By Amy Alonzo
Lush, green grasses and willows line the edge of Elko’s Susie Creek. Water gathers in deep, slow-moving pools.
The ribbon of green and blue that winds through the Northern Nevada desert stands in stark contrast to the surrounding sagebrush, providing sanctuary for fish and waterfowl.
It wasn’t always that way.
Amy Alonzo – A beaver swims across a Nevada stream.
Three decades earlier, in the late 1980s, Susie Creek was just a sliver of water slicing through a barren gravel bar. There was not a willow or sedge in sight.
That was before the beavers returned.
Native to North America, beavers once covered much of the continent, including portions of present-day Nevada. Estimates put the number of beavers nationwide at about 55 million before European settlement.
By the end of the 19th century, trapping had decimated beaver populations. Good sources of fur and oil, they also were competitors for land desirable for ranching and agriculture. With increased agricultural and urban development, groundwater pumping and irrigation diversions altered many of the streams the few remaining beavers called home.
Where the beavers remained, they were often viewed as nuisances to ranchers, given their propensity for damming up moving water.
But over the past few decades, beavers have bounced back as most public and private land managers now realize the rodents are more than a source of fur and oil — they are a critical component to healthy riparian ecosystems. They can reduce erosion, raise the water table, improve water quality and expand floodplains and wetlands — many of the same goals of riparian restoration projects.
Many Nevada ranchers are realizing that if they want healthy waterways on their grazing allotments, they need to also want the large rodents – or at least a simulation of them — on their property.
This realization has given beavers a new reputation in agricultural areas across the West. In a generation, the rodents have gone from being perceived as pesky nuisances to critical landscape components.
“It’s hard to talk about beaver without talking about taking care of the streams,” said Carol Evans, a retired Bureau of Land Management fisheries biologist who spent her career helping restore overgrazed creeks throughout Elko County. “You just can’t have one without the other.”
In Nevada, beavers naturally occur in the Humboldt River Basin, along the Colorado River and in the streams and tributaries of the Snake River.
In those watersheds and beyond, the Nevada Department of Wildlife (NDOW) is building beaver dam analogs — mimicking the beneficial effects of the rodent’s dams —and taking the first steps toward reestablishing habitat to support beavers where populations had been driven out.
“We’re kind of in the midst of a beaver enlightenment. It’s neat,” Evans said. “People are understanding all the ecological benefits of the beaver.”
But, like everything else, beavers come with a downside. As their numbers increase, they are expanding into urban areas such as Reno, where they aren’t restoring watersheds — they are just, well, still considered a nuisance.
A cultural shift
Driving a load of dynamite back to Elko’s Maggie Creek Ranch from Battle Mountain, Jon Griggs knew one thing: Keep the dynamite and blasting caps separate.
It was around 1990, and he’d just been hired at the nearly 200,000-acre ranch — the same one Susie Creek runs through — as a cowboy. One of his first jobs at the ranch was to blow up a beaver dam on Maggie Creek.
“We had sticks flying up in the air, we had big booms, but we really didn’t do much because we had no idea what we were doing,” Griggs recalled.
The general attitude of ranchers toward beavers is changing, but for a long time they were “the devil,” according to state biologist Madi Stout. This was largely due to the rodents’ proclivity to build dams wherever they found water, including irrigation ditches and canals designed to deliver water without barriers.
“Anytime they hear running water, it’s a bat signal to them to build a dam,” she said.
Beavers build dams to create ponds where they can construct lodges. The ponds and lodges provide protection from predators.
In the early 1990s, Evans approached Griggs to talk about the way cattle grazed on Maggie Creek Ranch. The ranch operated on a rest-rotation grazing system, but riparian areas including Susie Creek were almost always grazed all season long. Formerly lush riparian areas had morphed into barren patches of dirt around the creeks.
What if, she proposed, the ranch avoided grazing cattle along the creeks during the hottest months of the year? Plants along the streams would have an opportunity to regrow, the land could start to recover and the streams could heal.
The first year, native grasses came back. The second year, other flowering plants returned. It takes about eight to 12 years to restore a riparian plant community back to a level that attracts beavers. By the early to mid-2000s, Susie Creek was increasingly healthy and beaver populations were rebounding.
Griggs was hesitant to let the rodents return but did so at Evans’ encouragement.
“We let ’em go,” he said. “And thank God we did. They did some phenomenal work for us.”
Fast forward three decades, and Griggs is now the manager of Maggie Creek Ranch, president of the Nevada Cattlemen’s Association and one of the most prominent voices in Nevada ranching. He still wears a beaver felt hat, but he’s also somewhat of a spokesperson for the positive work beavers do.
“It took all of us a cultural shift. We just didn’t get it,” said Griggs, 60, who has spoken at environmental symposiums across the nation. “My generation and probably the generation before me kind of got here when beaver were gone.”
Over time, Griggs came to see beavers as a way to restore wetland areas, a sentiment he says many ranchers now share.
“You think of the creek just as the water you can see, but a healthy creek is the water you can see and a big sponge of water beneath it that hydrates the whole flood plain,” Griggs said. “Beavers, when they slow water down and back it up, they hydrate that sponge, and it allows for riparian vegetation to expand. For us, that means we get areas of green when nothing else is green.”
But beavers aren’t a cure for all Nevada’s riparian ills and cause problems in some areas of the state, according to state furbearer biologist Russell Woolstenhulme.
He’s responded to calls at Wild Island, a water park in Sparks, because beavers were cutting down trees in the parking lot. He’s received calls in arid Palomino Valley with reports of a beaver walking down the road, searching for a new place to build a dam.
“They’re absolutely amazing — but throwing beaver at every problem — everyone else wants to throw beaver at it and walk away. All they see is the good thing,” he said. “The problem with that is beaver build dams and flood everything. Nevada has some really strict rules about water flows.”
In 2015, beavers in Sparks were causing damage and risk of residential flooding along the North Truckee Drain. The city temporarily resorted to catching them underwater, where they were drowned to death, before stopping the practice.
They continue to be seen as nuisances and have such impacts on water flow that laws remain on the books specifically addressing the removal of beaver dams. The law outlines how their dams are to be removed by state officials if they are “found to be obstructing the proper and necessary flow of water to the detriment of water users.”
“There might be too many in the wrong places, but there aren’t enough in the right places,” counters Josh Barnes, biologist with Trout Unlimited, a group that restores coldwater fisheries, adding that if there were enough beavers, the state would have more functional, healthy streams.
