Beavers put to work saving two Utah rivers
National parks are often called “best idea in America”. This is what supporters of national parks and forests believe, anyway (and they are probably not mistaken). Earlier this month, the Facebook page highlighted another excellent idea, this about a unique conservation effort.
The unique conservation effort is… beavers. In 2019, researchers began to move captured beavers who had become a nuisance for humans along the sections of the San Rafael and Price rivers in eastern Utah.
The idea is that beavers – often considered as engineers of nature – have landscapes of the river by unleashing and building dams. All this occupied activity keeps water and creates wetlands that support countless other species. According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, they are “one of the most profitable and lasting solutions for ecological catering and resilience to climate change”.
Credit: NPS / Neal Herbert
And our desert rivers indeed need an ecological restoration. Human activities, including the constructions of tanks, dams and diversions, have exhausted their crucial water supplies and, therefore, degrade Utah State Magazine.
CUE THE CASTORS. Two years after joining the pre -existing small population, Emma Doden, a student graduate of the then state University who had participated in the conservation experience, his team had found dams in regions where they had never been observed before.
While a certain number of the total translocated beavers died or moved away from the target catering area, “some of these beavers stayed where we put them. And even those who did not – we had a little 20 km. [12 miles] Downstream, which is far enough for a small animal-they probably help the system, because the river is so degraded, “she said.
[ Related: Beavers, snails, and elephants are top grads from nature’s college of engineering. ]
By 2023, the experience was still working. The researchers saw more dams than before their study on the translocation of the beaver, said behavioral ecologist Julie Young at the Utah State University at the Wildlife Society. Some beavers have improved the regions of preexisting analog dams – or beaver dams made by humans built for environmental catering purposes.
“What heavy machines and government programs could not do, some rodents pulling sticks in the mud did better,” the national supporters of parks and forests ends.
Although the position does not cite specific evidence supporting their complaint regarding the government’s intervention, there is no speech that beavers – like invasive plantation eaters – are a more natural solution.
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