Palouse man finds better beaver solution

PULLMAN – John Brown’s battle with the beavers on his property spanned over a decade.

The hobby farmer, who lives a few miles south of Pullman, is driving through his property on a John Deere Gator and pointing out poplar trees that border a stream.

One tree, planted in 1999, leans over a walking path at a roughly 45-degree angle. The beavers chewed through its roots. Others, similarly damaged, had their tops lopped off by the local power company to protect nearby electrical cables. Brown points to nearby rows of daffodils.

“I have lost probably 1,000 of those to beavers, too,” he said. “They flooded, and daffodils couldn’t tolerate the water.”

For years, Brown said, the beavers would build, and he would tear the dams out. The beavers would come back. But a few years ago, Brown said, he decided to change his approach.

“I was tearing out six dams a day up and down the stream, and I accidentally fell in the stream in January. I said, ‘That’s it. I’m not doing any more of this,’ ” Brown said.

Most people don’t get rid of beavers because they dislike the animals, said Melissa Mackelvie, an assistant regional habitat program manager for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

“They’re just at their wit’s end. They’re like, ‘We love the beaver, this is cool, but you know, this is a safety risk.’ Or ‘I need to harvest this,’ ” she said.

Beavers aren’t without benefits, said Adam Gebauer, program director at The Lands Council. His nonprofit works to help restore and preserve forest, water and wildlife in the Northwest. That includes the beavers.

“Beavers’ natural tendency is to create dams, to create habitat that suits them. It also turns out it suits a lot of other species and has a lot of ecological benefit,” he said.

Beaver dams can also slow down water, thus dampening the impact of floods downstream, Gebauer said. During fire season, dams also create wildlife refugia and fire breaks. The animals are ecological engineers, he said.

“They probably manipulate their habitat more than any other species,” Gebauer said, “other than humans.”

Even so, beavers can still be hard to live with. To alleviate that burden, The Lands Council works with landowners and municipalities to install something called a pond leveler when beaver dams are a little too effective.

Those pond levelers work by allowing water to quietly pass through a pipe that’s been installed in the dam, thus controlling the pond level.

The technology isn’t completely foolproof. Sometimes sediment-heavy water or especially industrious beaver families can necessitate additions or more maintenance than usually needed.

In Brown’s case, Gebauer and other staff are helping install another leveler soon, because the pond has been rising again.

“There’s an organization in the Methow (Valley) that’s been doing a lot of this work for a bit longer than we have,” Gebauer said. “Similar to us, 90%, 95% of them work as planned. But they have a couple where they have to go in every year.”

Mackelvie said even with those challenges, pond levelers are sometimes a more practical long-term solution than other options.

That’s because trapping a family of beavers doesn’t eliminate the habitat that draws them in.

“There’s gonna be beavers that move in,” Mackelvie said. “You’re probably gonna have other ones move in – a year, six months later.”

Now that he’s retrofitted the dams, Brown said, the beavers aren’t so bad. For one thing, they raised the water table, meaning Brown’s pasture stays green for longer. That’s a point he brings up to a beaver-skeptic neighbor who runs cattle, he said.

The new habitat also attracts wildlife, Brown said. That includes deer, moose, muskrats and a constant stream of birds. A thrum of sound emanates from the pond where red-winged blackbirds, California quail, mallard ducks, ravens, kestrels and geese make their home.

“It’s a pretty sterile environment in the Palouse, you know?” Brown said. “If you stand out in the middle of one of these wheat fields, you’re not gonna hear that.”

Many people still don’t know pond levelers are an option, Mackelvie said, although that number is increasing. It’s certainly not a problem that’s going away: She estimates that about half of her calls last spring were beaver-related.

Mackelvie said it also helps people to see how things work for their neighbors before they commit. Pond levelers are more common in the Midwest, but less so in the Northwest.

“The Midwest is not Whitman County,” she said. “I think when we have more people choosing these options, and seeing these different options, there’s a pickup of interest.”

All in all, Brown said, he’s willing to put up with the hassle for the changes the beavers create. Some of his neighbors might think he’s crazy, he said. For him, it’s worth the trouble.