OSU’s Beaver Relocation Research Yields Fresh Finds

Everyone’s seen the image of humans trapping beavers and releasing them in some other location, either in order to restore beavers to an area where humans have wiped them out, or to remove them from an area where humans would rather they weren’t — or, most of all, because knowledge became more widespread a long time ago that “Our Friend the Beaver” could undo damage that humans had done to the land. We relocate beavers, sometimes in what seems to be absurdly reckless ways, but until now few studies have been made of how well relocated beavers survive. Now, scientists at Oregon State University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Wildlife Research Center are trying to change that. 

“We wanted to see if there were things that are limiting beaver dispersal in western Oregon,” USDA research wildlife biologist Jimmy Taylor, employed at the National Wildlife Research Center in Corvallis, explained to Sean Nealon of OSU Today, “whether they are not able to disperse because of geography or some physical limits. Our findings indicate that doesn’t seem to be the case. They seem to be moving freely within watersheds, with at least occasional movements between watersheds.” 

The team studied the DNA in tissue samples from 292 beavers, some live-captured, some provided by trappers and some taken from roadkill. All samples were collected in the Coast Range because it was densely forested and had several interconnecting watersheds, allowing them to test theories about what might or might not be a barrier to travel by a beaver from one area to another. What they found was that while beavers do sometimes move from one watershed to another, they were much more likely to remain in the watershed where they were born — and breed there — than they were to travel a long distance. The study authors recommended relocating beavers within one watershed rather than transporting them to new ones, to better simulate the natural movement of beavers.   

By John M. Burt