Oregon beaver biologist Conrad Ely wades through icy Carlson Creek in Tillamook State Forest to look for beaver dams, dens and gnawed branches.

Clad in waders and staff in hand, Conrad Ely trudged through the icy Carlson Creek, a stream meandering under mossy Douglas firs and cedar in a remote section of Tillamook State Forest.

Ely, a state beaver biologist, scanned the water for gnawed-off branches, poked at bunched up leaves and shone his flashlight under trees overhanging the riverbank.

In this quiet landscape known mostly to hunters and timber workers, he was after an elusive sight: teeth marks, trails, dams and lodges and their creators, beavers, the furry mammals with paddle shaped tails that once populated every stream and river in Oregon but have been nearly wiped out across the region.

“I’m a beaver detective,” Ely joked.

Ely’s effort is part of a first-of-its kind survey of beavers and their activity, with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife collecting data throughout the state to understand where and how the animals live. The surveys underlie a new plan to protect and restore beaver habitat in Oregon, though its success is yet unknown as wildlife officials work to change the narrative about the animals and how they should be treated.

Even in Oregon, the Beaver State, beavers have long been seen as a source of fur for a waning group of trappers and a nuisance for landowners — pesky rodents akin to rats, killed indiscriminately with little afterthought or state oversight.

But beavers’ fortunes are changing as scientists point to the myriad benefits they bring to the environment and to humans, including alleviating climate change impacts like drought and wildfires and helping with the recovery of imperiled fish, turtles and frogs.

“We have a directive to level up landscape restoration and beavers are the bridge and glue holding us together,” said Adrienne Averett, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s new beaver coordinator. “They create canals, pools and side channels. Landowners want beavers … to improve forage. And they diversify the habitat for other species, including a lot of our salmonid species.”

Painful history

Beavers were once plentiful in Oregon and across the continent, with as many as 400 million damming up streams, rivers and lakes, shaping a water-plentiful land before European settlers arrived. The animals were respected and revered across many Native American cultures and were a source of food, clothing and trade.

But starting in the 1600s and continuing for nearly three centuries, fur traders and trappers hunted them down to near-extinction, including in the Pacific Northwest, the animals’ soft underfur turned into countless beaver hats.

The fur trade, in turn, drove colonial expansion across North America and played a crucial role in the settlement of Oregon, opening the floodgates of emigration on the Oregon Trail.

By the early 1900s, beaver populations collapsed — an estimated 100,000 animals were left in all of North America — and many of the ponds, wetlands, side channels and inundated flood plains they had once created disappeared while others were drained for agriculture, leaving behind a much drier landscape.

States, including Oregon, temporarily prohibited beaver trapping and instituted beaver relocation programs, leading to a small rebound. There are now an estimated 10 to 15 million beavers across the U.S., just under 5% of their original numbers. There’s no population estimate for Oregon.

Their scarcity has hardly made for harmonious coexistence with people. With their habitat decimated by development, farming and ranching, beavers often seek to occupy human landscapes, leading to conflicts that have cemented their reputation as pests that damage trees and plants, cause flooding and clog up stormwater drainage culverts and septic systems.

It’s why Oregon has for years classified beavers as “predators” — because they “prey” on trees and plants — allowing private landowners to solve the conflicts by killing them and destroying their lodges and dams, no questions asked.

The beaver plan

But, as climate change-induced drought and heat waves have wreaked havoc on American cities, farms and ranches, many scientists and land managers have come to understand the furry animals have ecological value. They’re nature’s engineers, as their dams, canals and channels keep water on the land and help recharge aquifers, rivers and streams.

Also, key in a state that spends millions of dollars on habitat restoration, beavers can create — for free — pools and wet areas along streams, riverbanks and flood plains that serve as high-quality rearing habitat for salmon, frogs, turtles and countless other threatened and endangered species. And while state officials have for over a decade identified beavers as beneficial in its fish recovery plans, they had not fully invested in restoring the beavers themselves until the past few years.

In 2021, conservation groups and timber companies signed the Private Forest Accord, an agreement that expanded protections for wildlife while providing regulatory certainty for timber harvests. It included new beaver protections on private forestland, such as mandating the reporting of all beaver kills, prioritizing nonlethal strategies for beaver conflicts and requiring timber landowners and the state to fund beaver habitat to help fish recovery.

And this summer, those protections were expanded to all private property as new state “beaver bill” legislation reclassified beavers as “furbearers,” animals whose fur has commercial value, consolidating their management under the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, where they’re now overseen as wildlife not pests. Beavers had already been considered furbearers on public land for some years.

Beaver trapping is still allowed — about 1,400 beavers were killed in 2023 in Oregon by people with a furtaker license — but the status change means all private landowners must now take out a state permit to kill nuisance beavers. Even those allowed to bypass the permit system because they’re property is in imminent danger need to show evidence of a beaver-caused problem, not just the mere presence of the animals.

And everyone needs to inform the state when they kill beavers. The state, in turn, can track how many were killed and why, and help landowners with nonlethal coexistence measures as alternatives, including placing fences and barriers around trees and culverts or spraying repellent on trees and plants.