Please, Consider the Beaver

The first time I tried to meet Drew Reed, the most prolific beaver mover in the state of Wyoming, I was thwarted by a sick goat. Reed and I had made plans to rendezvous in Jackson, the tony resort town south of Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks; I was en route when Reed called, his drawl pinched with concern. One of his goats, a 220-pounder named Maximus, had been laid low by a mysterious malady, and the vet needed to intervene ASAP. Reed was sorry, but we’d have to postpone until his beloved creature had been cured. Maybe, he added hopefully, Maximus just needed some electrolytes. I was disappointed, but also felt some admiration—here was a guy who cared enough about animals that he’d blow off a human engagement to tend to the health of a ruminant.

A month later, with Maximus in finer fettle, I found myself in the front seat of Reed’s pickup, bouncing along a dirt road through the Gros Ventre Valley. A transverse crack glittered in the windshield; the rear window was plastered with a decal of a T.-rex-sized billy terrorizing tiny humans, accompanied by the phrase my goat ate your stick family. A boxy white trailer rattled in our wake, threatening to decouple from Reed’s truck with every rut. Reed and his wife, Amy, normally used the trailer to tote Maximus. Today it conveyed a more sensitive cargo.

“Hope they’re doing okay back there,” Reed muttered.

The road, pocked with potholes deep enough to drown in, clung tight to the hillside, nearly forcing us to trade paint with cars creeping in the opposite direction. The Gros Ventre River ran below, a shimmering blue thread twisting through sere sagebrush meadows. Reed, a baseball hat yanked low over his shaved head, grumbled at unyielding drivers. At last the road descended into the valley, where an amber tributary called Cottonwood Creek gushed into the mainstem of the Gros Ventre. Reed executed a nimble three-point turn and backed his rig down to the creek so that the trailer’s rear door opened onto the water. He clambered down from the cab for a quick debrief.

“The main thing we have to be prepared for is, they could separate,” he warned me and a few onlookers who’d followed in a separate car. “It’s doubtful they’re gonna go upstream like I’d like for ’em to do—path of least resistance and all. I’m gonna do everything in my power to keep ’em together. The last thing we need is someone running between ’em.” He paused for emphasis. “The welfare of these animals is always paramount over people’s enjoyment.”

A chorus of “I agree!” rose from the small crowd. “All right, then,” Reed said. He unlatched the trailer door, lowering it into the creek to form a ramp. Then he stepped back.

The beaver who poked her head from the straw-covered bed of Drew Reed’s trailer was big—big enough to make me inhale involuntarily. If you have ever seen a beaver, you have probably seen her swimming at a distance, with most of her estimable mass concealed, iceberg-like, underwater: a misleading view that creates the impression that beavers are little larger than housecats. Not so. This animal weighed sixty pounds, as much as many golden retrievers, a dense bolus of muscle and fat and milk chocolate fur—the linebacker of the animal kingdom. She—a pronoun I assigned her at random, as beavers’ sexes are notoriously difficult to discern—stood precariously on her hind legs in the doorway, nose twitching as she surveyed her surroundings, front paws held to her chest tentatively like Oliver Twist asking for more gruel. But her caution didn’t last long: Here was running water and standing cottonwood, all the habitat and food that a bark-noshing aquatic rodent could desire. The beaver dropped to all fours and waddled down the ramp, hips and rump swaying like the ponderous bulk of a stegosaurus. This was not an animal well suited for land travel.

“Hey, bud!” Reed cooed. “Water, huh? You like water?”

No sooner had the hefty adult emerged than she was followed by a baby beaver, a kit, hardly bigger than a Chihuahua. We murmured our delight; even the hard-boiled Reed, I figured, would have to admit the thing was pretty dang cute. The juvenile hesitated, and Reed gave it a swift pat on the butt, as you would to an obstinate horse. “Go with Mom,” he chided. The two beavers scudded into the stream, weaving back and forth, half swimming and half walking, the water not quite deep enough to submerge.

They looked understandably disoriented—they’d endured a long journey in a dark chamber, been flung into new environs, and were surrounded by strange hairless bipeds. Their ordeal, I thought, was like getting snatched by aliens from your bed in Sacramento, spending a day in isolation aboard a mysterious mothership, and then being dumped unceremoniously into a cornfield in Topeka.

That confusion, perhaps, explained what happened next. With a flick of his oar-like tail, the kit abandoned his parent and took off downstream, slipping like a trout over a rocky rapid. In defiance of Reed’s fervent wishes, the pair was separating. Absent an adult, the kit would surely perish, either of starvation or in a cougar’s jaws. Reed dashed over the cobble toward the bottom of the rapid, where he stood in shin-deep water, crouched like a shortstop preparing to corral a wicked grounder. Deftly he plunged his arm into the stream and, to our astonishment, hoisted the kit up by his leathery tail, holding him aloft like a trophy fish. Other handlers, before and since, have warned me against carrying beavers by the tail, for fear of dislocating the appendage. Although Reed isn’t persuaded by the dislocation theory, he doesn’t make a habit of tail grabbing, either. But in the heat of the moment, what choice did he have?

“That little booger got into that deep hole right in front of me and I was like, oh crap!” Reed told me later, after the beavers had been reunited and shooed upstream. “There’s really no other place on a beaver to grab ’em.”

The Gros Ventre River flows into Jackson Hole, the glacier-flattened valley that lies beneath the bladed Teton Range. Today Jackson Hole is a playground for the Patagonia class, a ritzy sprawl of ski slopes and mountain biking trails and upscale art galleries. Two centuries ago, though, the valley was defined by fur. In the autumn of 1807, John Colter, a former member of the Lewis and Clark expedition, followed the Bighorn River into the Rocky Mountains to trade with the Crow Indians. Colter wandered Wyoming for months in the snowbound dead of winter, toting little more than a rifle and a pack. Although no one’s quite certain where his route took him, he’s considered the first white man to enter the hole, a word trappers used to describe broad, game-filled valleys. He also found lots of beavers.

In the decades that followed, a parade of fortune seekers followed Colter’s footsteps into the Northern Rockies, a region that, blared one newspaper, “possess[ed] a wealth of furs not surpassed by the mines of Peru.”[1] These travelers were the famed mountain men, rapacious beaver trappers who, between the early 1820s and the late 1840s, systematically ransacked just about every pond and stream between Colorado and California. Most of those pelts flowed to the Missouri River and thence to St. Louis, to be shipped off to the East Coast or Europe for conversion into fashionable hats. With breathtaking speed, the mountain men demolished their resource, virtually wiping out beavers throughout the American West. “The trappers often remarked to each other as they rode over these lonely plains that it was time for the white man to leave the mountains,” Osborne Russell, a beaver hunter who frequented Wyoming and Utah, wrote in 1841, “as beaver and game had nearly disappeared.”[2]

Although the reign of the mountain men was brief, they left an enduring ecological legacy. If you know nothing else about beavers, you’re probably aware that they build dams: walls of wood, mud, and rock that hold back water and form ponds and wetlands. The rodents also construct lodges, towering houses that often rise from open water like volcanic islands. These structures don’t just house beavers themselves: Trumpeter swans squat rent-free atop beaver lodges, commandeering them as nesting platforms upon which their chicks shelter from land-bound predators like foxes. The majestic white birds also crave the elodea, sago pondweed, and other aquatic plants that grow in shallow beaver ponds.

By trapping out the Northern Rockies’ beavers, the mountain men unwittingly destroyed countless acres of prime swan habitat. A few decades later farmers and ranchers finished the job by draining wetlands to make way for cattle and alfalfa. Today only ninety or so resident trumpeter pairs linger in the region, and chicks seldom survive. “Beaver ponds would’ve been strung out like necklaces down these drainages, and this landscape would have been a giant sponge,” a swan biologist named Ruth Shea told me. “That’s why there were swans nesting everywhere. Swans are the poster child for the importance of the beaver.”

By the dawn of the twentieth century, the fur trade had largely dissolved, a victim of its own success. Beavers began to recover, much to the chagrin of Jackson’s landowners, who rang up wildlife control trappers whenever the rodents gnawed down cottonwoods, dammed irrigation ditches, or flooded fields. No longer did we regard beavers primarily as pelts—just pests.

That didn’t sit right with Drew Reed, an Arkansas native who, in 2008, took a job at the Wyoming Wetlands Society. Intrigued by beavers’ ecological potential, Reed set out to make capture-and-relocation a priority. He taught himself to live-trap and hung up flyers advertising his services. Word of Reed’s humane approach spread among Jackson’s wildlife-loving citizenry like brushfire in dry grass. “All of a sudden my phone was ringing off the hook,” he told me. Some trappers threatened their new competitor; others referred him clients. Before long he was dumping beavers in the Gros Ventre River two or three times a week. Filmmakers arrived from the BBC to shoot a documentary, salaciously titled Beavers Behaving Badly.

In 2015 Reed and Shea scraped together funding for a new nonprofit, the Northern Rockies Trumpeter Swan Stewards. Birds may be their remit, but their focus is beavers. Usually Reed arrests his quarry in suitcase-like live traps, though sometimes he’s forced to get creative. Just before I came to Jackson Hole, he wrangled an especially wily fugitive with a salmon net—“a harebrained scheme,” he gleefully acknowledged. “It was utter chaos when that beaver hit the net. It was a rodeo.” He held on. The beaver was moved.

All told, Reed estimates he’s relocated north of 250 beavers. How many have survived is another question. Although he’s recaptured some old friends years later, many, no doubt, have been devoured by bears, wolves, and cougars, or slain by trappers. Without Reed, though, their fate would have been more certain, and grimmer. “Even if one landowner is willing to let the beavers stay, their neighbors probably won’t—and we all know that beavers don’t understand what a property line is,” he told me as we bounced home. “I’m usually given an ultimatum: You relocate ’em, or they’re dead. We’re giving them a second lease on life, a chance to try to go make it. I call it reseeding a drainage. They’re not gonna stay exactly where you put ’em, but I’m happy if they stay somewhere in the area and start doing their work.”

As if on cue, Reed threw the truck in park and raised binoculars, ogling a lodge protruding from a distant pond. The structure, he told me, was likely the handiwork of a relocatee: He’d recently spotted one of his ear-tagged beavers cruising around the complex. “Oh, heck yeah—that thing has grown,” he enthused. “That’s three times the size it was a couple years ago.” He gazed into the floodplain below, the wide sagebrush pasture parched and sepia and swanless as it rolled away from the river. “Man,” he murmured, almost to himself, “I’d love to see that whole meadow underwater.”

[1] St. Louis Enquirer, quoted in Eric Jay Dolin, Fur, Fortune, and Empire (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 224.
[2] Osborne Russell, Journal of a Trapper (Boise: Syms-York, 1921), 124.

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This excerpt is from Ben Goldfarb’s book Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter(Chelsea Green Publishing 2018) and is printed with permission from the publisher.