Beaver Library

Beaver Futurism envisions the reclamation of Indigenous people’s knowledge and practices through partnership with the North American beaver, ultimately promoting Indigenous and global health. Beaver is revered not only as a master of habitat restoration but also as a living emblem of resistance against containment within and expulsion from land embedded in the settler colonial context. Through Beaver’s transformative dam-building processes, this remarkable engineer nurtures relational ecologies by reconnecting fractured landscapes and habitats that sustained long histories and Indigenous lifeways, often disregarding physical (roadways, rails, houses) and political boundaries (US/Canada border, multi-owner landscapes). Today, tribal restoration projects mimic and reintroduce beavers, reconnecting to land and traditional practices. Traditional knowledge challenges modern borders by looking to the past, reinforcing Indigenous sovereignty through access to traditional foodways, medicines, and beliefs. This vision invites a return to the embodied knowledge of living with the land and partnership with Beaver.

We explore the complexities of managing beaver (Castor canadensis) conflicts in North America, describing the most common approaches used by natural resource management agencies to address conflicts. We identify specific conflicts caused by beavers, the ecological benefits beavers provide, and the tools commonly used to address conflicts. We discuss regional differences in beaver management strategies, including ecosystem restoration and conflict prevention. We specifically discuss a variety of management practices including public education, land use management, trapping, translocation, exclusion, shooting, dam removal, repellants, and harvest incentive programs; we then review the challenges and benefits of these tools. We discuss the need for integrated management strategies that maintain the ecological benefits created by beavers while addressing human–beaver conflicts.

Beavers modify landscape morphology and hydrology, thereby creating habitat for
diverse species, enabling many ecological processes, and promoting climate change resiliency.
Beavers are now rebounding from near extirpation in North America and increasing beaver
populations can facilitate restoration goals given beavers’ roles as ecosystem engineers. This is
especially relevant in the Chehalis Basin in western Washington where beaver is a focal species in
the Aquatic Species Restoration Plan (ASRP) which aims to protect and restore critical aquatic
habitat. Although beaver can be valuable for restoration, they can also cause conflict with people by
damaging trees, flooding roads, etc. Given potential conflict and the role of beaver in restoration, we
surveyed landowner perceptions of beaver and collated data on the status of beaver in the Basin.
Our landowner survey provides information to begin assessing the Chehalis Basin community’s
understanding of and desires for beaver. Our study explicitly explored whether negative attitudes
towards beaver are positively correleated with an individual’s reported conflict with beaver.
Notably, we found that landowners experiencing conflict with beaver were more likley to agree
with lethal control of beaver and disagree with maintaining beaver-created habitat than
landowners not experiencing conflict. This survey’s results underscores how proactively
addressing human-beaver conflict in the Basin is crucial for avoiding increasing negative attitudes
towards beaver and beaver-related restoration. Our survey supports a need for outreach and
education on beaver conflict mitigation, particularly related to unwanted tree removal. We also
present trends data on recreational beaver trapping in the region and areas of reported beaver
conflict. Although robust beaver population data are lacking, we provide a compilation of known
beaver occurrences as a baseline for beaver activity, especially near restoration priorities. These
beaver status data, in conjunction with our landowner survey data, provide a comprehensive
picture of the state of beaver, beaver conflict, and beaver restoration in the Chehalis Basin. Our
findings can help guide restoration practitioners in the Chehalis Basin to best capitalize on beaver’s
habitat restoration potential while mitigating conflict now and into the future.