The Gnawing Problem: Why We Hate Beavers And How We Can Learn To Coexist

Beavers can help us with drought, flooding, biodiversity, and more. So why are so many people opposed to beavers? And how can we learn to get along?

In May 2001, canoers on the River Tay spotted the first beaver in Scotland after having been extirpated for 400 years.

More beaver sightings followed. Many celebrated the news. After all, beavers bring with them the many benefits we’ve been discussing: better flood control from storms, water conservation during droughts, provide fire breaks, and increase biodiversity.

But many local land managers were not among them. They called for the beavers to be removed forthwith. They said they’re not actually native. They’re not the right species. They might be diseased. They were not wanted.

Meanwhile, land managers like farmers are the people who have the most to lose from climate change. It seems ridiculous to oppose the very creatures that could save their farms.

And yet, they’re not alone. The biggest challenge in beaver restoration is humans, particularly those who manage land, whether they’re homeowners, ranchers, or farmers.

It’s really tempting to just bypass their cooperation, saving us years in going back and forth. In the 1990s, Scottish Natural Heritage investigated the possibility of returning beavers, but they were stymied by farmers and fishermen. It seemed like reaching a decision would take decades. Then the beavers showed up, forcing everyone’s hands. And while the original beavers were not conclusively proven to be covert releases, after the first beavers were discovered, covert releases followed.

But we can’t just bulldoze forward without their cooperation. We need local support. We need land managers to make adjustments to coexist with beavers, rather than call for trappers to kill encroaching beavers, destroying dams, and calling on politicians to oppose protections for beavers and call for their eradication.

(This also isn’t to say that land managers are the only problem. Bureaucratic processes and offices are also a problem, but that’s another story.)

There is hope. We just need to understand and listen. According to a 2024 study following up nearly twenty years following the River Tay reintroduction, these land managers aren’t actually that opposed to beavers themselves. They’re much more mixed about beavers benefiting society in general.

They just believe that beavers aren’t good for them personally.

Let’s nerd out about why people hate beavers and how we can better coexist.

Why do people oppose beavers?

Land managers feel they’ve lost control

Beavers completely change the topography of the land, flooding fields and moving rivers, without any seeming care to others. No other species — besides one — can so completely alter the landscape.

(And people do say that we hate most in other people what we hate in ourselves.)

Beavers are nocturnal, often swimming in under the tunnel of darkness, and by the time the local humans notice they’re there, trees have been felled, rivers dammed, and ponds threatening to flood.

We humans have gotten used to being the only creatures who can wreak such mass changes. We hate when other people make choices that infringe on us, on the things we feel ownership over, without so much as a consultation — whether that’s government regulation, corporations, or beavers.

There’s already so much that land managers can’t control. As Nevada rancher Jon Griggs explained to Ben Goldfarb in Eager, “As stockmen, we want so much to control the things we can control, because there’s so much we can’t. We can’t control the weather. We can’t control our markets. We can’t control government regulation. But when beavers show up, we can control that.”

And it’s not just the beavers they’re asserting control over. The 2024 Tay River study found that killing beavers and destroying dams was a political statement. The fates of their farms seemed to rest in the hands of urban-dwelling government officials who didn’t know the first thing about farming. So they needed to take a stand and show them what they believed — that beavers didn’t belong.

While beaver killing rates dropped after the Scottish Parliament finally passed beaver protections nearly two decades later, they didn’t stop altogether. The researchers devised a method for interviewees to share how many beavers and dams they personally had destroyed without the researchers being able to tell in order to get a more accurate picture of the beaver deaths, but a few land managers were proud to share.

Land managers have a different vision of what the land should look like

While researching beavers in Saskatchewan, one statement really made me angry. A local man said that they needed to get rid of the beavers because that’s not how the river is supposed to be. The river is not supposed to be dammed.

I’d just finished reading two whole books about how ludicrous that is. The river is supposed to be dammed. Beavers are supposed to be moving up and down our prairie rivers, damming and flooding and leaving precious pond water for our expected droughts.

But we humans have short memories. Most of the people who settled here came after beavers were annihilated by trappers. And they came from Europe, where beavers had been a rare sight indeed for hundreds of years, with particular ideas on what land should look like. Across North America, new farmers found fertile ground in old beaver meadows and people built homes in floodplains, which was bound to be problematic.

Growing up here, with fields of wheat, canola, and alfalfa, it’s easy to think that this is what the land should look like. But conservationists have a different idea, and that’s where conservationists and land managers butt heads.

When conservationist Carol Evans first approached Griggs about restoring Susie Creek, he thought that they were crazy. Susie Creek watershed, where he grazed cattle, was a trickle of a river with a strip of a riparian zone. In short, his fields were more “moonscape” than field. Evans told him it could be so much more. But to Griggs, this was normal. “If anything,” he explained to Ben Goldfarb, “I thought that was a pretty dang good July because there was water in the creek at all. I took some convincing. I didn’t know the potential of it.”

As the River Tay study shows, land managers identify themselves as stewards of the land. They have a vision of what their land should look like and that their land needs careful intervention — and beavers are not exactly known to be careful.

Land managers have the most to lose and bear the costs

Meanwhile, beaver reintroduction tends to benefit society and nature at large, while land managers have the most to lose. Coexistence often requires spending a lot of money (although longer lasting), while trapping (while a temporary solution at best) is much less expensive.

Beaver ponds affect acres, not small patches of land, and when you only have a few acres to begin with, a beaver pond could lose you half your working land, never mind damage to roads and buildings.

Orchards lose trees, as beavers are happy to fell fruit trees.

And while larger ranches (many of the ones I’ve read about are hundreds or thousands of acres) can afford to lose these acres, ranchers in arid regions are loath to give up the precious strips of good forage along rivers. Everywhere else tends to dry up.

Meanwhile, changing up how one farms is always an expensive proposition. Farmers have to learn new methods for coexisting with beavers. Many farms run on slim margins to begin with, and the loss of land and fruit trees (even if temporary) and potential property damage could prove ruinous.

How can we better coexist with beavers?

So, knowing what land managers face and where they’re coming from, how can we work with land managers to better coexist with beavers so that we can all reap the benefits?

Recruit local ambassadors and show what land managers can gain from beavers

The Tay River land managers felt they were being told what to do by city dwelling people who have little to no understanding of farming and what their particular land is like (and won’t have to face the impacts).

So we need to recruit local farmers who can serve as test cases — and then help these land managers demonstrate to their neighbors what they themselves can gain.

Jon Griggs’ ranch serves as a great example. As mentioned above, he was skeptical. Nevada is a very arid land that can go long periods without rain, and when drought strikes, the only good forage is along the riverbanks. It’s not a surprise that livestock managers in US arid regions wholeheartedly resist any suggestion of keeping their cattle off riverbanks when it could cost them their herd, especially when many believe this is what their rivers should look like.

But despite his reservations, Griggs agreed to adopt rotational grazing, fencing off the riverbank during the peak growing season to allow willow, cottonwood, and other plants to grow big enough.

In just a few years, his ecosystem had completely changed. The small riparian zone surrounding the degraded riverbank expanded. Beavers returned and built dams and beaver ponds, conserving water during long dry periods, restoring ground water levels, and expanding the riparian zone. The river no longer dries up during the summer, lasting instead from spring to frost. Since then, he only lets the calves along the riverbank, who benefit the most from the high quality forage.

Jay Wilde is another cattle rancher who learned to work with beavers, instead of against them. In 1995, he had two problems: poor grazing and lack of water. After using rotational grazing to improve rangeland, he still had the problem of his creek drying up halfway through summer. Then he had an epiphany over his morning coffee — when the beavers disappeared from the creek, so did the water.

While just trying to relocate beavers didn’t work (for the reasons I covered here), he partnered with two professionals to build 19 BDAs in 2015. The beavers returned, and so did the water. As of 2019, Birch Creek lasts 42 days longer, until it freezes in October.

Since the reintroduction, Wilde has hosted dozens of workshops and talked to hundreds of other workshops with other livestock producers, as well as had articles written about his endeavors like this one in Beef Magazine.

We shouldn’t underestimate land managers. They often have years, decades, or even generations of knowledge of a particular land behind them. (Much like we need to listen to Indigenous peoples, who have even more generations of land knowledge). If we consult with them, if we listen to them about what they know and what they’re challenges are instead of trying to “force” change on them, we’ll all end up better for it.

Liz James gave a talk that I still remember to this day that illustrates this perfectly. She was charged to go to a village in Kenya to tell the Maasai people there that they needed to give up their cattle to survive. The Kenya government had parceled up the land for individual ownership, so they couldn’t move their cattle around any longer to find better forage. But she was terrified. Who was she to tell these people what to do? To give up something so integral to their culture, to their history, to their identity? To claim that a complete stranger to the people and the land knew better?

So instead, she listened. And because she listened instead of instructing, the local women warmed up to her and told her that they knew they couldn’t keep their cattle. But they had ideas on what they needed to do next. They just needed capital that didn’t come with exorbitant interest rates. So Liz James ran a crowdfunding campaign that would fund microloans, which once repaid, would go on to fund the next project.

Of course, the ability to go in and listen first, instead of lecture, is an incredibly valuable gift that we should not underestimate. We should cherish these people and try to develop it in ourselves.

Lectures and education can only go so far. When land managers see the possibilities, the benefits that they themselves and the land can gain, then they’ll be a lot more willing to listen.

Offer consultations and grants to cover expenses of beaver coexistence

Willingness is one thing, but there’s also a high cost — both in time and materials. Beaver coexistence methods are effective in the long term, but they’re often much pricier than grabbing a rifle or hiring a trapper, both in terms of money and labor.

For example, a case study for Cooking Lake/Blackfoot Provincial Recreation Area in Alberta found that traditional management (trapping, dam removal) cost $19,624 per site while installing pond levelers cost only $1,934 per site, saving them 90%. Meanwhile, Billerica MA’s 43 pond levelers resulted in a 44% annual cost saving.

The solutions also need to be effectively set up. Ben Goldfarb describes in his book resistance to beaver deceivers because someone tried to set one up, didn’t do it properly, and so it didn’t work. Like everything in gardening, you need to understand how it works as well as how beaver works. Then, you need to be able to adapt the solution to the particular environment. They’re not one size fits all.

Having free consultations (with people who listen) and grants to cover expenses would go a long way to gain favor for beavers among local land managers, especially when recruiting for test cases.

But even better would be if we could pay land managers for the land beavers use. After all, while land managers can derive some benefits, the benefits of beavers are mainly in the public good. If we could pay for beaver-use, then land managers can make up for lost profits. And they may be a lot more willing to listen.

Introduce low-tech solutions that prevent property damage

While there’s a lot to learn about farming and coexisting with beavers, we already have a number of easy solutions that can mitigate beaver damage while gaining the rewards.

Culvert Protection Systems (AKA Beaver Deceivers) prevent culvert clogs

Culverts or the conduits or passageways built under roads, railroads, trails, and other places to allow rivers and streams to flow through, usually by a big steel pipe.

We humans love them because we can build infrastructure over rivers without blocking them and causing rivers.

Beavers love them too. Just imagine you’re a beaver who has left their lodge to seek out a new home, and you come across a road that blocks off have a river into a pond. And it’s almost perfect — there’s just this one hole you need to block off. Easy peasy. This place is perfect! So you dam up the culvert, and the resulting pond floods over the road. Perfect.

Except then these pesky humans come along, setting traps for you and clearing out the dam.

The way that transportation departments have handled beavers blocking culverts is pretty ineffective. A good place to dam is only going to attract more beavers, causing an endless cycle of hiring trappers and people to clear the culverts and paying to fix the roads and railroads.

But we have the solution, and while it’s more expensive initially than clearing a culvert once, it pays for itself over time.

A Culvert Protection System has three parts. Two cages, one around the culvert itself and another about ten meters away. A pipe is set with one end in each cage. A beaver will try to dam the cage around the culvert, believing that’s where water is escaping from. Meanwhile, water actually flows through the other cage into the pipe and through the culvert unimpeded.

The trick is to effectively “deceive” the beaver in where water is leaving. Their brains have developed to pick up a particular flow rate.

Pond Levelers prevent flooding

Beavers dam up rivers to expand their territory. They only waddle 100m from the water’s edge to find wood and food. The bigger their pond, the bigger their range, the more resources they have access to.

But this generally causes problems with land owners, as they lose valuable fields or have their basements flooded. While hopefully the land owners can take advantage of some of this water storage, that’s not always the case.

That’s where pond levelers come in. Pond levelers help control the maximum water height, which helps keep flooding under control. It works similar to a beaver deceiver.

Pond leveler in Ireland. Photo by Michael Callahan, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

To keep water flowing over a dam, a pipe is installed that runs from the beaver pond and over the dam. As the water level rises, so does the water inside the pipe. Once it rises high enough, the excess water spills over the top of the pipe, onto the other side.

If the intake of the pipe can be over 30’ feet away, where the beavers are unlikely to look for it, the intake end doesn’t need a cage. But a cage can help protect the intake end of the pipe from being dammed.

Land managers can also redistribute the water somewhere else, like say if they wish to flood their orchards on the off season to raise ground levels, or have another place where a water storage pond would be more suitable.

Fencing prevents tree destruction

Another huge issue is beavers destroying trees — especially ornamental, agricultural, and beloved trees. But we’ve had the solution for that for years — just wrap the tree up so that they can’t chew through them. The Beaver Institute claims that if done properly, fencing a tree has a 100% success rate.

You can use chicken wire or hardware mesh, but the Beaver Institute recommends wire mesh for both longevity and improved aesthetics. The fence should be at least four feet high, and at least 2 feet higher than the highest snow level.

You could also use the sand-paint method, using a mix of exterior latex paint and sand to paint the trunks of full-grown trees. (This method doesn’t work on saplings.) When color matched, the paint is virtually invisible. It needs to be repainted every few years.

If you have an orchard to protect, you can simply fence off the entire area, like you would with deer. Keep the fence as low to the ground as possible. Beavers need at least 3 inches to get through, and they will dig under a gap. You only need to protect trees within 100m of water, as beavers won’t go that far from safety when foraging.

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We can coexist with beavers. It’s just about good old human inventiveness and a willingness to listen and work together.

💬 Join the Conversation

Have you ever seen or used a beaver deceiver or pond leveler? Do you know of any other methods that can help us coexist with beavers?

Please share in the comments. We’d love to know!

Happy growing!

Tanith

P.S. Here’s your extra credit reading!

George Holes, Gabriel Rowland, and Katherine Fox explore the reasons behind species reintroduction in Eager about beavers? Understanding opposition to species reintroduction, and its implications for conservation.

Again, I owe a lot to Ben Goldfarb and his book Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter* for peeks into real examples of beavers in action on ranches and coexistence solutions in action.

If you’d like a closer look into the fur trade and modern day trappers, Leila Philip’s Beaver Land: How One Weird Rodent Made America* follows her own personal journey becoming obsessed with beavers tied to the past — and what we’re able to do about beavers today. The idea for paying farmers for hosting beavers came from this book. I also learned that many beaver pond offshoots are such tiny streams that you wouldn’t be able to see them until you step on them and your foot squelches. Imagine if we could combine that with irrigating orchards and farm fields!

(* These links are Bookshop.org affiliate links. When you buy a book through my link, you’re not only supporting me with no added cost to yourself, but also supporting an independent bookstore.)

The Beaver Institute is full of resources! Here’s a full PDF guide on how to make and adapt pond levelers and culvert protection devices and a guide to protecting trees from beavers.

The Miistakis Institute Working With Beavers Program has compiled a list of case studies showing the cost savings that beaver coexistence tools provide.

The Unitarian Universalist Church of St Petersburg, Florida hosted Liz James and her speech, My Muzungu Eyes Are Improving. I only touched on a small part of her insights and highly recommend watching the rest.