Leave it to beavers to save farmland from drought in the face of climate change | CBC Documentaries

Cattle farmer Jay Wilde’s Idaho ranch had been threatened by devastating droughts for years. And he knew if his land ran out of water completely, it would be the end of the fourth-generation family operation. 

But one morning, Wilde had an epiphany — there were no longer any beavers on his land. 

Many ranchers see beavers as a nuisance, since they don’t want their trees cut down and their land flooded. “I grew up hating them,” Wilde says. “If we got a chance, we would shoot them.”

But once the beavers disappeared, so did the water.

Wilde’s farm is located on a high and dry plateau, a place where water is already in limited supply. Human-induced climate change has made the last two decades the hottest and driest of the past 1,200 years in the West. And in 2023, America’s two largest reservoirs reached record lows.

Wilde was already starting to see the impact on his farm. Fishing holes and streams which once criss-crossed his land were now gone. 

This was the beginning of Wilde’s journey to make amends with the beavers and reintroduce them, and their landscape engineering, to his land. The story is featured in this clip from the “Waters” episode of The Nature of Things series Shared Planet. 

A beaver’s dam is an unmistakable engineering marvel. A humble structure of logs jammed together blocks the mouth of a creek or stream, totally transforming the land around it. Restricting the flow of the water causes it to spread out into ponds. Dams also hold back the spring snow melt, keeping the land wet and fertile for longer.

Wilde suspected that these dams would be the key to restoring his ranch. But he now had a problem to solve: how do you bring beavers back to the land? 

Wilde reached out to Joe Wheaton, an associate professor of riverscapes at Utah State University, who had been developing ways to reintroduce beavers to watersheds. Wheaton and Wilde came up with a plan to make the land more inviting — and to source the much-needed beavers. 

“To finally see it all come together, it was almost like a dream come true,” Wilde says.

Watch the video above for the full story.

Watch Shared Planet on CBC Gem and in 4K on The Nature of Things YouTube channel.