What’s the best way to relocate a horde of beavers? That’s a puzzle the Idaho Fish and Game Department had to solve in 1948, after it kept receiving complaints about the furry rodents.
After World War II, many people moved further away from Idaho’s capital, Boise, to more rural areas such as Payette Lake and McCall. However, a beaver population was already established in these regions and people weren’t happy with them chomping down trees and building dams as it affected their properties.
As the Department recognised the significant role that beavers play as ecosystem engineers (and realised the money they could save by moving the beavers elsewhere instead of building dams to stabilise water supplies), they chose to relocate the animals instead of exterminating them.
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Operation beaver drop
It was decided that the beavers would be relocated further south at the Chamberlain Basin, in the Sawtooth Mountain Range in central Idaho.
Initial attempts to move the beavers involved transporting them via horse, mule and truck, but this took too much time across the mountainous areas and the beavers would overheat in their carrier boxes.
That's when Idaho Department of Fish and Game employee Elmo W. Heter came up with an unusual idea. The beavers could be put into hinged wooden boxes, each fitted with a surplus wartime parachute, and then dropped out of a plane. The boxes would automatically spring open upon landing.
After initial dummy weight testing, Heter ran experiments with an old male beaver the team named Geronimo, who was dropped (in a parachute-fitted box) again and again on a flying field.
In August 1948, a Beechcraft plane took off with eight crates of beavers, a pilot and a conservationist to make the first official drop. In the following days, 76 beavers were parachuted in near the basin.
Ecosystem engineers
All but one survived the drop and the beavers went on to transform the landscape, with the operation generally considered a success. The positive impact of the beavers was demonstrated in 2018, when a wildfire ripped through land near Baugh Creek (a tributary of the Little Wood River in the Sawtooth National Forest). While most of the surrounding landscape was torched, areas close to the river remained mostly untouched by the blaze. Aerial images taken by NASA’s Earth Observatory show the striking difference in vegetation growth between regions with beaver activity and those without.
A further development in the story occurred in 2015, when a historian found a film that the Department made about the operation in the 1950s, that was thought to have been lost.
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Top image: a beaver by a dam in Wyoming. Credit: Getty