Giving more than a dam.

For millennia beavers have been building the living conditions that salmon, steelhead, lamprey, frogs, turtles, and willow flycatchers require. But beaver benefits are not restricted to dams alone: their bank tunnels shelter young fish; native turtles bask on their lodges; and migratory birds nest in their coppiced willows. Even the beavers’ simple act of cutting and moving stream-side trees and shrubs into the water as they feed builds the foundation for the aquatic food web of a stream—collections of beaver-chewed sticks become “river reefs” teeming with life. Beavers push all of these fantastic ecosystem benefits out ahead of themselves, one dam at a time. They build an aquatic kingdom, each stick and paw-ful of mud expanding a lush, diverse, resilient habitat.