Depending on who’s talking, beavers can be any of the following: unsung ecological heroes, nuisance rodents bent on wreaking havoc, cute creatures brimming with charisma — or a hunting target.
Now it’s Colorado wildlife officials’ task to create a statewide management plan that acknowledges all the roles beavers play in the Centennial State.
As beavers become more popular and their ecological benefits better known, Colorado wildlife officials are, for the first time, compiling a statewide management plan for the tens of thousands of beavers that make Colorado’s waterways their home. Agency officials hope to expand beaver habitat so that as many beavers as possible can thrive in the state.
“There’s a high level of interest in beaver restoration and management, and it’s just building and building and building,” said Boyd Wright, Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s native aquatic species coordinator.
The interest in beavers was clear at the sold-out, two-day Colorado Beaver Gathering last month in Boulder — a follow-up event to the sold-out, three-day BeaverCON conference held in town the year before. The growing interest in the species and the proliferation of beaver-related advocacy groups are part of the expanding curiosity that Wright says is prompting CPW to develop a comprehensive beaver plan.
The new plan will aim to balance the species’ irreplaceable role in wetland ecosystems with the fact that beavers’ eagerness to build can sometimes obstruct human infrastructure. The small community of recreational beaver hunters, too, must be considered.
One of the agency’s goals is to create consistent guidelines and support across the state to deal with those beavers that cause trouble by blocking irrigation ditches, road culverts and water treatment operations, or by creating unwanted ponds on people’s properties.
Beavers deemed nuisances in Colorado are often killed — an outcome CPW hopes to reduce with its new plan.
CPW last week released a draft of the new beaver management plan and is soliciting public comment on the 125-page document. The public has until Dec. 17 to comment on the draft and the agency will publish a final plan by the end of February.
CPW is one of several wildlife agencies across the West that have recently adopted a mindset that prioritizes coexistence with North America’s largest rodent, said Michael Saul, the Rockies and Plains program director for the nonprofit group Defenders of Wildlife.
Wildlife agencies’ shift away from using lethal means to control beavers has been encouraging, he said.
“That’s an enormous change from just 20 years ago, and we’re really excited to see CPW talking about restoration and benefits,” Saul said.
More beaver data needed
Abundant beaver populations roamed Colorado before European settlement and the arrival of trappers seeking the rodents for their pelts. The lucrative beaver trade lured trappers to Colorado’s mountains and decimated the beaver population in the early 1800s.
Beaver populations — historic and current — are difficult to calculate, but studies cited by CPW say the number of North American beavers declined from between 60 million and 400 million beavers before settlement to a range of 9 million to 12 million today.
Biologists estimate 60,000 to 90,000 beavers live in Colorado now, and they assume the state’s population followed a similar trajectory, with populations much smaller today than they were before large-scale human settlement.
“In Colorado, we assume they followed that same trend and are greatly reduced from historical levels, but are still a relatively abundant animal,” said Brian Sullivan, CPW’s wetlands program coordinator. “We’re not concerned about long-term persistence of beavers by any means. But we know they’re way below their former levels — and that has come with some costs to the health of the watersheds and the health of the land.”
A relatively small number of beavers are intentionally killed by humans every year, but the state does not collect data on either beavers hunted for sport or those killed for damaging property.
Under state law, landowners can legally kill a beaver without a permit or needing to report the kill if a beaver was causing damage. CPW kills approximately 90 nuisance beavers a year across its properties, according to the draft management plan. That includes state parks, wildlife areas and hatcheries.
People who recreationally hunt beavers are allowed to harvest an unlimited number of the rodents with a furbearer license. They’re not required to report how many beavers they kill.
CPW issues a voluntary survey to those with furbearer licenses. Survey data from recent years show that approximately 1,500 beavers are hunted and killed every year.
That data void is something CPW hopes to fix with the management plan. And those who hunt beavers agree that better data is needed.
The Colorado Trappers and Predator Hunters Association last year submitted a petition to the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission asking for more robust data collection on the hunting of several species, including beavers. The association would like CPW to require hunters to present every harvested beaver to agency staff and report where the animal was killed.
The association also wants better data to show the public that they are harvesting only a tiny sliver of the state’s beaver population, said Dan Gates, the group’s president. CPW previously required similar data reporting for beavers but stopped mandating it in 1977, he said.
“We thought it reasonable to go back to documenting what was harvested,” Gates said.
But progress on the petition has been halted as CPW develops the beaver plan.
A necessary nuisance?
Dozens of eager beaver believers gathered in a small Boulder music venue last month for the Colorado Beaver Gathering. There, beaver fans discussed the rodent’s critical role in restoring wetlands, mitigating wildfire damage and improving water quality.
The crowd listened attentively as Wright, CPW’s native aquatic species coordinator, discussed the beaver management plan. When the crowd got a chance to ask questions, a rancher piped up.
She wanted to know how CPW’s plan would address the fact that ranchers and farmers often need to move beavers quickly if the rodents are damming up their irrigation ditches or culverts. The rancher said she’d spent hours clearing out dams from her ditches and didn’t think many ranchers would take the time to file extensive paperwork to translocate beavers. CPW is considering a formal system to move beavers causing problems, but the rancher worried it would be cumbersome.
Instead, she said, they’ll revert to the decades-old, paperwork-free solution: shooting them.
“We don’t have time to do all that paperwork,” she said. “I’m not going to do it, and I love beavers.”
That’s one of the central tensions CPW hopes to address in the management plan, Wright said. State officials hope to provide more resources — and maybe money — for landowners so they can mitigate the damage done by beavers while allowing the critters to stay on the property. That might mean blocking beavers from accessing culverts, wrapping trees in protective fencing or using piping to move water from one side of a beaver dam to the other.
If those efforts don’t work, CPW staff want to create a standard system that landowners can use to quickly address beavers that can be translocated.
“Lethal outcomes are always going to be part of the management prescription, but we want to minimize that,” Wright said.
CPW’s plan aims to better recognize the beaver’s role as a keystone species, which is a species that ecosystems depend on. The benefits beavers bring to a landscape are plentiful, research shows.
The ponds they create serve as critical habitat for many animal and plant species. Their dams slow down water, which minimizes erosion, extends spring runoff and slows floods. The wetlands the dams create help recharge groundwater stores and cleanse the water stored there. They also make landscapes more resilient to wildfire, and their pond systems serve as refuges for other animals during blazes.
“They do millions of dollars of work for free,” Peggy Darr said of beavers. She is a wildlife biologist with Defenders of Wildlife and consulted with CPW on its draft plan.
Skeptics of the plan wonder if CPW has the money and staff capacity to implement the new solutions the plan suggests. Already, the agency is stretched thin, said Gates, who serves on several CPW stakeholder groups. Beavers remain prolific across the state, and CPW’s current method of managing the population has worked, he said.
“It’s a solution in search of a problem,” Gates said.
The have been no explicit conversations about finding more money for beaver management, Wright said. CPW is developing the plan so it can be completed with current staff resources, he said.
The draft plan is under internal review and the agency hopes to finalize and begin implementing it in February.
“It’s been a real whirlwind of a year getting this thing off the ground,” Wright said.
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