In 2020 the Almeda fire swept through Southern Oregon.
It devastated the towns of Phoenix and Talent,
burning thousands of buildings and taking three lives.
Part of the reason the fire was so destructive
is that it burnt straight through
the middle of the towns along the Bear Creek Greenway.
Oh yeah. Look at that Ash sludge.
Look it, yeah.
That's gnarly.
Seven months after the fire,
Jakob Shockey and Sarah Koenigsberg took us along
to search the greenway for a furry critter
that may have helped slow the flames.
Oh. And over here look.
Oh, there's a bunch of little teeth marks,
pulling the bark off.
TOGETHER: Surprise!
Of course, when you think of preventing wildfires,
you probably think of Smokey Bear,
but we're looking for an animal
that plays a much bigger role in fighting
and recovering from fire. Beavers.
Sarah and Jakob help run a nonprofit
called the Beaver Coalition.
We saw this all across the greenway
where you've got these bank dens.
Oh yeah. Well look how far back it goes.
They're pretty roomy, if you crawl up in one, you know.
They are part of a growing movement
to partner with beavers to tackle
big problems like fire and drought.
Many folks have been coming to beaver
as we're looking at water scarcity.
And as we're looking at,
how do we most impactfully build resiliency
into our landscape.
And so the Beaver Coalition sort of grew out of that.
And why we exist is to empower humans
to partner with beavers.
If you're asking,
why would humans want to partner with beavers?
[water splashes]
Well, one reason becomes clear as we look down
on this beaver dam in downtown Phoenix.
That's such an awesome dam.
Beavers created this pond between the highway
and Main Street, not long before the fire,
and it appears to have slowed the flames.
This body of water protected this little strip.
The pond might have even saved the Phoenix Civic Center.
And now the dam is filtering ash from the water
for salmon and other animals living downstream.
You just think about how much toxic sludge
is now in this pond from the fire runoff.
Totally.
How nasty it is there and how clean it is there
right before it goes into the creek.
It's like, you couldn't ask for better.
To understand what beavers have to do with fire,
first we have to understand a little more
about the animals themselves.
Beavers are awkward on land,
making them easy pickings for predators.
But they are graceful in the water.
So they build dams to create ponds
and wetlands for protection.
And at the center, some construct their iconic lodges.
Scientists have long considered beavers
to be nature's engineers
because they reshape the very ecosystem around them.
But recently scientists have made a new discovery.
As wildfires grow worse with climate change,
these beaver wetlands can create an emerald oasis
in an otherwise charred landscape.
You can see it in image after image of burns
in Oregon, Idaho, and California.
To learn more, we met up with one of the leading scientists,
Emily Fairfax, at nearby Ashland Creek.
If you ask someone to imagine a healthy stream
or to draw a healthy stream,
what they think of, often, is this little thin stream
winding through the landscape.
It's cool. It's clear.
And that unfortunately in most cases
is not what streams should be looking like.
They only look that way now
because European settlers trapped millions of beavers
and converted their wetlands into farmland.
Things used to look a lot more like this.
A really healthy stream, especially in valleys,
especially in sort of lowland areas,
should be really messy.
It should be splitting into a bunch of different directions,
and then coming back together.
There should be so much brush and so much vegetation
that it is challenging to walk through.
There should be mud. There should be bugs.
There should be fish.
There should just be chaos all around you.
And that's a healthy stream.
These messy beaver wetlands slow down water
and irrigate valley floors as well as any farmer.
Even in times of drought. And when fire moves through,
they act much differently than simplified streams
like Bear Creek.
[duck quacking]
Emily made this animation to explain what happens.
So what you have is a beaver moves into the landscape,
and it's a pretty simplified stream, but he builds that dam.
And as he builds that dam, a pond forms.
And then from that pond, he digs those canals,
spreading that water out into the landscape.
And the earth around that beaver pond
is like a great big sponge.
It's sucking up water, and the wetland is developing
all this, you know, biodiversity is happening.
It's great. It's beautiful.
And then somewhere a fire starts.
And as that fire moves through the landscape,
and it approaches that stream,
this area that the beaver has built this pond
and has dug these canals, is so wet,
it's so soggy, it's really difficult to burn that.
Emily and her students have spent years
poring over satellite images of beaver ponds
before and after fire.
These beaver dammed areas experience
about three times less burning
than the areas that don't have beavers.
So they're significantly more protected from fire.
And when fire does go through them,
it's much, much lower intensity.
And sometimes it can't go through them at all.
It's just too wet to burn.
Those wet areas also provide a safe place
for other animals to hunker down in.
And that's huge, especially if you think about
some sensitive species where their whole habitat
could be destroyed in a fire.
So if beavers can create firebreaks
and wildlife refuges all over the landscape for free,
you'd think we'd want them everywhere.
But they also flood roads and yards
and cut down trees that people like.
So in most Western states, including the Beaver State,
the furry engineers are classified as nuisance animals.
And there are a few limits on hunting and trapping them.
[cage door shuts]
Such was the case for Phoenix.
The last time beavers moved in,
the town trapped and removed them.
You know, then after that, they started coming back,
and I said, no, that's not gonna work.
So this time Matias Mendez called Jakob
to help Phoenix live with their furry neighbors.
Matias, how's it going? The whole clown show's here.
Mathias is concerned the dam will keep growing
and could eventually plug the culvert downstream
and flood the road.
So Jakob is going to install a pond leveler.
It's a device that removes the flood risk,
but lets the town keep the ecological
and fire benefits of the pond.
This is the cage that hides the leak,
and this is what we're going to sink out in the ponds.
Then we run this over the beaver dam,
and then it's like your bathtub drain, right?
It's keeping it at that level.
Well, that's great, man.
Jakob's nonprofit, the Beaver Coalition,
has funding to install devices like this
in the Rogue Basin to help humans and beavers co-exist.
But it means Jakob is going to have to get wet.
You walking or swimming?
Swimming.
[laughs]
I can barely touch.
[hammering nails]
[drilling machine runs]
A pond leveler is basically a long pipe
that runs over the dam out to the middle of the pondm
where a cage stops the beaver from blocking it up.
We want to hide this as far from the dam as we can
because beaver will obsess over looking for that leak.
And they're not thinking that it's 40 feet out in the pond.
Jakob's hope is that if the beavers thrive here,
they'll start to work their way back up the greenway.
And they'll reshape the landscape to make it more resilient
to fire and drought in the future.
We selfishly need the beaver's help.
We don't have enough time or money or people
to help bring this creek
back to the place it needs to be.
And beaver will do that for free.
Beaver are the ecosystem engineer for this landscape,
and we can play at it, but they're the professionals.
So we need to defer to the professionals.
[water splashes]