The beaver who would one day be named June was simply doing what beavers do. But her dams, built around her lodge in Utah’s Bear River Mountains, ran afoul of a rancher. He said the flooding caused his sheep to get stuck in the mud.
That landed the furry engineer in the unfortunate category of “nuisance beaver.” In most places around the country, she would have been killed. Instead, she was enlisted: strategically relocated and released in an effort to restore degraded streams elsewhere in the state.
Beavers possess a singular drive to slow flowing water and create ponds, with skills to match. Across the West, the animals are increasingly valued for their ability to keep water on the drying landscape. Their dams reduce runoff, recharge groundwater, build habitat for fish and other wildlife, help streams recover critical sediment and create watering holes. As wildfires intensify, beavers are more important than ever.
50 States, 50 Fixes is a series about local solutions to environmental problems.
But their chewing and damming have long led to trouble with humans. And that hasn’t changed.
Utah is among a number of states, tribes and conservation groups that are leading the country on relocating unwanted beavers. While the animals remain controversial, Teresa Griffin, a wildlife manager with the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, said she’s seeing more interest from colleagues than ever.
“At first, we used to just do it in the southwest corner of the state, but now everybody else is kind of getting on board and becoming beaver believers,” Ms. Griffin said.
Experts emphasize that finding ways to coexist with beavers is preferable to relocating them, because that brings significant risks to the animals. Devices can help, including some that stop dammed water from getting too high and others that protect culverts and drains. The right kind of fencing around trunks can shield trees.
“Education should be the No. 1 priority,” said Shane Hill, who has worked on beaver-driven restoration at the state wildlife agency and the Sageland Collaborative, a nonprofit group.
Still, when landowners are resolute that they want beavers gone, relocation offers the animals a second chance.
Utah requires that beavers quarantine for a minimum of 72 hours before being moved to a new watershed, to prevent the spread of aquatic invasive species and disease.
So the beavers need accommodations.
At Ms. Griffin’s facility in the southwest, the guests make use of two donated hot tubs, now filled with cold water. Up north, outside of Logan, the Beaver Bunkhouse offers concrete basins.
June found herself at the bunkhouse.
At check in, beavers are inspected for injuries, weighed, given ID chips and named.
There’s also a startling procedure to identify their sex, which is impossible to discern externally. To go light on the details, it involves expressing a gland, sniffing and checking color.
“It’s very interesting,” said Becky Yeager, facility manager for the Beaver Ecology & Relocation Collaborative, which was established by Utah State University and runs the Bunkhouse. “But it’s important for us to know the sex.”
Beavers mate for life, and families have tight-knit bonds. The animals are more likely to remain at a relocation site when moved together, so trappers on the team try to get as many members as possible. With single beavers, the group tries to release both males and females in a given area.
“It does provide an opportunity for us to play matchmaker,” Ms. Yeager said.
Beaver wetlands once blanketed North America, helping to shape the hydrology of the continent. But by the late 1800s, the fur trade had nearly wiped out the animals. State reintroduction efforts followed, including by parachute in Idaho in 1948. Now biologists estimate that perhaps 15 million beavers live in North America, down from historic numbers of maybe 100 million or more.
Nick Bouwes, an aquatic ecologist who helped start Utah State’s collaborative, came to beaver relocation through his own efforts to modify the landscape. He and colleagues were building dams that mimicked those of beavers in an attempt to restore streams by encouraging the animals to take over the work, he said. In short order, the beavers did.
“I started seeing what beavers could do and how fast they could do it,” Dr. Bouwes said. “Our structures were just — we’re just children playing in the sandbox compared to what they’re doing.”
Now the group traps and releases about 60 beavers a year, working with the state wildlife agency’s northern office. The southern office relocates around 30, and the central office jumped from single digits in recent years to 26 this year.
Hundreds more beavers in Utah, nuisance and otherwise, are killed by trappers. Across the United States, the federal government killed more than 23,000 in 2024.
Ambrie Darley, a hunter and trapper in northern Utah, used to catch beavers with lethal devices akin to giant mouse traps. It’s much easier that way, she said. But in 2021, she and her late husband started working with the university collaborative on live-trapping beavers.
“I’ll be honest, this did turn us around,” said Ms. Darley, who no longer traps beavers lethally. “I find that very rewarding, when something can be useful somewhere else,” she said.
The beavers that get in the most trouble tend to be young singles who have recently left their families, said Nate Norman, lead biologist for the Beaver Ecology & Relocation Collaborative.
“They’re looking for a mate and they’re looking for a new home and they wander onto some person’s property and start taking down trees,” Mr. Norman said.
When they are relocated, the biggest question is how the animals fare upon release. Both the state wildlife agency and the beaver collective have tried to track their former charges by placing radio transmitters in their tails, but the animals tend to quickly get rid of them. The groups have turned away from that approach.
Generally, research has found that relocated beavers face significant risk of getting killed by predators like mountain lions and bears. And it can be challenging to get them to restore a particular area because they often choose to leave the release site.
Mr. Norman thinks success rates have a lot to do with placing beavers in the right habitat: Not so degraded that they can’t make a living, and not too overrun with other beavers, since the animals are territorial.
He’s currently working with two biologists, Alex Fortin and Natalie D’Souza, who are trying a new method for monitoring beavers post-release that involves analyzing satellite imagery.
That project is only halfway through but has some heartening anecdotes.
Initial research led the team to a few beavers, including none other than June. She had been trapped in 2022 and released into the Raft River Mountains, where state biologists hoped beavers would, among other things, create habitat for Yellowstone cutthroat trout.
Three years on, Ms. D’Souza and Mr. Fortin found that June has established a family and widened a stream.
Visiting for fieldwork, they came upon a group of anglers fishing at new ponds created by the beavers. One after another, they were reeling in Yellowstone cutthroat trout.
Catrin Einhorn covers biodiversity, climate and the environment for The Times.
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