Project Beaver Annual Report 2023

At Project Beaver, we aim to increase the acres of water and life that beavers are stewarding in their diligent, old, and complex way. We work towards this goal through two programs, Empowering Humans and Valuing Beaver Works. This is what we accomplished in 2023.

Knowledge Resources

We published the Best Management Practices for Pond Levelers and Culvert Protection Systems: A guide to using flow devices to coexist with beavers as well as infosheets on pond levelers, culvert protection, tree protection, crop protection, and ways to help beavers fix ecosystems.

We have received confirmation that a wide range of people are actively using these resources to coexist with beavers. We are helping watershed councils, soil and water conservation districts, municipalities, and individual homeowners. These resources were accessed 3,703 times via our website.

“You can tear a beaver dam out and literally overnight it can be almost totally rebuilt, and you can do that day after day after day, and they’re going to come back and come back and come back. I heard about devices that would control the level of the water behind the beaver dams.”

— Lyle Speisschaert, Speisschaert Farms
in Forest Grove, Oregon

Leading by Example in SW Oregon

We published two beaver plans for public lands — one for the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest and another for the Cascade Siskiyou National Monument. These plans provide the administrative backing to help beavers return to these lands via low-tech process-based restoration and relocation of beaver refugee families.

“I am pretty excited to share this document! This plan is the culmination of a multi-year effort between the RRSNF, Project Beaver, Applegate Partnership and Watershed Council, and others… Jakob Shockey (Project Beaver Executive Director) in particular was instrumental in the design, content and vision for this effort. Without this partnership, the Forest would likely not have been able to pull off this project.”

— Steve Brazier, Fish Biologist for
the Rogue River, Siskiyou National Forest

Castor Consciousness

Beavers in Oregon were legally classified as “predators” (even though they are plant-eating herbivores) until we helped pass a law this year to change that. Because of House Bill 3464, which received bipartisan support, beavers are now a little more protected in the Beaver State.

Restoring Riverscapes Workshop

We facilitated a three-day virtual workshop for National Marine Fisheries Commission, which was designed to introduce participants to the idea that healthy rivers are complicated, evolved systems. The workshop included over 35 presenters and 800 virtual participants. Materials from this event were archived at the website restoringriverscapes.org.

Beaver Boardwalk

In the dry lands outside rural Cave Junction, Oregon, beavers have restored a degraded stream into a drought-resilient wetland in prime rearing habitat for native salmon and trout. This is a special site with a freestanding beaver lodge and abundant wildlife. In the language of the local Takelma People, this site is a sbink or “place of the beavers”. Thanks to a generous donation by Jason Strauss, Project Beaver has purchased this sbink less than a mile off Redwood Highway with the intention of building an accessible boardwalk and visitor facilities. We envision picnic tables under oak trees where families unpack their lunch or enjoy an accessible boardwalk out into the beaver wetland. The site will include a place for people to park, a simple visitor center elevated over the wetland, and infrastructure to support our work (like halfway house pens and coppice beds of willow for our refugee beaver program). Many people have forgotten or are unaware of the ecological wealth that beavers bring to a landscape — this will be a place to remind people of that value.

Ecological Wealth

Despite spending billions in the Pacific Northwest on water security, wildfire mitigation, carbon sequestration, and habitat resiliency, we are still struggling through intense seasons of drought and wildfire. Beavers have been stewarding water and life on our planet for millions of years and the science shows that beaver landscapes are more resilient to these issues. However, much of the best beaver habitat is located on private land where landowners often trap beavers to prioritize agriculture and development. We’ve started talking to potential partners and informally chatting with landowners about piloting a program that values beaver-managed hydrology on private land. This would be a voluntary incentives program of direct payments for area under beaver management. This means farmers, ranchers and other landowners would be paid for every square meter of land they leave under beaver management.