00:00:02
Speaker 1: Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wild life, wild places and the people who dedicate their lives to conserving both. Big shout out to ONEX Hunt for their support of this podcast. I’m your host, Lake Pickle, and man am I ever so excited for today’s episode. Today’s typic of discussion is about an animal that I’m most sure all of you are familiar with. Heck, all of us know what beavers are known for doing. They’re the original subjects for the saying you had one job. They see flowing water and they go absolutely not. And when they wake up in the morning, I’m pretty sure they say to themselves, it seems like a good day to build a dam. Okay, I’m mostly joking here if you can’t tell, but y’all get what I’m saying. Beaver’s are primarily known for doing one thing, building dams. It’s a blessing and a curse. It’s what has made them get the label as a nuisance species in many circles and one of the factors that has made them popular amongst trappers. However, in today’s episode, we’re gonna be looking at beaver’s in a different life, possibly in a way you’ve never thought of them before. It’s time to add some much needed complexity to the way this critter is perceived. Let’s dive in. Before we dive in with our two guests, I’m going to do my best impression of my friend Brent Reeves, and I’m going to tell you a story. It’s one that happened long ago, and it will set the stage perfectly for where we’re going with this. Yall ready, here we go. This is the story of the parachuting beavers. And yeah, I did say parashuting beavers, and it takes place in Idaho in nineteen forty eight. Now, as we alluded to earlier, beavers build damps. Theyre what is referred to as a keystone species, which is a term that applies to one particular organism that makes a disproportionately large influence on its environment relative to its often low abundance, which in Layman’s terms, means a small amount of beavers can a big amount of difference. Another important thing to know about a keystone species is that they are critical for maintaining biodiversity as well as habitat structure, and their removal can often cause significant ecological shifts, which again in Layman’s terms, means taking beavers out of an area. It’s gonna shake some things up. Some say that a beaver could transform a landscape like no other creature in the entire animal kingdom. This innate ability that beavers have to engineer their own ecosystems that they reside in is the most important part of what was going on in Idaho in nineteen forty eight. You see, it was becoming a problem. It was just after World War Two and people had discovered how beautiful places like McCall and Pyette Lake were. Folks were building homes, setting up communities and places where beavers had been hanging around and doing their thing for centuries. As the communities grew larger, the conflicts with beavers increased. The beavers were wiping out trees, riparian bush, damning creeks, causing them to flood, and risking serious damage to the town and its residences. So the question was what do you do about this? That’s where creativity and initiative end of the story in the form of a man named Elmo Heater. Now, besides having a super cool name, Elmo worked for the Idaho Fishing Game right in the McCaul Lake area. He had experience with beavers, and he was tasked with finding a solution. Elmo figured out early on that relocation of these beavers was by far the best answer. However, this solution was a lot easier said than done. An area called the Chamberlain Basin would be the perfect place to relocate these beavers. It was said to be a beaver paradise and that their presence would be beneficial to the habitat. The Chamberlain Basin lies in what is now called the frank Church River of No Return wilderness area. It was about one hundred miles away and it contained no roads and was by all accounts rugged country. There would be no driving in there. There wouldn’t be landing any planes, helicopters, or even a hot air balloon. I suppose you could pack them in there on foot, but no one was volunteering to do that, and they actually attempted mules and horses at one point, but it was said that the pack animals became spooky and quarrelsome when loaded down with a struggling pair of odorous live beavers, and so Elmo was forced to get creative, Like we said at the beginning of the story. This was right after World War Two. Elmo knew of a surplus of parachutes, and that’s when he formed the idea of paratrooping these beavers from a plane into the back country of the Chamberlain Basin. Just imagine how that went the first time he presented that idea to a meeting of his peers. This is speculative on my part here, but I just have to imagine that he got at least one or two you’re crazy remarks throwing his direction. However, Elmo was confident that it would work, that it would solve the problem in growing communities, and it would help the habitat of the Chamberlain Basin, a real win win win situation. Those are rare. Now that the plan was hatched, it had to be carried out. It’s one thing to say you’re going to air bomb some live beavers into the wilderness with the safe landing. It’s another thing to actually figure out how to do it. The first idea was a woven willow box, and the premise was that these beavers would hit the ground chew their way out freedom, which I supposed. It’s a pretty good idea in theory, but it ended up not working because the beavers commenced to chewing the second that they were put in the woven boxes. This gave high risk that the beavers would either bust loose inside the plane or bust loose while they were still high in the sky on the parachute ride. Neither of those are ideal, so Elmo ended up designing a box that the beavers were unable to get their teeth around and would then open upon impact. It was tested first with some dummy weights, which appeared to work. Then they found an older male beaver in Fyi. This is probably my favorite part of this story. Elmo decided to name this beaver Geronimo, seemed fitting. Luckily for both Geronimo and Elmo, the box worked. They tested it over and over again to make sure of it, which meant Geronimo the beaver took a parachute ride over and over again, and once they tested it enough to the point that they were all convinced that it would work, it was time to start a fish relocating beavers. As a reward for all of this, old Geronimo became the first male beaver to arrive in the Chamberlain basin with three other female friends. It said from the observers that once Geronimo figured out that his air travel days were over, he started immediately building a colony with his lady friends. Hats off to you, Geronimo. After this first successful relocation of beavers from the heavens dropping down into this dry basin like a mana from above, seventy six more beavers followed suit. All were in agreeance that this was a successful project that created some amazing habitat in now what is the largest protected roadless forest in the lower forty eight. It was so successful that some modern biologists wonder why they didn’t continue to move beavers past nineteen forty eight. However, it is highly likely that the offspring of those first beavers are still living and helping the habitat of the frank Church Wilderness to this very day. Pretty crazy, right, But let’s pause for a second, let’s zoom out on all this. Why am I sharing this story with you? Well, the reason is because, as listeners of this show, you know, we focus in on how we as humans interact with wildlife. Our relationship with wildlife. The relationship with humans and beavers is long and it’s convoluted. Can beavers be a nuisance? Yes, of course they can. We see that today and we saw it in that story. But can beaver’s also be incredibly beneficial for wildlife, wildlife habitat and to humans also? Yes, Like most other facets of life, there’s complexity to this. So we learned about the beaver problems and solutions of nineteen forty eight. However, I’m interested in what’s going on with beavers today, and believe me, there’s plenty going on. It’s time for you to meet Nate Norman, the lead field biologist for the Beaver Ecology and Relocation Collaborative at Utah State University, an organization that was founded to enhance and support the practice of relocating beavers to improve degraded riverscapes. They’re a well established program now, but I want to first learn how they got.
00:08:00
Speaker 2: Started, specifically in this area in northern Utah. There were two college professors, Joe Wheaton and Nick Bowis, and they came up with an idea of doing fake beaver dams. They’re called BDA’s beaver dam analogs, and they were working on projects in northern Utah and southern Idaho and realized that these fake beaver dams did a lot of the restoration work that they were hoping for, but that over time they broke down. So the real goal was to get beavers on there and let the beavers do the work rather than having humans come in and fix these fake beaver dams.
00:08:46
Speaker 1: Did anyone know that there were some folks already making artificial beaver dams or beaverdam analogs as a form of wetland and habitat restoration, which to me is kind of hard not to see the humor in because it seems like a whole lot of time, effort, and money to build a structure that a beaver will build you for free, which I suppose is why they eventually moved to beaver relocation. But I think it’s an important fact to highlight as we move forward that the need for the water daming impact on the landscape was something that people were already becoming aware of.
00:09:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, you’re hitting on something that you know is profound in the fact that that is why they had to make fake beaver dams. The thought is is that they don’t want beavers on their properties. You can’t control a beaver, right, you want a beaver to build a dam there and there and there, but not over here, and you don’t want it to flood your road or you don’t want it to you know, out here, block irrigation ditches, that sort of thing. And so we can go in and we can put them right where we want them. When a beaver gets in there, then they got their own mind and they’re going to do their own thing. And you know, hopefully they’re going to help you out and create the ponds and the water where you want them, but they’re also going to create some issues where you don’t want them. And so that’s you know, kind of why our program got started. In certain areas, beavers are a nuisance. And you know the fact is is that before you know, the West was developed, the trappers came through and they they were the first ones to come into these areas and the very first thing they did removed all the beavers right. So then behind them they’ve kind of blazed the trail and settlers start coming in. But settlers move into an area that has now been debiabered, right, and the beavers have been moved out of the area. So they look at these stream banks that are had been flooded by beaver dams that have now been broke down, and these lush, rich soils are there because of the beaver dams, and now they’re developing or moving into those areas to plant their crops. So you can just see the progression as to how we just moved right into the areas where the beavers were, and now we have an issue with the beavers coming back to these areas and creating issues for us. I don’t think we’re going to move out of the beavers bottom lands anytime soon. But luckily here in Utah, we have a lot of public land. We have areas that it is, you know, very open, and there is not a lot of infrastructure, so we can actually move these beavers into these areas to create this habitat. I don’t know if this would work as well, you know, in somewhere out east, where you know, you have a much bigger human population, but it works for us here.
00:11:45
Speaker 1: Let’s think back to the parachute beaver story for a minute. If y’all remember back in nineteen forty eight, the original conflict with beavers arose because civilizations were moving into areas where beavers had been existing for years. Fast forward to what’s happening today, and it’s really not that much different. As Nate outlined, some of these places that we as humans choose to reside, plant crops, build houses, and so on are also areas that beaver like, and thus we have conflict and there are definitely real instances where beavers can become nuisances. However, much like Elmo, a few folks decided to get creative.
00:12:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, we call it a win win win, Right. You’ve got the land owners, you know, that are having problems and they’re real you know, we had we had lady call us up one day when a beaver had come down and shoot down a tree in her backyard and her daughter’s wedding was, you know, planned to be there that weekend. You know, underneath these trees they just drow. But it can also be a win for the environment because when we look at a lot of lands after the trappers came through, you know and just almost eliminated the beavers, they’d never recovered to that stage that they were prior to that, So there was still room on the landscape for more beavers. And we can take these beavers and we can move them up into those areas where they create these habitats that are great for you know, wildlife fish. But we’re even finding ranchers out here are wanting beavers on their property because when they push that water out and they create more grass and more green not only from their pond, but also from the groundwater that is seeping out of those ponds and kind of widening out those riparian areas. That’s just more feed for their sheep and their cattle. Also, one of the things that we have to do out here, when we get these big snowfalls, everything kind of just washes down quickly in the springtime, creating floods, creating issues in the spring. Then everything dries up during the summer. So the ranchers go out and they build stock ponds and then they do this a wild bike, two palm guzzlers. But when the spring runoff comes off and it washes out those burns that they built for these these ponds, you know, somebody’s got to go back up there and fix it. In contrasts, you got beaber’s up there and the spring runoff comes down and washes out one of their dams. Now the beaver fixes it. And not only that, but then they create three or more ponds form their upstream. So you know, it just makes sense that, you know, getting more beavers on the landscape, holding that water up, making it come down slower in the spring time, and preserving more of it up in our mountains through the summer is just really good for everybody.
00:14:29
Speaker 1: All right, So we have a much better idea of what a beaver can offer to a landscape. I’m now interested in how they got this program up and rolling.
00:14:38
Speaker 2: There was a student in one of the classes and him and his dad were trappers, and his dad owned a taxidermy store or whatever you call it in the valley here, and after taking the course, he started to talk to his dad and said, you know, we shouldn’t be trapping out all these beavers. You know that they’re really good for the other wildlife and habitat. And his dad was kind of like, well, you know, the guy that I’m trapping on, we don’t trap him, He’s going to have somebody else trap him out.
00:15:07
Speaker 1: This is one of the most interesting points in the whole story to me. A student who operated a taxi derby business with his father that were also both trappers that had been trapping beavers for years are the two individuals who originally thought of the idea to relocate due to the potential benefits that it would create for other wildlife. This idea led them to approaching the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, who was excited about this notion because of the potential benefits it would make on the wildlife and the habitat, so they proceeded forward with it, which eventually led to Nate’s initial involvement with the program.
00:15:40
Speaker 2: They asked me if I was interested in learning how to live trap, So I said, yeah, sure, you know, I want to give it a try. My background was really in wetlands, but I was interested in how the beavers created wetlands and that sort of thing and the benefits of that. So I went out with the student and his dad and and they kind of taught me how to trap, and we were sort of the blind leading the blind. They knew how to trap, but they didn’t know much about live trapping. So we worked on it. We figured it out together. And then it turns out there was a guy at the Forest Service who was also kind of a respiration biologist who was interested in this stuff as well, and he was also a beaver trapper. So he got involved, We got involved with the State Wildlife that to try to come up with some ideas. She was the one who came up with the quarantine and some methods for kind of steading up our facility. And then that second year, I guess it was, Joe got together with me and he says, you know, I’ve been talking with the UDWR and they think that they want to get more trappers involved and bring on some people to do live trapping, but they want to kind of a certification program for them, you know, so they want to train them. And I thought that would be great because I could really use some more training. Like I said, we’d only caught five beavers the year before. Joe said, no, no, no, you’re not getting it man, you’re teaching the training. I was like, you gotta be kidding me. I’m only trapped five beavers. I can’t do this. But that’s how I kind of got started. They put me in contact with some people. There were some organizations in some tribes up in Washington and Oregon that were doing this, and so they put me in contact with some people there. They came down and helped me do the training, and the State Wildlife BET assisted with the training, and we expected to get a group of trappers from around Utah that would be interested in doing this live trapping. And one of the reasons was we were we were and still are paying the trappers one hundred dollars of beaver to live trap rather than lethal trap. But what ended up happening is we got a bunch of professionals from the wildlife agencies from all the surround states that were also interested in these kind of programs who wanted to learn more about it. So interesting we only got i think one trapper and two students from the university that took the training, and everyone else was professionals from surrounding areas. From that, you know that a lot of the other states and I shouldn’t say base on their stuff on what we were doing, but we all kind of talked about things that we were doing and trying and what had worked and what hadn’t. And so the training kind of just brought a bunch of people together to figure this out and what we should be doing to do these these relocations.
00:18:39
Speaker 1: So, as is common with many startups or new ideas, you’re trying to figure out year one of this beaver lab trapping and relocating was a bit of a learning curve, only five beavers trapped in total, working with veterinarians to establish a quarantine protocol and trying to expand the program if possible. Well it must have worked because for the second year they were able to grow and get some trappers involved, with many of them being professionals from surrounding areas. We’re going to learn more about this program and the ins and outs of it, but first I want to ask Nate about a very specific story that happened early on in the program’s life and that yielded some pretty incredible results.
00:19:18
Speaker 2: There’s a ranch and it’s kind of where I first got started in all this up in Idaho, where the rancher realized that his stream hit a small intermittent string was going dry every spring, you know, after runoff it was basically gone. But he’s an older guy and he remembered as a kid that that used to flow into the midsummer, you know, even in the late summer, and now every year it was going dry early spring. He thought, you know what, I remember there being beavers up there when I was a kid. Now we used to shoot them, you know, we used to get rid of them every chance we could could, you know, because we didn’t we didn’t want them around them block their irrigation canal. But we did a pretty good job because there’s no more beavers up there. So he tried to relocate some in on his own, again probably you know, under the shade of darkness, but they didn’t stick, they wouldn’t stay in the area, they got killed, whatever. So at that point he came down and spoke with Joe Wheaton and Nick Klowas at the university about, you know, the possibility of getting beavers up there. And that was the very first beaver relocation project that I was involved in. And we took a few beavers up there, and this is after we had built the BDA’s so the bdas create some little habitat for him, some deep water so they can hide from predators, and they stuck. Jumped forward a year or two and a few more beavers relocated up there. They start reproducing, and he had you know, fifty to one hundred beaver dams throughout the watershed. They’d really you know, did well. They protected them. And now we’re probably nine ten years from there, and he has water flowing in that stream year long the ponds are now supporting fish that are big enough to catch, so his granddaughter is fishing out of the ponds, and moose have returned to the area that he hadn’t seen for, you know, thirty years. So that’s one really good example.
00:21:31
Speaker 1: Let’s highlight those impacts again, just to make sure we don’t miss anything from just the single action of reintroducing beavers to this particular property. There is now year round waterflow in that creek, there’s ponds that are supporting small fishery, and moose have returned to the area in which beforehand the property owner hadn’t seen them for over thirty years or so. Is it starting to become clear the impacts these beavers can make. It really is wild, which in turn made a lot of sense to me why Nate explained how the program grew so rapidly after.
00:22:00
Speaker 2: That that second year. You know, after we got five beavers, we got fifty. By the next year, we got one hundred beavers in that season. We’ve kind of hovered between fifty and seventy five beavers per season fairly consistently after that. Not last season, but the season before that, we had a really big runoff, and there was a lot of beavers we saw as roadkill, and we can’t get as many beavers that year, but in general, you know, I think we average around sixty beavers per season. We’ve had such a good relationship with the trappers. That’s one of the areas where I think the word has gotten out the most. And that’s why I thought you should talk to Hoppy. He’s he’s not only a big time hunter and fisher and trapper, but he’s just an interesting character.
00:22:51
Speaker 1: All that is some impressive growth. Five beavers in the first year, fifty in the second year, one hundred in year three, and now they average around sixty a year. And again, it’s not really a shocker when the program is yielding the kind of results that it is. But now I’m gonna take Nate’s advice and talk to this Hoppy fellow that he mentioned. And by the way, Night was not wrong. This guy is a character.
00:23:15
Speaker 3: Are you running traps right now?
00:23:17
Speaker 2: Yeah?
00:23:17
Speaker 4: I’m running traps right now.
00:23:20
Speaker 3: That’s great.
00:23:21
Speaker 1: After giving the man some time to finish his traps, we got into the conversation are you running traps every day?
00:23:27
Speaker 3: Are you running the trap line every day to some extent?
00:23:30
Speaker 2: Oh?
00:23:30
Speaker 5: Yeah, I cause my main gig, we’re due, Like I manage a buffalo and elk hunting ranch. So like our season ends like first week of December, So anywhere from first week of December all the way through even into the March, I’m running traps every single day anywhere from you know, one hundred to three hundred different sets, you know, just on a timeline where I’m just checking everything as the need be checked and trapping as many things as I possibly can.
00:24:02
Speaker 1: You know, it’s clear this guy gets after it in terms of trapping. So now let zero in on the topic of trapping beavers specifically and learn how he got involved with the Beaver Relocation Collaborative.
00:24:14
Speaker 5: I’ve been trapping, man, I don’t know, it’s probably my teens, you know, sixteen seventeen range where I could actually drive myself around and get on some stuff. But you know, and that’s kind of how I met Nate in the first place. Is I’ve been you know, I had lethal trapped beavers prior to hanging out with Nate and them and BRC. And then they kind of turned me, so say, into kind of being the full circle guy where I could, you know, lethal trap things and need to be lesal trapped, but I also live trap the beavers for them and kind of bring my knowledge of trapping into the relocation scene where they were recruiting people that wanted to be conservationists and recruiting people that like really wanted to be a part it, and trapping was like something that I think they needed more more help with, and then they had to spend more time, you know, getting those guys learning the ropes and trying to figure out where to have the sets and what it meant and whereas I kind of just knew, but then I had to kind of learn, you know, how to keep the well being of the animal in mind, and you know. Not that not to say that you don’t do that in regular day trapping, but it’s definitely more of a point to do that when you’re trying to live trap and relocate stuff than when you’re just trapping for fur or a nuisance type thing or anything of that sort.
00:25:38
Speaker 4: That makes sense.
00:25:39
Speaker 3: I’m not trying to paint the picture at all that I’m anti you know, lethal trapping beavers. There’s plenty of instances where it comes up where that’s perfectly okay to do. I just find it also interesting that there’s some there’s places like where you’re at in Utah where live trap at them and take it them to areas to you know, re established wetlands or help with you know, help with the wetlands. Is just really, really, really interesting. So are you doing any lethal trapping of beavers anymore? Are you? Are you if you’re trapping a beaver, are you live trapping it?
00:26:11
Speaker 2: These days?
00:26:11
Speaker 5: So I appreciate your perspective for sure, because I’m one hundred percent on that same page. Also where there’s there’s space in this world for both sides of that coin. There’s space in the world for a lethal trap, and there’s and there’s a place in the world for the live trapping relocation and things like that. Right, So nowadays I’m definitely more along the lines of live trapping and relocating than I am actually lethal trapping the beavers, even though I do happen into a beaver here and there on my line, you know, where I’m running snares close to a river bottom or or just stuff like that just happens a lot of times.
00:26:49
Speaker 4: I’m trapping on a lot of private property over here too.
00:26:51
Speaker 5: I’m not doing a whole lot of public land trapping just because I’ve been so lucky to have access to a lot of stuff and I’ve I’ve seen where trap and can help them with the goals that they’re trying to achieve with deer and turkeys and and things like that. So when it comes into the sense where I’m trapping on those private properties, like those people are irrigating and running the water to cows and running water to fields and things like that where they don’t necessarily want them there. So that’s where we can scratch each other’s backs. Where I have those INDs, you know, I’m seeing them during trapping season, I’m seeing them where I can legally harvest them in a lethal way, right, But I keep the landowners in mind that they want a specific thing done. But at the same time, I think like, Okay, maybe I can save that come the summertime where we can get this thing relocated and then full circle moment help everybody out with you know, the relocation and the habitat work.
00:27:48
Speaker 4: And so it’s just it’s just.
00:27:50
Speaker 5: A deeper, meaning, deeper concept than just trapping that animal because it’s plugging up a covert, or trapping that animal because it’s falling trees or or anything like that where somebody else could use it to actually keep water or have water or you know, bring that water table up a little bit in this in that sense, right, so it has. It has flipped my mindset, you know, where I’m like, man, I could instead of just solving one problem, we can solve couple with just a little extra effort or a little bit you know, a little bit more, you know, thoughtfulness in that sense, right, you can. You can just think a little harder, think a little better, think a little smarter.
00:28:31
Speaker 1: I love getting perspective from guys like Hoppy on these kinds of issues. To me, they’re as equally valuable as the perspective of the biologist. One thing I feel like we’ve learned and seen play out several times in this show is that often the success of any program initiative campaign set out in the name of benefiting wildlife often hinges upon biologists in the public being willing to work together, and Hoppy’s involvement in this beaver relocation in Utah is a perfect example of this. To round this episod off, I want to ask him if he’s been able to see some of the positive impacts from his relocated Beaver’s firsthand.
00:29:07
Speaker 4: Absolutely absolutely.
00:29:08
Speaker 5: I actually, I actually was a part of a property that I didn’t even know was a thing. Before I had even met BRC or net Nate or any of those guys. I had been hunting turkeys on a property. It was a property that was butted up to a bunch of public land, and I had been hunting turks on public land for forever. And then I’d met the guy that had come to one of our like relocation parties or those kinds of things, and then we got talked about turkeys, and then he was like, he’s like, yeah, I live up there. And I’m like, oh, man, I know exactly where that is. And he’s like, hey, come hunt turkeys on my place. It butted up right up against you know, the public or whatever. So I knew exactly where he was at. And I’ve been hunting turkeys on his place ever since. But his place, this creek runs right through his place, and it’s just gorgeous habitat Big long Green Grass. In the springtime, you know, turkeys everywhere because there’s just a lot of a lot of big woods meeting like kind of open fields and things like that. And we live in big high country too, where like six.
00:30:11
Speaker 4: Seven thousand feet he just had like great habitat.
00:30:14
Speaker 5: And then and then he got to explain to me that it never used to be that way until they started helping him out with the beaversion kind of getting them into that high country where where a lot of our water happens in the springtime, right runoff and things, and then we have super dry summers. And it was kind of hard for me to understand that it ever could have looked any different than what it did, because like, the turkeys in there were just so awesome, and you know, there’s a lot of grouse all over there.
00:30:43
Speaker 4: And so that kind of brought a full circle to me. And that was actually.
00:30:46
Speaker 5: Pretty early on when I hadn’t necessarily started live trapping for them, but I, you know, i’d kind of had the interest to, and so it kind of that kind of pushed it forward for me.
00:30:55
Speaker 4: Where I was like, this is actually possible.
00:30:57
Speaker 5: And obviously it took him quite a while to do that, because anything worth working for is probably gonna take take some time, but like, but I was like, man, that’s so awesome. And then b r C has been doing some relocation and some some stuff with us through me through some of my private private property access as well. And obviously we’re kind of in the early stages there, but we’re already starting to see some beavers kind of get established, kind of in the.
00:31:23
Speaker 4: Lower parts of where we’re at.
00:31:25
Speaker 5: Obviously we want to kind of keep moving higher, but it you know, we’ll take them where we can get them, but we’re already starting to see some progress there too, So that’s super super cool. And I think in places like down south areas where like there’s excess water, you guys have these rainstorms that come in and they don’t you know, they don’t six to eight inches at a time, whereas we have like six to eight inches of annual precipitation, where we we know what we’ve got and we’ve got to keep it.
00:31:54
Speaker 4: And so the.
00:31:55
Speaker 5: Beaver’s definitely formed more of a functional part of the world here than I think they have in different parts of the world.
00:32:02
Speaker 4: Of course, right, that’s kind of why we’re doing what we’re doing.
00:32:06
Speaker 5: But they were always they’ve always been here, right, They’ve always been here, and they should be here, and just bring them back to places where they have been where they should be is just cool to see, right.
00:32:16
Speaker 1: I definitely think it’s cool to see the North American beaver a keystone species, an ecological engineer, a critter that can transform a landscape like no other creature in the animal kingdom, a nuisance sometimes sure, a critical piece of the ecosystem that benefits wildlife and wild places, water quality, and humans as well. You better believe it. Be sure to check out the Beaver Ecology and Relocation Collaborative at Utah State. They really are doing some cool work. Heck, Nate told me that he even figured out how to transport beaver’s on horseback. That’s something our friend Elmo was never able to do. They’ve got some pretty cool videos on their social media as well at the Natural Resources at USU if you want to check them out. I want to thank all of you for listening to Backwoods University, as well as Clay’s Bear Grease and Brent’s This Country Life. It means a whole whole lot to all of us. And if you enjoyed this episode, share it with a friend this week and stick around because we’re just getting started. There’s a whole lot more on the way.
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