Across North America, beavers are having a moment. While the continent’s largest rodent has long been vilified as a nuisance and its pelts marketed as a luxury, the aquatic mammal’s ecological benefits have become undeniable. Now, conservationists, ranchers and wildlife agencies are looking to beavers to solve some of the most pressing environmental issues, such as drought, wildfire risk and fisheries health.
In the Treasure State, the Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks is proposing the Montana Beaver Transplant Program, which would allow managers to trap unwanted beavers and relocate them to appropriate habitat, a policy that is currently legal but rarely used due to a cumbersome permitting process.
“FWP wants to have all the tools in the toolbelt available to do beaver restoration and deal with conflicts,” said Torrey Ritter, FWP nongame wildlife biologist. “And part of that picture that’s mostly missing right now is the transplants.”
Transplantation would reduce the lethal removal of beavers, leaving them on the landscape — albeit in a new location — to continue in their roles as ecosystem engineers. Their dams store water, increase biodiversity while improving floodplain connectivity and wetland function. However, a beaver’s evolutionary imperative to dam can interfere with the human-built environment.
“The broader goal is to take beavers from areas where they’re causing problems for people or imperiled fish species, and put them in places of their historical range where they can bring about the benefits that we want,” Ritter added.
Pedro Marques, executive director for the Big Hole Watershed Committee, welcomes this development. “We see Montana going in the direction of being able to take nuisance beavers out of places where they’re causing headaches and putting them in locations where they can be helpful as a no-brainer strategy for the state to adopt,” Marques told Mountain Journal.
“The impacts beavers can have in terms of water storage and fish and wildlife habitat are so dramatic that we want to make sure we have them in as many places as possible.”
Torrey Ritter, nongame wildlife biologist, FWP
Like many watershed conservation groups, the Big Hole Watershed Committee has installed beaver dam analogues to mimic beaver behavior. This helps slow the flow of water, benefiting fisheries, agricultural producers and wildlife as drought becomes more prevalent.
But according to Marques, nothing beats the real thing. “As far as long-term stewardship and long-term costs of keeping that type of activity up on the landscape, beaver is by far the biggest ally and cheapest tool in the toolbox,” Marques said.
The Montana Beaver Working Group, a partnership of conservation nonprofits and state agencies, has laid the groundwork for the relocation policy over the last decade.“We got really interested in beaver restoration as a proactive, science- and nature-based tool for improving watershed health and enhancing climate resiliency,” said Lily Haines, community programs manager for the Clark Fork Coalition. “In that interest we started to have lots of partner conversations which included stream restoration experts and influential wildlife biologists.”
Elsewhere in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, beaver relocations have become ingrained in state-level wildlife management. “The Wyoming Game and Fish Department continues to recognize beavers as a unique and valuable tool for habitat restoration,” said Game and Fish terrestrial habitat manager Ian Tator in an email to Mountain Journal. “We primarily relocate beavers from areas where they conflict with human interests to locations where they can provide essential ecosystem services, such as enhancing floodplain connectivity, attenuating stream flows, saturating soils and expanding vegetated areas along streams.”
Like their counterparts in Wyoming, Montana biologists hope the proposed Beaver Transplant Program can provide similar services as drought, wildfire and lower streamflows persist. “The impacts beavers can have in terms of water storage and fish and wildlife habitat are so dramatic that we want to make sure we have them in as many places as possible,” Ritter said.
Now that the draft environmental assessment has been released, FWP is accepting public comment on the proposal until 5 p.m. on October 27. Officials will review comments and present the final proposal to the Fish and Wildlife Commission, which will ultimately decide if and how the program is implemented.
“At the February 26 [2026] commission meeting, we are going to ask for their permission to make this program a reality,” Ritter said.
