Utah program helping relocate beavers to restore environment

PARADISE, Cache County — Agencies from around the country are looking to Utah for a new program designed to help preserve our outdoor spaces, and it all has to do with the beaver.

Out on a farm in Paradise, one resident noticed water levels around the property were going up. And though they weren’t showing their faces yet, the culprit? Beavers.

“Our grandkids think it’s just the coolest thing in the world that we have beavers,” Billie Murray said. “We first bought this property 11 years ago. We noticed again, just a few weeks ago, the water level is going up.”

Murray called in help from the new Beaver Ecology and Relocation Collaborative, a program dedicated to trapping and relocating beavers instead of killing them.

“The only way to deal with these beavers was to have them lethally trapped and removed, but now we give people an option,” said Nate Norman, lead biologist for the collaborative that started five years ago.

Now, they’re getting national attention.

“We’ve been contacted by people in Colorado, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, all looking to replicate what we’ve got going on here,” Norman said.

He said that beavers restore environments and help preserve water, which is why Murray wants to relocate her beavers.

“They need to create wetlands, they need to create meadows and renourish the land because they actually create an environment that re-nourishes the land,” Murray said.

Becky Yaeger with the Beaver Ecology and Relocation Collaborative set a trap after breaking down the dam on the Murray property. The team didn’t have to wait long. Just two days later, volunteers brought a 46-pound beaver back to what they call the bunkhouse. That’s where Norman and Yaeger check in the beavers.

“We just pick them up and put them in our lap to look for injuries, determine the sex,” Norman said.

They measure the weight, collect stool samples and measure the tail — this beaver had a tail length of 15.1 inches — as well as prepare to microchip them.

We learned this beaver was a female — they named her Wilma — and she had kits.

“Beavers are really family-oriented so if we can get the whole family and release them all at once, that’s our preference,” Norman said.

Sure enough, the team found four kits trapped along with their dad.

“There’s nothing cuter than a little beaver kit,” Norman said. “When they come in, they’re just a little ball of fur with a flat tail and just all about curiosity.”

Typically they quarantine the beavers for about three days, but to make sure they got the whole family and they weren’t carrying any diseases, it took them about three weeks for this family. But the team was able to find them a new home.

“There used to always be beavers here and so we wanted them back on the place so they could help repilling with areas and stuff like that,” said Clint Byram on his ranch in Morgan County, where water levels have been lowering.

Byram and his dad helped release two beaver families in different areas around the property.

“It was a lot of fun to see them,” Byram said. “Just start seeing them build some of their beaver dams.”

The Beaver Ecology and Relocation Collaborative just received grant funding to take aerial photos so they can track how the beavers affect areas, look at where they build their dams and study how long they stay there.