Beavers: Nuisance or a necessity? Wildlife officials wade into the debate.

(Illustration: Kevin Jeffers/The Colorado Sun; Canva)

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Like other old-timers in the Gunnison Valley, Sam Pierce’s ranching ancestors used to blast beavers and their dams and lodges with dynamite. They viewed beavers as nuisances — nothing more than big rats that flooded their fields and could scramble water rights with their diversions.

Now, Pierce, a Stanford University Ph.D. student, and a contractor with the U.S. Department of Energy and Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory , is back in his ancestral valley researching the good that the cursed rats of old do around the beaver stronghold of Crested Butte.

His conclusion: Beavers are “nature’s engineers, hydrologists and biochemists.”

Sam Pierce measures the distance across a beaver dam on Trail Creek in the