With their penchant for transforming their surroundings, humans and beavers tend not to see eye-to-eye as neighbors.

When their proximity becomes too close for comfort, Jakob Shockey aims to “help the monkeys outsmart the rodents” without resorting to traditional lethal methods.

“We’re pretty good at it if we put our minds to it,” he said.

As executive director of the Project Beaver nonprofit, Shockey has found both species can benefit from nonviolent approaches to resolving conflicts over territory.

“You don’t need to care at all about beavers and it’s still easier to coexist with them,” he said.

By using peaceful strategies, humans can mitigate the damage beavers cause while directing their energy toward improving stream health and wildfire resilience, he said.

In his experience, Shockey has found beavers can restore watersheds more effectively and less expensively than humans.

“I quickly realized beavers are doing a better job and doing it for free,” he said. “The most effective thing I can do is defer to the professionals. Beavers are professionals at moving water around.”

Even among landowners who entirely lack affection for the furry engineers, conciliatory methods provide more long-term stability than deadly ones, he said.

Beaver ‘treadmill’

“They’re just ready to get off this treadmill of trapping every year,” he said.

If a landscape appeals to beavers, sooner or later, new ones will be drawn to the area vacated by those that were removed, so trapping isn’t a permanent solution, Shockey said.

“You’ll just get more beavers moving in,” he said. “If they come in once, they will come in the next year and the next year.”

When beavers are attracted to a site where they’re repeatedly killed, it also acts as “population sink,” or “black hole” for the species, Shockey said.

Beavers aren’t in jeopardy of extinction, but their numbers remain too small to provide ecological services everywhere they’re needed, including areas where friction with humans is unlikely, he said.

“We need to stop killing just so many of them,” Shockey said.

How pond levelers work

With the exception of irrigation canals, where any blockages are intolerable, most waterways can support beavers without endangering human dwellings or structures, he said.

If a beaver dam backs up enough water to threaten private property, landowners can deploy a device called a pond leveler to reduce flooding.

A pond lever consists of a flexible plastic pipe, which is inserted into the pond while the other end is placed downstream of the beaver dam. Water will then flow through the pipe and decrease the pond’s level to the elevation of the outflow.

“You’ve capped how much flooding a beaver can do at that site,” Shockey said.

The beaver will search for a breach in its dam without realizing it’s actually the tube that’s reducing the pond’s size. A cage around the pipe’s intake prevents beavers from getting close enough to detect the leak’s true source.

“They will tolerate it. I can’t claim they’re happy about it,” Shockey said.

The trick is to shrink the pond enough to prevent excessive flooding but not so low that beavers can’t hide underwater from predators, he said.

If the dam’s entrance is uncovered, for example, that will make a beaver feel vulnerable and compel it to build another dam downstream, which just recreates the problem, he said.

“It’s kind of a balancing act,” Shockey said. “If you drop the water too much and expose their front door, they will get really angsty.”

Protecting orchards

If beavers are gnawing on orchards or vineyards, low electrified fences are effective at teaching them to stay out. Since the animal is typically wet and well-grounded, its conductivity ensures a memorable lesson.

“They are really sensitive to electricity. It trains them very quickly,” Shockey said. “They’re probably one of the easiest animals to fence out of croplands.”

While beavers were historically considered unwelcome tenants, they’re increasingly considered desirable by landowners who want to ward off drought and fire, he said. “I get calls about, ‘How can I order some beavers?’”

Artificial dams help

The rodents aren’t as easy to acquire as baby chicks, though landowners can encourage their occupancy by installing artificial beaver dams.

They serve as “speed bumps” to slow the rapid flow of water through stream channels, preventing natural beaver dams from being “blown out” by rushing winter flows, Shockey said.

Once a creek or river is re-inhabited by beavers, water backs up against their dams, allowing sediment to build up and reduce the channel’s depth, he said. Over time, this dynamic can create additional channels and restore the floodplain.

The dams also improve water quality, functioning as “a big filter on your stream,” and can supplement irrigation by storing water and retaining ground moisture, Shockey said.

No water rights needed

Unlike their human counterparts, beavers can build storage facilities without negotiating the bureaucratic process of obtaining water rights, he said.

“They are heavily invested in making sure there are ponds into the late summertime because that’s how they survive,” Shockey said. “It’s just nature taking its course.”

Compared to human efforts to repair watersheds, which involve heavy machinery and nursery stock, the restoration achieved by beavers lasts longer, he said.

Aquatic habitats restored by humans are essentially “on steroids,” as the improvements are difficult to sustain without continued artificial inputs, Shockey said.

“The minute our budgets dried up for maintenance, these places would be overcome with invasives,” he said. “Beavers are a 24/7 maintenance crew you don’t have to pay.”

Shockey witnessed this problem firsthand as an employee of a watershed council, which he joined after training as a wildlife biologist in college.

The experience taught him that watershed restoration is more effectively accomplished by beavers with minimal human intervention.

“Habitat is the product of habits of nature,” he said. “It’s the product of a process.”

Beaver believers

It also convinced Shockey to focus his career on revitalizing the species. Today, he heads the Project Beaver nonprofit while running a private company, Beaver State Wildlife Solutions, which assists landowners with mitigating the impacts of the mammals.

The nonprofit is dedicated to education and outreach, tackling the “bigger issues” of beaver management. For example, it cooperates with state wildlife officials to relocate live-trapped beavers to public lands where their services are required.

The organization also purchased a beaver wetland in Oregon’s Illinois Valley, which it’s turning into an education center where visitors can see the creature’s handiwork in person.

Governments spend millions of dollars on environmental restoration projects, but they could bolster those efforts by encouraging coexistence with beavers rather than killing them, Shockey said.

“Mostly, people are completely unaware there are other options available,” he said. “I hope people will start seeing beaver habitat on their land as an asset. At some point, we have to connect the dots there.”

Jakob Shockey

Occupation: Executive director of Project Beaver, a nonprofit organization, and owner of Beaver State Wildlife Solutions, a private company.

Age: 33

Education: Bachelor of science in Wildlife Biology from Evergreen State College in 2012.

Family: Wife, Lydia, and three young children.

Hometown: Applegate, Ore.

Websites: projectbeaver.org, beaverstatewildlife.com