Rob Rich

It was a real thing. It did happen in, I believe it was 1948. A lot of interesting things came back after World War II there. And one of the things is that we were really infatuated with air travel and airplanes at the time. And so...

they were trying to figure out the, you know, how to get one of the early solutions has always to beaver conflict problems has always been like, oh, let's just move them somewhere else and do that. And that's still a kind of a gut response for anything from skunks to squirrels to, you know, anything else that we're having a conflict with.

And so they tried on mules with that group of beavers in Idaho. This was outside of McCall, Idaho. And That was not successful for the mules, particularly. They were not very conducive to that. And so they got this idea to release them from the air. And you can find footage of it still, of it happening.

But they did release a number of beavers in these boxes that had straps that would open upon impact with the ground, but not before.

I think it was a few dozen beavers that they released. launched out of the air into this kind of wilder area outside of McCall, Idaho. And they did have one fatality, but over, you know, a couple dozen beavers were dropped out of the sky for that purpose. So reintroduction has a really complex history in different iterations.

60, 70 years later, we've realized today how important it is to really relocate beavers as a family unit, because as we've talked about already, they really have strong and complex social bonds. And so it's not effective just to take one beaver and just dump it out in a new place. That beaver is most likely going to suffer and suffer immense risk as well from that relocation.

But when relocated as a family unit, there is potential that they can do well, but again, it is a lot of risk for the animals still.

There is no doubt that as a ketone species, like they are just disproportionately impacting many more lives than we even are aware of at this point. So just knowing what species are in your area and what are thriving, and you can really get a pulse on that yourself too.

Great question. Yeah. Then what's neat about beavers, in addition to being keystone species for all these countless organisms that inhabit our environment around us, is that beavers are keystone species for all kinds of

All just even I mean, the, you know, we've got entomologists and ornithologists and fluvial geomorphologists and all kinds of all just that are coming together to realize, hey, the beaver is like at the nexus of a lot of what we do. And so. I think it's a growing awareness.

You know, we had so much of the 20th century between the early 1910s or so through the late 1900s, where we, one, just didn't have the eyes to see beavers. And we didn't have the beavers actually physically weren't there. And so they were kind of out of sight, out of mind for a while. But one of the great thinkers that helped reverse that a lot was this guy named Robert Nyman.

And he was a hydrologist and ecologist that really showed, wow, beavers had a huge impact on the North American continent. And he was one of the first people to just show, OK, if there were millions of beavers, what kind of water storage did that do? What did that do differently than a concrete dam, that word type of building? And so he looked at a lot of those things.

And and that was in the late 80s, early 1990s when he started doing that. And then another one of his students, Michael Pollack, really took that into the fish realm a little bit and looked at, hey, these coho salmon. They spend 18 months of their life in fresh water when they are in fresh water for that long. The beaver pond is like a nursery pond.

for all their their feeding and growth before they go out to sea in these pacific coastal systems and so he did a lot of work with coho salmon and he was actually one of the big guys launching the kind of beaver revolution in 2014 really is when a lot of people really started to take off with this of of just like yes they are answering a lot of things for for fish as well as other species

And I am kind of wary myself of just like deification and demonism. We just swing so strongly between these poles of love and hate that I think one of my goals for working with Beaver is really to just integrate them into kind of all we do and just see them as another intrinsically valuable species that we can live with and among.

And they can really do us a lot of good and we can learn a lot from being with them as well.

one of the great things is that there is no one way to be a beaver or a castorologist. You know, there are many different ways into this. And, and so if you're really into the water angle, the hydrology of it, you know, that's one thing there's lots of opportunity for wildlife biologists and whatnot.

I think I consider myself a lot of a field ecologist and a wildlife tracker in a lot of ways in that I, and looking at the beaver as one among many of the species that I study. And I'm doing a lot of work to help kind of assess where habitat is good, where potential is good, and inventory and assess those connections.

But just the best way to start getting into it is just to go out to just see if you can find beavers near where you live, and just start watching, observing, and asking questions. And beavers are one of the species that is not endangered today and they don't, at this point, don't have any likelihood of becoming an endangered species, but they are unique and also that they're really accessible.

They can live alongside us if we let them. And so I find that very hopeful in that there are species that so many people wherever they are can really learn from.