By Ben Neary
NMWF Conservation Director
New Mexico has experienced increasingly huge forest fires in recent years coupled with drier forest conditions and dwindling stream flows. Against that harsh reality, some conservationists are looking to beavers to help restore the state’s rivers and streams.
Reid Whittlesey is restoration director at Rio Grande Return – a group that advocates for the protection of the waters, wetlands and wildlife in the Southwest. Rio Grande Return has undertaken projects around New Mexico to restore rivers and streams and reestablish beaver populations.
Whittlesey will present a talk about the work as the featured speaker at the New Mexico Wildlife Federation’s free “Wildlife Wednesday” event on Dec. 11.
It’s clear that beaver populations increase watershed health and resilience, specifically in light of the mega-fires that New Mexico has experienced in recent years, Whittlesey said. “In my mind, beaver is a way to get to the greater goal of riparian restoration,” he said. “I think they’re a great tool to get to that.”
Rio Grande Return is part of the NM Beaver Coalition, which also includes representatives from the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, various national forests around the state and a range of environmental organizations. Rio Grande Return was founded in 2007 by Alan Hamilton, former conservation director at the New Mexico Wildlife Federation.
Rio Grande Return does more than talk a good game. According to its website, the group since 2020 has planted over 200,000 willow, 6,000 cottonwood and Goodding’s willow, 1,200 native riparian container plants and 44,000 salt grass plugs. It has cultivated wetland seed on over 200 acres; cleared invasive trees from over 400 acres of wetlands; constructed exclosures to protect riparian areas from cattle and elk on more than 50 acres. It has erected/repaired over 15 miles of wildlife friendly fence; constructed and maintained more than 650 in-stream structures on over 10 miles of streams and done other work to control erosion and restore the environment.
Whittlesey said there are opportunities for volunteers to help with the tree-plantings and other work to improve streamside conditions.
“We’re super willing to work with volunteers – integrate them into the crew during the week, or have a specific volunteer event,” Whittlesey said. “We’ve held a handful of volunteer events this year, getting folks from New Mexico Trout and Trout Unlimited out on the Rio Cebolla. And then we had some folks from the Santa Fe County Open Space volunteers help on some projects too. So yeah, we have a lot of opportunities.”
Rio Grande Return sees the restoration of beaver habitat as the key to achieving greater riparian ecosystem function, Whittlesey said. “And our big focus is using ecologically process-based implementation practices, meaning we’re trying to mimic processes found in nature that are currently absent or diminished due to largely human impact.”
Rio Grande Return has projects ongoing in the Jemez Mountains, Whittlesey said. “We have sites on San Antonio Creek, on the Forest Service side as well as in the Valles Caldera National Preserve,” he said, adding that several other projects around the region are ongoing as well.
Whittlesey said the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish has restrictive guidelines on the translocation of beavers to new locations. He said members of the New Mexico Beaver Coalition are working to increase interagency cooperation with the end goal of getting more beavers translocated on the landscape.
The beaver population in New Mexico has dropped tremendously over the past few hundred years, Whittlesey said. He estimated numbers have fallen 95 percent, but said exact figures are impossible to determine because a lot of the extirpation occurred before records were kept.
“Following that, a lot of the riparian habitats have been so degraded over the course of the last couple of hundred years that they don’t provide sufficient habitat for beaver,” Whittlesey said. “So that’s really our approach, trying to get the habitat to sufficient characteristics to support beaver again.”
Part of the restoration work includes fencing elk and cattle off of streams so newly planted vegetation can take hold, Whittlesey said. “The browse pressure from cattle and elk is so high that you wouldn’t be able to establish willow without some crazy management regime, so we’re building high fences as well as some cattle fences,” he said.
Rio Grande Return has worked with Santa Fe County to do what Whittlesey called “beaver coexistence work,” showing farmers and acequia parciantes that rather than being a nuisance, beavers provide real benefits to river systems.
On the Rio Quemado, near Chimayo, Whittlesey said his group worked on a parcel of land that holds irrigation headgates. He said that when beavers were first established there, some locals told Santa Fe County officials that the animals needed to be removed.
“And the county kind of pushed back, and said, ‘let’s see if we can do some coexistence measures to see if you guys can get along,’” Whittlesey said. “We installed a handful of pond levelers to prevent flooding of adjacent landowners, and we built some cages around the headgates. There have been no instances of conflicts at the site over the last three years since the beavers moved in.
“And then last year, when we had such a poor monsoon, some of the old timers there who had been so anti-beaver initially, acknowledged that because of the beaver dams storing so much more water, they were able to get like three or four more irrigations throughout the season,” Whittlesey said. “The stream flowed perennially downstream from the beaver complex for the first time in 20 years.”
While Rio Grande Return would like to see beaver populations restored back into their historic range in the state, it also recognizes that’s not likely. “I don’t think that’s feasible,” Whittlesey said. “And a lot of the streams that used to have beaver in them are no longer perennial.”
The Santa Fe National Forest has been a big proponent of beaver restoration work. Whittlesey said officials on the Lincoln National Forest, in southern New Mexico, are paying attention as well.
“There’s a lot of interest on the Lincoln with getting beaver back because they had a bunch of old trout streams that are no longer close to being perennial and a lot of that is caused by extirpation of beaver,” Whittlesey said.
Whittlesey’s free presentation on beaver restoration efforts will start at 5:30 p.m., Dec. 11, at Marble Brewery’s Northeast Heights Taproom, at 9904 Montgomery Blvd., NE, Albuquerque.