The Wyoming Game and Fish Department (WGFD) built and completed maintenance on 130 beaver dam analogs along the North Platte River this season. The projects are designed to benefit waterways and wildlife health.
Beaver dam analogs, or BDAs, aren’t new in Wyoming. Documents of similar beaver dam replica projects in the state date back as far as the 1940s, according to WGFD aquatic habitat biologist John McCoy.
“ We like to copy the pros as much as we can, and they've got it down pretty well,” McCoy said about building BDAs.
To build a beaver dam analog, crews of about three to four people go to predetermined locations along a river system to weave willows and woody material between wooden posts. The project is designed to slow quick moving streams in order to reduce erosion and redirect water to feed plants along the riverbank.
Placement and permitting of these dam projects can be extensive, and choosing a site to build a BDA often is a beaver hunt.
“Looking at it as simple as you can, we'll try and put them where we find beavers naturally,” McCoy said. “ So we'll often pick those spots 'cause we know, well, it's worked here once.”
Recent projects at Lone Tree Creek and Bolton Creek along the North Platte were determined to be promising sites for BDAs due to prior beaver activity. McCoy said that it was difficult to find a spot in Lone Tree Creek that didn’t have traces of old beaver dams.
At the Lone Tree Creek location, contractors with Wyoming Game and Fish installed about 100 BDAs in eight days. Each BDA project completed by contractors can cost anywhere from about $200 to up to $1,000, according to McCoy. These costs are often lower when performed by volunteers or Wyoming Game and Fish employees.
“The absolute perfect scenario is when beavers find your structures and they decide that they want to take over maintenance,” McCoy said. “We've actually seen that on a few projects where … it's been on our docket to go in and fix them, and then we get in there, and lo and behold, the beavers have already … either patched up our structures or built a dam just upstream of it.”
While most BDA projects require maintenance from Wyoming Game and Fish or other contractors, McCoy said that about 30 of the roughly 200 BDA sites in the Casper region have been inhabited by beavers and are largely self-sufficient.
Hundreds of new BDA projects are planned across the state, McCoy said, including 500 planned in the Beaver Creek drainage in the Black Hills, 48 planned in upper Powder River tributaries, 20 planned in a tributary of the Little Laramie River and another 20 planned in the North Fork of Crow Creek. Future projects are in various stages of the planning process.
