Short Wave - Beavers Can Help With Climate Change. So How Do We Get Along?

Episode Date: April 24, 2024

NPR's Tom Dreisbach is back in the host chair for a day. This time, he reports on a story very close to home: The years-long battle his parents have been locked in with the local wild beaver population. Each night, the beavers would dam the culverts along the Dreisbachs' property, threatening to make their home inaccessible. Each morning, Tom's parents deconstructed those dams — until the annual winter freeze hit and left them all in a temporary stalemate.As beaver populations have increased, so have these kinds of conflicts with people...like Tom's parents. But the solution may not be to chase away the beavers. They're a keystone species that scientists believe could play an important role in cleaning water supplies, creating healthy ecosystems and alleviating some of the effects of climate change. So, today, Tom calls up Jakob Shockey, the executive director of the non-profit Project Beaver. Jakob offers a bit of perspective to Tom and his parents, and the Dreisbachs contemplate what a peaceful coexistence with these furry neighbors might look like.Have questions or comments for us to consider for a future episode? Email us at [e-mail] — we'd love to hear from you!See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey everyone, it's Tom Dreisbach sitting in the host chair today. And a few months ago, my siblings and I got a text message. It was kind of out of the blue in the way only a message from your parents can be. It was just a picture of my dad and he was standing in the snow near my family's house next to a big tree. And close to the bottom of the tree, it looks like someone or something had taken a huge, bite out of it. Like if the tree were an apple.

It almost looks like you could push it really hard and it would fall over. It's going to fall over. It will. Right? It's such that you really don't want to go check it out too closely. That's my mom, Michelle, and my dad, Craig. And they sent me and my siblings

this picture because the thing or things that took this massive bite out of the tree have become a little bit of an obsession. My parents are in a long-running feud with a group of wild beavers. To set the scene, I grew up in rural Vermont on a dirt road off of another dirt road, which connects to another dirt road. My parents' driveway is almost a mile long, and at the bottom is this leech-infested pond.

Yeah, I remember growing up, that is the pond that you did not want to swim in. It was just kind of gross. Well, it got grosser. Hard to imagine. So last summer, my parents are driving by and realize, wow, the water level level. is really getting high. Now, there are some culverts, which are basically big pipes, that run under the road and help drain the pond

and keep it from getting too full. But some number of beavers, no idea how many, had started damming up those culverts. How tight is the seal they're able to make? Oh, enough to stop all flow. With those culverts plugged, all it would take is a few heavy rains and the road would flood,

essentially stranding my parents. So every morning, for months and months, my parents would walk all the way down the driveway and unclogged the pipes. We were undoing their work every single day. Every day. So they worked, I don't know how many hours through the night, and we would undo it. And then they must have come back and looked and thought, what the heck, right? Rinse, repeat. Recently, the feud reached a bit of a stalemate because the pond froze in the winter.

and stopped all that work. We're happy, happy now that the pond is frozen. But in between late season snows, Vermont is thawing out. And when the water melts... Now, this is not just a story about my parents' accidental retirement hobby, because the beavers are actually a crucial species, what biologists call a keystone species. And scientists believe that beavers could play an important role

in cleaning water supplies, creating healthy ecosystems, and mitigating a lot of the effects of climate change. But as beaver populations have increased, so have these kinds of conflicts with people like my parents. So today on the show, what can beavers do to help with climate change and what can we do to help with peaceful coexistence? Well, I'm going to see if I can get us some help.

I'll call you guys again soon. All right. Okay. I love you. I love you. Thank you. I'm Tom Dreisbach. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

Okay. So to help my parents find some peace with the beavers and understand why they're so important in mitigating climate change, I spoke to a beaver expert. So my name is Jacob Shaki. I'm the executive director for a little nonprofit I started called Project Beaver, and I've managed to make a full-time job out of working with beavers and people. Do you spend most of your day working with people or with beavers, what would you say? I would say, unfortunately, it's people. Jacob trained as a wildlife biologist. He's based in Oregon, appropriately known as the beaver's. state, where he helps people come to terms with their flat-tailed neighbors. I often feel like I'm maybe like a marriage counselor.

I'm like, all right, well, I hear what you're saying, and this is the needs of the other party, and maybe we can work out some compromise here to where you're both happy. Jacob says the reason why it's so crucial to get people and beavers to couples therapy is that beavers are great at managing ecosystems. They're better than even scientists like Jacob. Beavers have been managing freshwater in North America and really across the northern hemisphere for millions of years. So beavers come in and they build dams

because they're trying to stay safe from predators that want to eat them. So they flood the land and they get a lot of water and then they're safe. Oh, because they can go under the water? Yeah. They're very graceful in the water and very clumsy on land. So on land, anything can catch them and eat them and they're like 50 pounds of slow-moving protein. But in the water, they're very hard to catch.

So when beavers are there and they're doing their thing, all the other animals that have been used to beavers managing water for millions of years respond really well. Like, you see the birds come back, you see the fish come back. And so I was over here saying, okay, well, I think my time as a human is best spent trying to get the professionals back to work rather than trying to fake what they're doing.

The professionals being the beavers. Being the beavers, yeah. We're talking serious professionals. The biggest beaver dam in the world is about a half mile long. It's in one of Canada's national parks. It is so big, it is visible from space. But it's in such a remote part of the park that you can't really visit it. It's believed to be the work of many beavers working over generations.

And in fact, the North American beaver has been around for millions of years. Jacob says they were a major draw. for the colonization of the U.S. Before people came here for gold, before they came for the timber, they came for the beavers. A land without beavers was an impoverished landscape that wasn't even worth considering.

But humans nearly drove the North American beaver to extinction through a combination of trapping for fur to make coats and hats and development on beaver habitats. Beavours have been making a comeback, though Jacob says we don't have very good estimates of exactly how many there are in North America now. This comeback, though, can come with more conflict with people.

It's a conflict we have to figure out, Jacob says, because beavers are what's known as a keystone species in the environment. Imagine a stone Roman arch, and at the top is the stone that keeps everything together. That is the keystone. You remove beavers, and then you remove the beaver dams, you remove the tons and tons of vegetation they're dragging into the streams that are becoming the bottom of the food web for all the other living. living animals in the water, and the arch collapses.

Given that beavers are playing this keystone role within their ecosystem, what kind of role do you think they can also play to help mitigate or manage some of these issues that are getting worse because of climate change? Well, you think about some of the issues with climate change, and most of them, beavers address, and they do it better than we've figured out how to do it. like water quality and water quantity, beaver dams filter water and they store water and the water as it kind of runs up against the beaver dam

is forced to settle locally into the soil. As it settles, then it eventually gets pushed back up into the stream a lot colder. So it helps with water temperature in addition to pollutants that are running through the streams. But it also recharges ground tables and people who live near Beaver, wetlands, you know, their wells are less likely to go dry. Beaver wetlands also mitigate wildfire

behavior. So there's a big fire in my area a couple years ago, and a bunch of cattle that were out on the land survived only because they hid in a beaver wetland. Oh, wow. But it sounds like to harness all of these positive effects of beavers, we need to manage this human beaver relationship. How do you do that? It's very possible to live alongside each other, but it can just be tricky sometimes. I joke that I often am just helping the apes outsmart the rodents. And that's really what it is. It's like, can we outsmart the rodents here? I think we can. I'm guessing you don't tell your clients that they're apes to their faces. No. No, although sometimes I will challenge them. Do you think you can outsmart the

rodent here? And some people take that as an important challenge to their humanity. And we'll go at it. with new vigor. And obviously one option for managing this conflict is, well, the option that a lot of people have taken for a long time, which is trapping or hunting. Well, trapping doesn't work very well because with trapping, you remove that family, but beavers are territorial. And if you've taken a family of beavers out of good beaver habitat, it's only a matter of time before another family moves into that good beaver habitat. And so, folks, will get on a treadmill of this reactive trapping where sometimes they're removing family after family after family

in the same year, if not every single year. And it's a lot of work for the people, and no one likes killing things generally. And so they go looking for another option, and that's where some of these coexistence strategies really shine, because not only do we empower the rodents to help us in the face of climate change, but we also come to a stable solution for the people that live nearby where they don't have to worry about it anymore. I wanted to see if Jacob could give some advice to my parents,

so I got all of them on the phone together. Hi, how are you, Jacob? Nice to meet you both. Yeah. Hello. Mom and dad, you guys have tried a strategy just trying to kind of outwork the beavers. Jacob, does that ever work? Like, can humans outwork the beavers in terms of unplugging the dam

and get them so frustrated they'll leave? Well, we can be dogged, right? I met a guy who worked for a public utility, and part of his morning, he would show up to work an hour later than all his colleagues, because on his way to work, he was charged with unplugging a culvert, and he did that for 30 years.

Oh. Okay. And the funny thing was when we then built a culvert protection system that worked, and he didn't have to do that anymore. He wasn't grateful. He was, that was a lovely morning routine for him that then I destroyed. There is something still satisfying about unplugging the cold. Yeah, the way the water whooshes back into the culvert.

It's a sense of accomplishment. Yeah. I could see why he would be disappointed. My parents and Jacob talked for a little bit about different strategies for finding peaceful coexistence, putting cages around an underwater pipe, some fencing or caging around. on the culverts. There's even a thing on the market called a beaver deceiver. Jacob suggested at one point creating a kind of decoy dam

that the beavers would see and focus on, rather than the pipes that keep the road from getting flooded. Jacob told my parents, there's actually a good chance that there are multiple beaver families in that pond. They might even have beaver babies this spring. At one point, my mom said she kind of admired the beavers, just how stubborn and almost ingenious they've been over the last few months.

kind of reminded her of someone. I've actually grown very fond of the beavers. I find them so incredibly fascinating. They actually remind me of you, Craig. They're like manifestations of you. Well, mom and dad, thank you so much. Thank you, Jacob. Thank you, Tommy.

Thank you. Okay, bye-bye. And Jacob, thank you so much for taking the time and really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you for having me. Well, that was Jacob Shockey, Executive Director of Project beaver in Oregon, along with my parents, Craig and Michelle, thanks to them. They're now on the lookout for whether there are beaver babies come into that pond. When I was recently back home, while my parents figure out the permanent solution,

I even helped clear the culverts of all the stuff the beavers are back to jamming in there. It was a beautiful day. Kind of fun, really satisfying to get the water flowing again. Let's see if we can push this out. And we want to coexist with these beavers, but we can't let them wash out our road. Oh, there's a big chunk. Look at it go now. Very satisfying.

Except I don't need to be satisfied every day. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and Burley McCoy. It was edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez and fact-checked by Rebecca, too. The audio engineer was Josh Newell. Thanks so much for listening to Shortwave from NPR.