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Who are you calling a nuisance? Conservationists work with, not against, nature’s greatest engineers

A beaver gnaws on a stick. The bottom half of its body is in the water and has several pieces of long grass surrounding it.
Southeast Beaver Alliance
Historically, beavers have been eradicated from habitats through either relocation or lethal trapping.

A growing coalition of conservation and advocacy groups across the country are working to shift the narrative surrounding beavers.

Historically, the animals have been considered nuisance wildlife. Their primary diet consists of tree bark, twigs, roots, and aquatic plants - and gathering those food stores can lead to damaged trees for landowners. The semi-aquatic mammals also use woody materials and large trees to dam waterways.

While that creates ecologically beneficial wetlands, landowners and farmers often report flooded roadways and agricultural fields when beavers are present. Until recently, standard practice has been to trap and relocate beavers when they’re found on private property.

Now, a volunteer group at Bernheim Forest and Arboretum, as well as national groups like the Southeast Beaver Alliance and the Beaver Institute are working to show the long-term benefits of coexisting with the animals rather than relocating them.

The Beaver Brigade

Evan Patrick, a natural areas manager at Bernheim Forest, is a founding member of the park’s Beaver Brigade, a volunteer group formed in early 2025 to install park infrastructure supporting their beaver population.

“It’s been a really popular turnout, we’ve had usually over 20 volunteers come out to each event where we are enhancing beaver habitat, protecting the protections within the arboretum, or at one of our volunteer events we planted over 1,200 live stakes of black willow to supplement that forage for our beavers,” Patrick said.

Patrick added that many of the practices at Bernheim can also be applied for landowners, including caging specific trees to keep beavers from chewing them and enhancing existing dam sites to encourage activity in designated areas. The conservation team at Bernheim has seen the benefits of encouraging beaver activity in their forest since they began the initiative.

“Allowing beavers to build dams and create beaver wetlands can help increase biodiversity by up to 100-fold,” Patrick said. “So, that’s emergent and wetland plants, things like birds and other aquatic mammals like otters and muskrats, invertebrates, it’s an incredible increase in biodiversity, so that’s why we want to allow them to create dams within the arboretum.”

Patrick said that with the success seen at Bernheim, the team’s efforts are now focused on convincing policymakers, landowners, and community members that beavers are beneficial for both the environment and for human life.

“The ecological services are incredible for wildlife, but they’re also great at creating climate resiliency, creating resiliency against wildfires, sequestering carbon, capturing toxic elements and heavy metals so that when that water goes downstream, it’s cleaner not just for wildlife, but for residents downstream,” Patrick said.

Habitat enhancement

The park’s shift towards coexistence measures began years before the formation of the Beaver Brigade. In recent years, the research forest has installed multiple methods of habitat enhancement to encourage their beaver populations to expand into desired areas of the arboretum. One of their first projects included a flow device installed on a culvert that leads to the park’s Olmsted Pond. That project involved unearthing a perennial spring adjacent to the pond and installing three cascading pools to attract nearby beavers.

Olmsted Pond at Bernheim Forest, a pond surrounded by green trees. A bridge crosses through the middle of the pond with a covered pavilion on a small island in the middle of the pond. Trees are reflected in the water.
Derek Parham
Olmsted Pond at Bernheim Forest is one of the original sites of beaver coexistence efforts.

“What happened pretty quickly was beavers coming in and enhancing this site. Within a year, the beavers came in and a lot of the vegetation they started using as a food source and they decided they wanted a deeper pool. So they dammed this pool here,” Patrick said.

While the project succeeded in attracting beavers, Patrick said there were further adjustments made to maximize the benefits for both wildlife and park visitors.

“This dam was holding back a significant amount of water in high flow events, during heavy rains, and we were having some infrastructure issues,” Patrick explained. “So, the solution to that is what’s called a flow device. The idea is to cage a culvert pipe, dig through the beaver dam, put the culvert through the dam, and then cage the entrance of that flow device so that the beavers can’t dam the entrance, so water can still flow through the dam.”

Through the flow device, Patrick says the conservation team can control the water level of the pond and pools.

“So we’re protecting trails, we’re protecting roads, we’re protecting our culverts, but we’re also getting all the ecological services and benefits from the beavers,” he said.

Throughout the forest, the conservation team and Beaver Brigade have installed man-made dams that mimic methods used by beavers. Those sites in turn attract more beaver activity, restoring wetlands and boosting biodiversity in pockets throughout the forest.

Evan Patrick, a man wearing khaki pants and a blue button-down shirt, points towards a man-made dam meant to replicate a beaver dam. It's made of sticks, mud, and leaves from nearby invasive shrubs.
Derek Parham
Natural areas manager Evan Patrick highlights a man-made dam meant to replicate a beaver dam and draw nearby beavers to the site.

To direct beavers away from protected species of trees, the park has implemented multiple methods, including overplanting key food sources like black willow.

“You can also use a type of latex paint and add sand to it, some type of aggregate. You paint the stem and it’s supposed to discourage chewing, the beavers don’t like the texture of the sand,” Patrick said. “But our best option so far has been caging. We’ve caged up to 400 trees at this point in the arboretum.”

With a combination of enhancement and direction efforts, the team is working toward restoring 16 acres of wetland and two miles of stream restoration. One of those efforts includes the restoration of Harrison Fork, a project that Bernheim conservation director Andrew Berry says is one of the most ambitious projects his team has overseen.

“It’s going to be the best beaver restoration project that Bernheim’s ever had,” Berry said. “It’s an incredible process, that project took 12 years to get started, now it’s going to start two years for the construction and revegetation. It’ll take another year for it to heal and really get established and growing, so we’re looking at 15 years to get to the point where we think beavers are going to come in and do something incredible, almost like a second phase.”

Berry said throughout his career at Bernheim, he’s seen in real time the ideological shift to coexist with native species rather than clear them from the landscape.

“We went from a place twenty years ago where beavers were trapped out of all of Bernheim and not allowed to gain a foothold, to the last 15 years where we’ve allowed them to exist in the natural areas and really supported and protected them there,” Berry said. “But then, just within the last five years we’ve really shifted our whole thought process around the beavers in the arboretum.”

A growing movement

The effort to live collaboratively with beavers isn’t only happening at Bernheim Forest. While it’s been a slow process, Kentucky Fish and Wildlife furbearers biologist Laura Palmer says they’ve also worked with landowners to steer away from relocation and educate property owners on the benefits of living alongside beavers.

“I try to not refer to wildlife as nuisance animals, but there are definitely occasions where they do cause problems. You know, they can flood roads, damage crops and timber and things like that, but by and large we try to encourage people to live with wildlife,” Palmer said.

Patrick said that as efforts to educate landowners and policymakers have progressed, he’s seen the majority of people accept the benefits of coexisting with beavers.

“If the other alternative is live trapping or lethal trapping, those are temporary solutions to, in their eyes, a long term problem. When we tell them, ‘You can invest a couple of hours and a small amount of money to install coexistence measures that will solve your problem for decades, that’s your alternative,’” Patrick said.

The resulting boom in biodiversity at Bernheim Forest, as well as the improved water quality for area residents, has been used to push for policy changes to State Wildlife Action Plans in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Mississippi. With the backing of groups like the Beaver Institute and the Southeast Beaver Alliance, that research has been shared on a large scale with conservation groups at events like BeaverCON. In 2024, the event drew representatives from 41 U.S. states and seven countries. Patrick and Berry hope that signals a global shift in conservation initiatives.

Derek joined WKU Public Radio as a reporter and local host of All Things Considered in January, 2025. Originally a central Illinois native, he graduated from Otterbein University in Westerville, OH in 2020 with a Bachelor's degree in journalism and media communication. He enjoyed two years in Portland, OR before making the move to southern Kentucky. Prior to joining WKU Public Radio, Derek worked as a multimedia journalist at WBKO TV.
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