This story was originally published by Reasons to be Cheerful
10 min read
Over the last 20 years, Oregon’s wilderness has suffered big time. Salmon have disappeared, wildfires have scoured the hills and drought has parched once-fertile soils. Years of small fixes — a little forest thinning here, a little fish-ladder installation there — have helped, but not nearly enough to keep up with the destruction.
By the start of the 2020s, Oregon had more ecologically impaired waterways than almost any other state, and environmentalists were ready for a serious solution. Something bold and risky. Something that would dramatically resculpt the landscape — and potentially correct decades of human development. In a word: beavers.
Hundreds of millions of beavers called North America home until an insatiable European fur trade nearly drove them to extinction in the 1800s. As a result, waterways in the U.S. became much easier to control: They followed increasingly predictable channels, drained more quickly and left plenty of dry, stable land in their wake. That was great for human development — but bad for almost everything else.
In recent decades, lands across the West have been drying out quickly as sponge-like wetlands vanish — a result of drought, climate change and a dearth of beavers on the landscape. Without deep pools to store cold water, average stream temperatures have risen, resulting in steep declines in local fish populations, particularly salmon. Another problem: Many species of salmon require slow-moving water and protected ponds to lay their eggs and raise their young.
By the mid-1990s, several species of salmon — once a primary food source for Oregon’s Indigenous tribes and a significant economic driver in the Pacific Northwest — had been listed as endangered.
Around that time, scientists started to look for solutions, launching a frantic effort to figure out what, exactly, salmon needed — and what they were missing. A handful of Oregon State University scientists stumbled upon a clue: They discovered that regions with beaver ponds had vastly higher salmon productivity than those without. Further studies have echoed those findings.
“Beaver ponds and alcoves represented only about nine percent of the habitat but accounted for 66 percent of the coho salmon found in the system,” land managers later wrote in Oregon’s Beaver Restoration Guidebook. Another study from British Columbia showed that the survival rate for young coho salmon that overwintered behind beaver dams was 60 percent or more — significantly higher than the regional average.
The research was compelling, but it took a long time to catch on. That’s because beavers in Oregon had to overcome more than a century of bad PR.
Beavers’ greatest strength is also their least-beloved characteristic. Masters of heavy construction, they’re constantly rearranging the landscape, whether or not their human neighbors approve. The critters have been known to flood roadways, submerge crop fields and decimate sections of forest. That’s a tough sell for most of modern humanity, which has gotten pretty used to controlling the environment.
“Beavers have been maligned for much of history,” says Maureen Thompson, a wildlife biologist and the program manager for Oregon environmental nonprofit Beaver Works. “For most of the last century, they’ve been considered a pest — even though they’re on the Oregon state flag.” In fact, beavers only became legally recognized as wildlife in Oregon in 2024. Prior to that, they were classified as a nuisance species.
That started to shift 10 to 15 years ago. Thompson says a number of the beaver advocates and volunteers she works with cite reading Ben Goldfarb’s 2018 book Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter. Around the same time the book came out, Oregon started grappling with more destructive wildfires and serious drought, which Thompson suspects was a wake-up call for many Oregonians.
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“You realize you can’t breathe during the summer, and you can’t get wildfire insurance, and you start looking for solutions in a way you weren’t before,” she says.
Fire can jump a narrow stream and blaze up the far-side hill. But it can’t always jump a beaver pond: These wetlands are natural firebreaks. They also keep ready sources of water on the landscape that, in a pinch, farmers can use for crop irrigation or watering cattle. As those benefits become more visible, Sullivan says, the tide of public opinion is beginning to turn.
Oregon isn’t the only place betting big on beavers. Recent reintroduction efforts in Idaho have been connected to healthier trout populations and increased aspen growth. In 2023, two Californian tribes reintroduced beavers and have since seen a 22 percent increase in water retention on their lands. And in 2026, Colorado passed a new management plan prioritizing beaver protection — an effort to boost fish populations and even clean up abandoned mine tailings.
“I would say we’re in the middle of a beaver conservation movement,” says Brian Sullivan, the coordinator of the Wetlands for Wildlife grant program at Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW). Ten years ago, Sullivan saw one or two grant applications for beaver-related restoration projects every year. Now, half of the applications he processes have to do with beavers or beaver dam analogs — logjams designed to kickstart wetland formation and attract beavers to an area.
“Those wetland habitats make up just two to three percent of the landscape in Colorado, but 80 percent of our wildlife species utilize them,” Sullivan says. “That makes the conservation of these habitats key to biodiversity.”
To that end, Colorado is working hard to increase the state’s beaver population, currently around 50,000. The state’s new Beaver Management Strategy includes working with landowners to prevent infrastructure damage, relocating problem beavers and otherwise avoiding lethal control.
Countries throughout Europe have also taken up the standard. (Eurasian beavers and North American beavers are distinct species with similar appearances and habits.) In 1920, beavers were released in Sweden in an attempt to revive the fur trade. That didn’t quite pan out, but people did realize that there were other benefits to having beavers around. Swedish wildlife advocates quickly turned the campaign into a conservation effort, says Emily Bowen, senior communications officer for the England-based nonprofit Beaver Trust. Other countries followed suit — including Germany, Norway and Hungary. Now, Europe’s beaver population is well up from its precarious one-time low of 1,200. Bowen estimates that the continent now hosts at least a million individuals.
And the momentum continues. The latest adopter: Great Britain, where beavers had been extinct for more than four centuries.
“Britain is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world,” Bowen says. “Our landscapes have changed massively over the last 400 years as we’ve gotten used to managing our water and our lands as we want.” Without wetlands to retain moisture and soak up excess rainfall, the country has become prone to both drought and flooding.
To combat that, the British government reintroduced beavers to Scotland in 2009 and then to England in 2015, albeit within protected enclosures. Just last year, the kingdom saw its first truly wild releases. Already, scientists have measured improved water retention, reduced downstream flooding and 200 percent increases in bat activity in beaver-crafted wetlands, says Bowen. Great crested newts, which once suffered steep population declines across the U.K., are coming back, and fish are thriving. Beaver Trust has also recorded drastic improvements in water quality.
Wetlands act as a natural water filter. Dams slow down water so that impurities from dumps and sewage plants can bind together and sink into the soil, says Bowen. The result is clearer, cleaner, healthier water.
“We see these before-and-after bottles of water where it’s murky before the dam and clear afterward,” she says. “Beavers are ecosystem engineers. When you slot them back in, you see a lot of these systems start to reboot.”
And it’s not just the land that benefits. Beaver tourism — including wildlife photography tours, canoe safaris and even merch — has sprouted up near release sites, lending a boost to local economies. A bar in Devon, for example, has come up with a custom brew: the Beaver Bitter.
One of the most rewarding things about beaver reintroduction, says Bowen, has been that kind of enthusiasm — and the sense of problem-solving and collaboration that has come out of it. Beavers are constantly changing the world around them, which means conservationists and communities have to band together to mitigate the effects without getting in the beavers’ way.
“We have to play chess with them,” Bowen laughs. “It’s quite a fun approach because we haven’t been in that position as humans for a long time.”
To help, Beaver Works has created an international hub where scientists and land managers can share tools and advice across borders. Through that hub, beaver reintroduction has evolved into a dynamic, collaborative effort among a global community of people who care about their local landscapes — and are willing to face significant challenges to bring back a species that could be key to repairing them.
On the ground in Oregon, Tribal leaders, local governments and even private land owners are putting their heads together to restore both beaver populations — and the other species that rely on them. In early 2026, Tribal members set up a series of beaver dam analogs on the Warm Springs Reservation in Central Oregon to draw the animals back to the area. Around the same time, beavers were spotted settling into a newly restored wetland in the Metro Portland area, a move the city has embraced. The state recently removed four outdated dams on the Lower Klamath River to help restore wetlands and bring back salmon populations, and legislators have passed a handful of new laws making it easier to reintroduce and manage beavers statewide.
And it’s working. Over the last few years, Oregon salmon populations have rebounded, in large part thanks to these kinds of habitat improvements.
“Beavers are on the upswing. People care about them, and there’s so much research showing that they benefit almost everything you could possibly care about,” says Thompson. “There are so many things in ecology that are demoralizing and depressing, but not beavers. Beavers are good news every day.”
The post Beavers Are Having a Moment appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
