By Robin Meadows
Pierre Paquelier was thrilled the first time he saw chewed bark and other signs of beavers at Lone Tree Farm, his 80-acre horse property along the Tuolumne River near the Central Valley town of Waterford. He grew up in France at a time when beavers there were all but gone.
But then his majestic Valley Oaks started dying. Beavers stripped the bark all the way around their trunks, weakening and eventually toppling trees as high as 50 feet.
“I was not so excited then,” says Paquelier, who offers equine retirement, training, and event services. “It gets really hot in the summer and we need shade for the horses.”
Luckily for Paquelier―and the beavers destroying his trees―California has a new program called the Beaver Help Desk that promotes coexistence with these up to 80-pound rodents. The help desk offers free on-site troubleshooting for beaver problems, an up to 50% match for the cost of implementing solutions, and free training and certification for beaver coexistence professionals.
The $2 million program is funded by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) and led by long-time beaver champions at the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center (OAEC), a Sonoma County-based non-profit that focuses on regional-scale community resilience and restoring biological and cultural diversity.
“Batman has the bat phone, and beavers have the beaver phone,” says Greg Hayes, OAEC’s Beaver Coexistence Program Manager. “It’s important that someone picks up the phone quickly.” As just one example, people don’t want to wait when they’re worried that a beaver is about to bring a tree crashing down on their house.
BEAVER BENEFITS AND CONFLICTS
The Beaver Help Desk is the latest initiative in CDFW’s push to reinstate beavers in California. After decades of issuing permits to kill nuisance beavers, the agency did a turnaround in 2023 and established a beaver restoration program.
Beavers, which mate for life, build dams to provide safe homes for their families. The dams create pools around their lodges, which are elevated, dry living spaces with underwater entrances to guard against predators.
Beaver dams have the beneficial side effect of expanding and even forming water-rich habitats from wetlands to riparian areas to meadows. “Beavers can do a lot of the restoration work that people are trying to do,” says Hayes. The contributions of these ecosystem engineers to the natural world include recharging groundwater, reconnecting streams with floodplains, and providing fire breaks and refuges for wildlife during drought.
But beavers can vex people who own or manage land with waterways. Dams can flood land, and block culverts and irrigation ditches. And―as horse farmer Paquelier was dismayed to discover―they can also damage prized plants. Beavers gnaw off limbs and fell trees to build their dams and lodges. They also devour the cambium of trees, a soft nutrient-rich layer under the bark.
CUSTOMIZED SOLUTIONS
For help with his beaver woes, Paquelier chose Cathy Mueller from the help desk’s list of certified coexistence professionals by county. During her site visit, she developed solutions tailored to Paquelier’s landscape and needs. “Each project is different,” says Mueller, whose day job is stewardship manager for the American River Conservancy, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the upper American River and Cosumnes River watersheds. “You can’t just pull it off the shelf.”
In Paquelier’s case, part of the solution was wrapping the trunks of about 35 Valley oaks in wire fencing heavy enough and secured by stakes long enough to withstand the Tuolumne River when it overtops its banks. “The trees that need protection are in the floodplain of a river that gets giant,” Mueller says.
Another part of the solution was installing solar-powered electric fencing around a 2,000 square-foot area with about 30 young oaks, whose slender trunks made them too difficult to cage individually. Now that his treasured oak trees are protected, Paquelier was delighted to see a beaver swimming near the river shore earlier this year. This is only his second beaver in eight years of owning the property, which is no surprise as they are generally nocturnal.
FILLING A NEED
Mueller became a beaver coexistence professional after getting a call at her land trust day job from a community with beaver troubles. She couldn’t find anyone to help them so she decided to learn how to do it herself. Her side gig, which she pursues mostly on weekends, keeps her plenty busy. In the few months since becoming certified, she’s worked to resolve a total of five beaver conflicts.
Besides keeping beavers from chewing valued vegetation, Mueller’s work includes protecting the land around their dams from flooding. Many people’s first instinct is to breach or remove a dam but this doesn’t work. When beavers hear the water running again, they work all night to repair or rebuild their dams, as seen in this video from a webcam Mueller installed at a project.
Beaver-friendly options for guarding against flooding include pond levelers, which are flexible pipes installed across dams. Water flows through the pipes so quietly that beavers hardly notice it, giving these devices the nickname “beaver deceivers.”
Finding ways to coexist with beavers is particularly satisfying for Mueller because she has first-hand experience with former policies that treated them as nuisances. During a summer job with the U.S. Forest Service in the late 1990s, she saw beavers killed to protect cabins from flooding on leased Forest Service land.
“It was disheartening,” Mueller says. “Now I get to help beavers stay and maintain aquatic ecosystems, and help landowners relax and not worry.”
