Shocking team, ready?

NARRATOR: This is what it looks like when a bunch of biologists go fishing.

Fish on.

Oh, on the bottom.

Yeah!

There's our first steelhead of the day, number one NARRATOR: But instead of pole, line, and hook.

Oh, oh, get 'em all.

NARRATOR: They have pole, electrical current, and net.

Oh, hey.

Oh, oh!

Fish party, whew!

Fish party.

Oh my gosh.

There's so many!

NARRATOR: You might not be able to tell from their unbridled joy.

Phew, that was a close one.

NARRATOR: But these biologists are counting fish during one of the worst droughts this part of Oregon has ever seen.

Fields baked and streams dried up or flowed so low and hot that fish died.

GUS: Oh, yes.

NARRATOR: But in this one spot.

There they all are.

NARRATOR: Everything was different.

Bingo.

NARRATOR: This is Bridge Creek and it's full of fish today because scientists here established a now widely accepted idea.

If we want to keep salmon and steelhead from going extinct, we should follow in the footsteps of nature's engineers, beavers.

GUS: There's some beaver tracks in the mud there.

NARRATOR: It's rare here to see the beavers themselves, but there are signs of them everywhere.

Hey, beaver poop.

Who's hungry?

There is a pathway that these beavers take to migrate in between the two impoundments, so you can see it's caked with mud here.

They'll just slide down like this all the way, all the way down.

NARRATOR: What makes beaver important to fish is not their poop or their pathways.

It's the dams and channels they build.

Downstream, we saw little riffle that was two feet wide and maybe two inches deep.

And now, we have almost an acre of water percolating through this landscape.

So the impacts that these ecosystem engineers can have to create a wetland is second to none really.

NARRATOR: Of course, one person's wetland is another person's flooded field, which is why beavers have long been seen as pests.

So to understand how scientists like Gus came to celebrate these rodents, we need to step back in time to the beginning of this groundbreaking project.

CHRIS: This is channel incision on steroids, so this is a pretty extreme example.

NARRATOR: NOAA Biologist Chris Jordan met up with Oregon Field Guide in 2009.

He told us that valley floors across the west used to be full of beaver ponds and wetlands, but then European trappers killed most of the beavers and settlers drained the ponds and pushed all the water into simplified streams to make room for their crops and livestock, often with big consequences.

Because it is this really erodable landscape, the stream cut down.

So here, right on the edge of this incised channel, you've got bare soil.

You've got this cut edge and you've got erosion.

NARRATOR: These streams are a huge problem in the eyes of fish biologists because they don't offer any habitat diversity.

That means salmon and steelhead have nowhere to shelter and survive through hot dry summers or winter floods.

It's one reason their populations are falling.

Then, something caught Chris's eye.

Where beaver had returned and dammed up ponds, fish were doing better.

This is beaver country.

The populations are coming back.

There's a beaver dam right over here.

2005, there were 300 juvenile steelhead rearing in there in the summer.

NARRATOR: That gave the NOAA team a novel idea.

Instead of using expensive bulldozers to restore these streams, maybe they could recruit beavers to do it.

I think we're just sort of trying to go back and say, what if there were more beaver?

What if they had more stable populations?

What if they had more stable structures?

Would that affect what the stream looks like?

And so those ideas, they're new.

NARRATOR: The challenge was creeks here often flood in the wintertime and wash away beaver dams.

So the team built a series of starter structures, what they called beaver dam analogs or BDAs.

The idea was they'd work like a bunch of speedbumps to slow the stream and weaken its power so that beavers could then take over.

So the question was, did it work?

To find out, we went to meet Chris and Gus at the exact same spot over a decade later.

Taking the old guy out in the woods.

Nailed it.

Oh, little gopher snake.

Rattlesnake mimic.

Hey, buddy.

The sites are just right downstream.

Looks like a-- Yeah, that's it.

There's this one here too.

Yeah, so these are the ones looking downstream.

And then that's wrapping around that at bank.

NARRATOR: Remember that BDA Chris and his team installed below the tree in 2009?

Well, beavers have completely covered it with their own dams.

I don't know, somewhere in here.

The willow have been here for quite a while now.

NARRATOR: Turns out beavers did use the BDAs and the result was an eight fold increase in the number of dams in the study area.

All those dams slowed the water and backed up silt, which raised the incised creek bed.

Then the beavers dug canals and spread the water out onto the creek banks, creating a growing wetland that's now home to all sorts of plants and animals.

What they did was transformative in those treatment areas.

And now, beaver control the hydraulics.

NARRATOR: The results are clear.

This is our footage of one of the treatment areas from 2009.

You can clearly see how much the stream spread out into a wetland by the time we returned in 2021, even in a late summer drought.

And now, instead of flushing water straight through, the area stores it and releases it over time, something even more vital in the face of drought and climate change.

But remember, the goal of this project wasn't just more beavers.

It was more fish.

Yeah, so should we be tagging the fish here?

GUS: Yeah.

RESEARCHER: Who's the big boy?

We insert these little pit tags in each of the fish.

We use 'em so that way, each fish has an individualized ID.

Ready?

Ready.

NARRATOR: Then they can track the fish's movement with antennas set up from Bridge Creek all the way out to the ocean.

RESEARCHER: 14.6.

We can develop their life history and estimate abundance.

And then we can also look at survival and production.

NARRATOR: So, years spent building BDAs and tracking the daily lives of fish.

What did they learn?

Well, the average number of juvenile fish in the study area increased by almost 180% and their seasonal survival rate increased by 50%.

These results fueled a seismic shift in how we think about beavers from pests we should remove to partners we should recruit as we work to restore ecosystems and threaten fish populations.

The low tech process developed here at Bridge Creek is now so widely accepted that the USDA will fund BDAs in agricultural land as part of its conservation strategy.

The whole community of us who started working here has grown to hundreds of projects.

And that's really cool because this is the kind of work that has to happen over tens or hundreds of thousands of stream miles in order to get the benefits that we can see in Bridge Creek.