As the nation faces a future of increasing floods, droughts and wildfires, millions of 60-pound rodents are standing by, ready to help.
Beavers can turn parched fields into verdant wetlands and widen rivers and streams in ways that not only slow flood overflows, but store them for periods of drought.
Still not impressed? In 2020, three raging fires in Colorado — including one with 70-foot walls of flame — effectively bowed to flattail dam builders, according to Emily Fairfax, an assistant professor of physical geography at the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities.
The fast-moving “megafires” left water-saturated areas around beaver-occupied rivers largely intact, while beaver-free riverbanks suffered extensive damage.
“We desperately need to build more climate-resilient landscapes. We have to plan something. We have to find a better solution,” Fairfax said. “And what I want everyone to consider is, what about nature's engineers?”
And yes, he said, he was referring to the beaver.
Fairfax, who spoke earlier this week at the first Midwest Beaver Summit, is part of a broader “beaver restoration” movement that has gained ground in recent years with conservationists in Colorado using simplified beaver dams to encourage the animals to repopulate waterways streets and California passes a new law encouraging non-lethal approaches to human-beaver conflicts.
There is a popular 2018 book, “Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter” by environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb. There are conventions: BeaverCON on the East Coast and State of the Beaver on the West Coast.
And beaver advocates — sometimes called “beaver loyalists” in a nod to their starry-eyed intensity — have gained a foothold in Illinois, where Glenview resident Rachel Siegel formed the nonprofit Illinois Beaver Alliance in 2021 .
“Beavers are having a moment,” Siegel said.
On his first day the Midwest Beaver Summitheld virtually and continuing on September 20, speakers praised the beaver's ability to create healthier and more resilient ecosystems at a time when climate change is expected to create new challenges.
The conference, which drew an audience of more than 300, was presented by the Illinois Beaver Alliance, Superior Bio-Conservancy and Heartland Rewilding, and sponsored by Openlands, the Land Conservancy of McHenry County and the Society for Ecological Restoration. Co-sponsors included Friends of the Chicago River and the Beaver Institute.
In the Midwest, the climate is forecast to become wetter in the winter, with a significant increase in heavy rainfall and flooding, Fairfax said. Summers, in contrast, are expected to be very dry, making the area vulnerable to wildfires.
“We cannot smoke our forests, our grasslands, our grasslands. We cannot watch as the water level drops lower and lower in our lakes, ponds and reservoirs and we cannot allow our cities, our communities to be consumed by huge waves of flooding,” Fairfax said. “But this is our future if we don't build more climate-resilient landscapes.”
Fortunately, he said, we have beavers.
When beavers build dams, the water slows down and flows past the banks of a stream or river into the floodplain land, and when beavers need more wood to expand the dam, they dig channels that radiate further out into the floodplain. The canals fill with water, effectively watering the land and reactivating a wetland ecosystem.
The result is a complex mosaic of habitats that benefit a wide range of species, as well as natural flood control, Fairfax said.
During times of flood, a large surge of water can break away the banks of beaver-free streams and rivers. But when a wave hits a beaver-designed floodplain, the water slows, spreads over a larger area, and seeps into the moist soil, which absorbs and stores it.
The stored water, in turn, helps insulate the floodplain from drought during a hot, dry summer, Fairfax said, keeping the plants lush and green, rather than dry and ready to smoke.
That's good news for the huge variety of plants and animals that live in beaver-made wetlands, and bad news for wildfires.
Fairfax showed images of wildfire-ravaged natural areas: Again and again, water-soaked beaver habitat escaped the worst damage.
In data he collected on three Colorado wildfires in 2020, it found that 40 percent of non-river areas were not heavily burned. This percentage increased to only 52% for riverine areas without beavers. But in the beaver-covered river areas, the rate was an impressive 89 percent.
“Beavers create fireproof patches in the landscape,” Fairfax said. This provides shelter for other animals, including fish, and maintains habitat that can help the ecosystem recover after a fire.
In Colorado, beaver-driven ecological restoration is in full swing, Goldfarb told the conference, with man-made dams called Beaver Dam Analogs helping to prepare degraded landscapes for beaver reintroduction.
Think of Beaver Dam Analogs as “starters” — fairly basic dams that allow beavers to take over and build more sophisticated structures, Goldfarb said.
“This kind of Beaver Dam scale construction is happening on a massive scale in Colorado,” Goldfarb said. “There are certainly projects that have built hundreds of structures and restored many, many miles of degraded streams. I've seen a pretty spectacular beaver response as a result of this.”
Another speaker, Leila Philip, author of “Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America,” said she was encouraged by recent policy work, including California's statewide initiative prioritizing non-lethal responses to problem beaver activities such as the felling of trees and the use of dams to raise water levels.
“There are some major changes that are moving the beaver movement a little more into the mainstream in a really important way,” he said. In one example, Oregon—the Beaver State—is considering whether to strip beavers of their “predator” status, making it harder for landowners to kill the animals.
“We have to look at how to deal with beaver management in all the different states, which right now varies widely, so for example here in Connecticut, you can't move beavers,” Philip said. “Even if I had a problem beaver and I had a place to put it, I can't move it without such a special permit (that) it's not really feasible.”
Challenges remain in Illinois, Siegel said, but there are encouraging precedents for beaver recovery elsewhere in the country.
“What we're trying to do is move the needle here,” Siegel said. “We're trying to change the culture.”
nschoenberg@chicagotribune.com
