By Eric Washburn

This winter was a grim reminder of the ongoing aridification of the western U.S., including Colorado. Snowpack is down dramatically, which will lead to extreme fire danger this summer and likely water rationing. The lower basin states with whom Colorado and the upper basin states are battling over the allocation of water in the Colorado River, should be bracing for a water crisis.

As a result of climate change, the Colorado River Basin is undergoing a long-term period of “aridification,” an inexorable transition to a warmer and drier climate. In fact, the period between 2000 and 2021 was the driest in the basin in 1,200 years. And given the relentless nature of climate change, this problem can be expected to only get worse over the balance of the 21st century.

Less and less snowpack means we will need to find other ways to naturally store more water on the landscape so it is available for use in late summer and fall. That will mean employing a lot more beavers building dams. A 2022 study by researchers at Utah State University, Colorado State University and the Colorado Natural Heritage Program estimated Colorado’s rivers and streams can host 1.36 million beaver dams. But with only about 53,000 beavers in the state today — about the same amount we had in 1941 because we kill so many every year — there are probably well over 1.25 million available, but unoccupied, sites for beavers to occupy and build dams. Assuming an average storage of one acre-foot of water per beaver dam, if all available sites were occupied, beavers would store roughly 450 billion gallons of water in Colorado, slowing the release of water in the spring, so our rivers and streams don’t run dry in the later summer and fall. To give you a sense of scale, 450 billion gallons is enough to meet about one-quarter of the entire annual water usage in the state.

To get all that critical water storage, we need to stop killing our beavers — extraordinary animals that not only store water but provide riparian habitat for fish and songbirds and create firebreaks across the landscape. To learn more about beavers than I can fit into this op-ed, I encourage you to read Ben Goldfarb’s wonderful book, “Eager,” about the many virtues of this incredible species.

There is reason to hope.  Colorado Parks And Wildlife’s (CPW’s) recently released Beaver Conservation and Management Strategy calls for achieving “an increasing trend in beaver populations and beaver-occupied wetland habitats in Colorado until ecological or social carrying capacity is reached.” That is an important goal and one that could help save Colorado from future water shortages. 

But unfortunately, as drafted, the plan is unlikely to increase Colorado’s beaver population and water storage much at all because it does very little to stop the routine, day-in and day-out, shooting of beavers.  

For decades, Colorado private landowners have routinely dealt with — and continue to deal with — beaver conflicts by shooting them. This method of conflict management is likely to continue unless landowners are encouraged to utilize non-lethal conflict management options and those options are provided without cost to the landowners so they are economically competitive with shooting beavers (the cost of a bullet).

Though CPW’s Beaver Strategy appropriately emphasizes the use of non-lethal conflict management tools, it does little to ensure their use. Consequently, additional policy measures, beyond those described in the strategy, will need to be incorporated into it to achieve a meaningful shift from lethal to non-lethal management, especially given the deeply established cultural practice of lethal beaver removal. Doing so will be a giant step toward enabling CPW to achieve the strategy’s goal of “an increasing trend in beaver populations and beaver-occupied wetland habitats in Colorado until ecological or social carrying capacity is reached.”

When the Beaver Strategy comes up for review by the CPW Commission in March, commissioners should demand it be strengthened by requiring landowners who have beaver conflicts to get a permit from CPW, and as part of that process, ensure the landowner demonstrates good faith efforts to implement non-lethal conflict management solutions prior to receiving an authorization of lethal removal. Moreover, requiring a permit for lethal removal signals to the public this species has real value and should not be killed in an off-hand, wanton manner.

This would not only help save the lives of beavers, who could then spend their time helping to store water more for use by Coloradans and our fish and wildlife, it would allow CPW for the first time to get an accurate picture of the number of beavers killed each year.

This will need to be done under a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between CPW and the Colorado Department of Agriculture (CDA). This approach would still allow landowners to kill beavers if non-lethal options were not feasible, but it would be a giant step toward saving the lives of so many beavers and toward meeting the beaver conservation objectives stated in the CPW’s Beaver Strategy.

To make all this work and ensure it does not present a burden on Colorado landowners, the state legislature should provide CPW with the financial resources to ensure landowners have cost-free access to non-lethal beaver conflict management tools, including flow devices, exclusion fencing and translocation services. It would be one of the best investments in our state’s water supply and in richer, more balanced and resilient ecosystems.

This would be a huge win for beavers, for Colorado’s dwindling water supplies, and thus for all Coloradans.

Eric Washburn is a fifth-generation Coloradan and big game hunter. He lives in Steamboat Springs.