid over the top. Reese, Born and two employees of the Frisco Creek animal rehab center use sticks and their wits to corral five beavers into kennels.
These beavers are part of the Beaver Translocation Program and are the third group this year to be relocated from the Valley floor to the Rio Grande National Forest. “Problem” or “nuisance” beavers are more often than not, just killed. When their dam building collides with agriculture or when they are perceived to be displacing water levels or threatening water rights, beavers are seen as pests and are treated as such. The hope is that this program will eventually lead to less conflict and more coexistence.
The future, Reese and Born say, is coexistence.
From Frisco Creek to Rios de los Piños
The Beaver Translocation Program is a part of the Rio Grande National Forest Wet Meadows Restoration Project. The Rio Grande Headwaters Restoration Project and the Forest Service have partnered on a new pathway for beavers to be placed higher in the mountains where they can have more direct influence on the watersheds and avoid the nuisance label. Projects like these have sprung up over the United States and in Canada, but work really didn’t start in Colorado until about two years ago.
“There’s always going to be conflicts on the Valley floor,” said Born, stewardship coordinator for the Rio Grande Headwaters Restoration Program. “I think of this as much a service to irrigators and water rights holders in the Valley as it is a benefit to the forest.”
Beavers play a vital role in watershed health; their impacts on the environment as a whole are widespread and well-known. However, where beavers excel in some places, they can be real problems in others. Particularly on the Valley floor, where their work and the work of farmers and ranchers collide.
“If you have suitable habitat for beaver, you’re going to continue to have problems with beavers,” said Reese, forest fisheries biologist for the Forest Service. “If we come and trap them out and move them, if you shoot them, the likelihood is that they’re going to come back at some point.”
She said that coexistence and making areas resilient against the beavers can “make your life easier because you’re not going to be dealing with the same issue over and over again. Because you’re not going to be able to eliminate beaver from the Rio Grande Basin.”
There are ways to create cohabitation, but it takes time and it takes money. The money, though, won’t come out of the pockets of those in conflict with the beavers. In fact, Born said, the approach is to offer funds to encourage people not to kill nuisance beavers and allow the animals to be relocated.
Reese and Born, with two adult beavers, two yearlings and a kit, load into a Forest Service truck and drive the length of the Valley until they are high in the Rio Grande National Forest. For those few hours, the five beavers traveled faster and further than they ever have before.
Beavers are nature’s engineers, second perhaps only to humans. Yet there is an age-old tension between us and them that has forced us to think differently about what techniques can reduce conflicts and make sure that the Rio Grande National Forest’s watersheds and the Rio Grande stay healthy.
Overgrazing and drought are two factors at play that threaten watersheds and streams. The relocated beavers will call the Rios de los Piños home and even though their future is somewhat cloudy, they have been given another shot at life and an opportunity to do their jobs.
If there’s enough habitat, they’ll stay together as a multi-generation family unit. But if there’s limited food or habitat they’ll move away.
At the release site, Reese and Born pull on their waders. Reese comforts the beavers who at this point have huddled into the corners or against the gates of the kennels, eyes wide and hearts racing.
Reese and Born tie two ratchet straps around the kennel and thread two wooden poles on either side. They take three trips from the truck to the drop off site, up to their thighs in water, carrying the beavers on makeshift gurneys.
The summer rains have created a swift and flowing rush of water.
The three kennels sit side by side. Reese and Born open the gates and coax the beavers with words of encouragement. Nothing happens for a moment. The animals are afraid and a little camera shy.
The kennels are tipped up and lightly shaken. The first beaver to take a swim is the baby. Then one by one, the other four beavers make their way into the water, where they slide in and slip under the surface.
And just like that, the job is done.
The Forest
Beavers are considered an Aquatic Focal Species or Aquatic Priority Species. This means biologists and experts can look to them as an indicator of watershed health.
“So then we monitor a beaver and do the beaver relocation program as a metric of monitoring our watershed and riparian health and hopefully improving it in areas where we can re-establish them,” Reese said.
The beavers are being introduced to some areas they inhabited 20 to 30 years ago, but were pushed out due to drought or overgrazing, food and habitat pressures, or even simply by being killed.
In the short term, beavers are most threatened by predation, mostly by bears and mountain lions.
In the long term, besides climate change and overgrazing, human conflict remains the biggest threat to beaver populations.
Reese said that even when problem beavers are moved up into the mountains, they can still be seen as a problem and killed. And there’s not really a lot anyone can do about it.
“They’re just getting killed,” she said. “We have to change people’s perspectives on beavers. Humans are going to be one of the major issues for recovering larger beaver populations.”
Beavers are a protected species in Colorado, but if beavers are damaging property or causing problems to irrigation or agriculture they can be killed under state law.
Not all farmers and ranchers are so eager to kill beavers. Some are quite understanding of beavers’ role in nature, but just don’t want them gunking up agricultural gears. Born said that some landowners who are willing to participate in the relocation program are also willing to wait until next season to have their problem animals removed.
Understanding beavers’ role in the ecosystem is half the battle.
However, it doesn’t mean that people like Reese and Born won’t continue to try and give the watersheds and the beavers another shot. In the national forest, there’s no shortage of good places for beavers to be left alone to do their work. Particularly in meadows.
In the meadows that beavers occupy, their dams act like sponges, soaking up water and dispersing it far and wide. Born said, “You have this whole mini-aquifer of groundwater that if the beaver dam is there is just full. And that sponge is going to help release water longer into the season and keep the river wet. It’s just the same as the Rio Grande and the aquifers here.”
There’s a direct relationship between beavers and water health.
“If the stream is cut off or forced to one side of the Valley,” he said, “that sponge is no longer fully wet so you’re more prone, if there’s no rainfall or low snowpack, then all of a sudden you lose flows completely or greatly reduced.”
On the car ride to the Rio Grande National Forest office in Del Norte, Born tells The Citizen that because of this mini-aquifer effect, some people may take it a step further and say that beavers and processed-based restoration have a potential to create a “second run off.”
“I don’t exactly like that terminology because I think it really overplays the potential,” he said.
Thinking on a stream-by-stream basis, he said, “we are so, so far from having any kind of meaningful influence on a river like the Rio Grande or Conejos. These are small streams that we’re doing habitat improvements for fish, for riparian habitat, and the groundwater recharge is almost secondary in these projects.”
On a statewide level, specifically through the Colorado Water Conservation Board, there is an effort to determine the exact influence that beaver structures have on streamflows.
Born said that would entail installing groundwater transducers and streamflow gauges before and after one of these restoration projects. That has never really occurred in the San Luis Valley before. The hope, he said, is to show that they are either increasing flows or doing very little.
The Valley Floor
Born said no one knows how many beavers live on the Valley floor. It would be a tough number to gauge. He thinks that there are far fewer beavers on the Valley floor than there are up in the national forest.
However, to give The Citizen an idea of just how often beaver conflicts occur, Born said that a farmer just a few miles upstream from Alamosa killed nearly 70 beavers in 2023. That number is normally around 30 to 40 a year.
“Alamosa proper might have a lot more beaver conflict if he wasn’t there. Ultimately, you have this philosophical issue of beavers are ecosystem engineers, we are the top ecosystem engineers. Beavers are pretty much number two. Which is really awesome. But we don’t like sharing.”
There are ways to create cohabitation. One of those methods is through the use of a “beaver deceiver.”
The most common and most frustrating headache beavers cause is building dams up against culverts. Using hog panel fencing, about six or so feet offset from the culvert, the beavers would be able to build a dam around that fence but wouldn’t limit the ability of the culvert to pass water.
Beaver deceivers aren’t always successful, Born said. “There’s always going to be a place for trapping and relocating.” He said there are many more beavers on the Valley floor than they are able to deal with, meaning they have to be “pretty choosy.”
That typically means establishing a priority list and going after the beavers giving people the most trouble and going after the largest colonies.
To do that, you’ve got to have someone who knows how to humanely trap beavers. Their trapper, who works through the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, works pretty much alone and often has to trap animals other than beavers – like mountain lions, for example.
Because there is only one trapper, that priority list is important as the team doesn’t want to waste his time with beavers that aren’t quite a big enough problem.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife permits trapping beavers for this relocation program from June 1 to Sept. 1, but work doesn’t really kick off until closer to July. The team wants to make sure that the kits are grown enough to be able to survive and to make sure that mothers aren’t pregnant. Due to the Valley’s limited window of warm days, it leaves about eight weeks to trap, quarantine, and release.
Beavers are good vectors. The Rio Grande Cutthroat trout is a threatened species and is currently seeing a resurgence in the Rio Grande’s watersheds, but it is a sensitive species, particularly to Whirling Disease. When beavers are taken from one water source to another they have to be quarantined for three days and have their water changed every 24 hours to ensure they won’t be carrying any diseases with them.
They are also quarantined to avoid the spread of Chytrid fungal disease, which affects amphibians.
All of these precautions are taking place because Reese and Born want to see these animals thrive and they want to ensure the health of the environment. Again, beavers are second only to humans in their ecosystem engineering. They are the water’s guides, and despite their conflict with humans, are a keystone species that we would sorely miss.
What comes out of this program has yet to be seen, but it’s promising. Whatever data and answers can be drawn will be shared for years to come.
Even if the success rate is 30 to 50 percent and not every beaver released doesn’t make it, Reese said she still feels “like the effort we’re putting in is worthwhile for the potential benefits of having more beaver on the landscape.”
Thank you Owen Woods for this wonderful article on the relocation project of Beavers! I am happy to know that two agencies are working to save Beavers and improve watershed health.