Wetlands across the world have been drained, filled in and degraded, and that loss has been pushing countless plants and animals towards extinction, warns a Ramsar Convention Bureau report on wetland biodiversity. This is a slow-moving crisis. But in Denver, one hairdresser with no wildlife training decided to do something about it, one beaver family at a time.
Get breaking news anytime, anywhere. Download the TOI app now!
A news report changed everything
Sherri Tippie wasn't a biologist, and she wasn't an outdoor person either. Her part in that story started small. One day in 1985, she was watching the local evening news when a story came on about a beaver that was on a golf course in Aurora, Colorado. The beaver had been chewing down trees, and wildlife officials were going to kill it. She couldn’t accept that. She called around town until she found a new home for the beaver, despite never having handled a wild animal before.
This phone call became her calling. In the late 1980s, she started her own little nonprofit company named Wildlife 2000 in order to do everything correctly, although she had no professional background in wildlife biology or trapping. She taught herself how to live-trap beavers, starting from scratch, reading equipment manuals, learning through trial and error. She had one strict rule: never separate a family. Since beavers are highly colony-based animals, she captured beaver parents along with kits and yearlings together and drove them, sometimes with a 50-pound beaver riding along in her car, to a new stream. In the decades to follow, Tippie and her volunteers would relocate more than 1,000 beavers, most of them in Colorado, as chronicled in profiles of her work by Denver's Westword and PBS Nature , which followed her beaver rescues for a documentary segment.
Why the whole family, and not just one beaver
Keeping families together was not just kindness. It was strategy. A lone beaver brought into a new stream could build very little by itself. A full family gets to work fast: felling trees, packing mud and sticks, and raising a dam within days. When the dam holds, water backs up behind it, and a pond begins to spread. The reeds and willows come in next, followed by fish, frogs, ducks, and songbirds.
One family of ranchers from Colorado's South Park area, whose beavers had died from disease, invited Tippie in to bring back beavers to their streams. After just a few years of Tippie introducing families of beavers across the ranch's various waterways, there were over 50 dams and ponds that hosted four varieties of trout.
The wetlands the world keeps losing
This matters because wetlands do far more than provide scenery; they help filter pollution from water, absorb floods before they reach urban centres, and even capture carbon. The study titled ‘ The value of the world's ecosystem services and natural capital ,’ by Costanza et al. in the journal Nature in 1997 put a price on services such as these. Costanza and colleagues figured the world's wetlands alone deliver close to $4.9 trillion a year in flood control, water purification and other benefits, a meaningful share of the roughly $33 trillion a year the study assigned to all of Earth's ecosystems combined. Wetlands have continued to be degraded through conversion to agriculture and urbanisation. Beaver dams can be among the most cost-effective ways to reclaim some of those lost wetlands.
How a beaver dam can outsmart a wildfire
The benefits reach beyond water quality. A 2020 study published in the journal Ecological Applications looked at how plant health was affected by beaver dams during major wildfires across the western United States. Researchers Emily Fairfax and Andrew Whittle found that land near beaver dams remained significantly greener and wetter through fires than land without nearby dams, even in areas that burned hard. They called the effect “Smokey the Beaver.” Dry ground is not fire-resistant in the way wet ground is, and beaver ponds help keep the surrounding ground wet even during droughts.
A movement built one beaver at a time
None of this was obvious to Tippie back in 1985. All she wanted was to save one beaver from certain death. The word got around, and soon enough ranchers, land developers, and even wildlife management officers who once dismissed her were calling to request beavers.
To Tippie, there never was such a thing as a nuisance animal; there were just people who hadn’t bothered to get to know one. Decades later and now having relocated over 1,000 beavers, wildlife agencies all over the country are finally coming around to her way of thinking. Beavers are no longer seen simply as pests to be relocated. Instead, they are increasingly being used as natural engineers to help rebuild wetlands that people drained away.
