What It Takes to Become a Beaver Coexistence Professional

But in the last two years, the state has begun to turn things around. Beavers have been decreed native, a new beaver reintroduction program has been established—and a wave of funding has arrived to help people learn, and practice, the delicate art of coexisting with Castor canadensis. Now, should you find yourself with a beaver problem, you can visit the Beaver Help Desk, a state-funded web platform run by the Sonoma-based Occidental Arts Ecology and Center, for tips and tricks. After you fill out the form, you will be connected with the next available beaver coexistence professional. Or if you’re looking for a career change, like Staychock, you can also become one. 

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The second California class of beaver coexistence professionals is set to graduate this July, courtesy of state-funded scholarships. BeaverCorps is—according to the national nonprofit Beaver Institute, which runs it—the only training program in the country that equips students with the fundamentals of beaver-human conflict management. These 15 newly certified graduates will join more than a dozen already at work statewide. 

They’re an “eccentric bunch,” Staychock says. Prerequisites for becoming a beaver coexistence professional do not include beaver experience. “Nobody grows up being like, ‘I really want to work with beavers,’” says Molly Alves, the supervisor of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Beaver Restoration Program. Past careers of beaver coexistence professionals span ecology, academia, and data analytics. The founder of the Beaver Institute, Mike Callahan, spent 20 years as a physician’s assistant before making the switch towards a more beaver-forward lifestyle. 

Here’s what you do need—and can learn through the BeaverCorps training: technical savvy with the various kinds of beaver coexistence technology (such as the Beaver Deceiver, the Beaver Back Saver, and the pond leveler, which we will discuss below), a love of the outdoors, and “a real delight in both building things and reading what’s up with nonhuman intelligence,” says Manning. Which is to say, you also like getting into the mind of a beaver. (Like the plot of the movie Hoppers, but less sci-fi.) 

The final skill needed is interpersonal—or interspecies-al—because the beaver coexistence professional acts more or less like a couples’ therapist. But replace the couch with a water body. And replace the two feuding spouses with a fed-up land manager and a cadre of stubborn beavers, who disagree about what happens to the water body. 

In the case of the Cosumnes River Preserve, up the Mokelumne River in the Delta, wildlife biologist Clint Helms wants to drain the water out of the preserve’s 100 artificial wetlands when the seasons change so plants can grow for the fall’s migratory shorebirds to eat. The area’s dozen-some beavers, meanwhile, want the wetlands to stay wet. “They’re triggered by the sound of running water,” Helms says. This means his job, for multiple hours a day every day, every spring, turns into what he calls Beaver Crossfit—clearing beaver dams out of the water control devices that drain Cosumnes’ wetlands.

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As he backhoes, shovels, and rakes away a newly built five-foot-high dam, the beavers, he says, “would just sit there and stare at you, like, ‘What are you doing? Why are you destroying my work? You’re gonna pay for this.’ ” Once Helms leaves, the beavers do make him pay. One family of beavers can and will reliably rebuild half a dam overnight. The Beaver Crossfit program includes few rest days.

Enter the beaver coexistence professional. Staychock and his classmates visited Cosumnes last summer as the in-person conclusion to their 40 hours of online training, and helped broker a peace in two wetlands targeted by beavers, by installing two beaver coexistence devices. These devices are the aforementioned giant tubes surrounded by chicken wire or metal grilles—carefully designed, painstakingly installed. Because the tube is submerged beneath the water’s surface, Helms can now drain these two wetlands silently. “That’s a game-changer,” he says. 

Because of federal hiring cuts, Helms is the only wildlife biologist on staff managing the 2,000-acre preserve. This spring, thanks to the big tubes, Helms got hours back every week to do other work. He was not entirely freed from Beaver Crossfit: Cosumnes has 98 other managed wetland areas, though not all are beaver favorites. But the would-be beaver coexistence professionals are returning this July with some more big tubes to help.

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For a beaver coexistence professional, Cosumnes is an easy case. At least Helms likes beavers. In most other places in California, a beaver coexistence professional must change hearts and minds before any water flows. “I started working with ranchers, and I realized, man, people really hate beavers,” says David Krawitz-Greenspan, an ecologist who founded Wet Meadows Institute, another beaver coexistence service provider. Krawitz-Greenspan, who graduated from BeaverCorps alongside Staychock last year, says most of his clients are used to getting rid of beavers as soon as they got annoying—as beaver dams flooded client backyards, beavers cut down a client’s favorite trees, and so on. 

But now, before the state issues a depredation permit, CDFW asks that landowners consider coexisting first—which often means going to the Beaver Help Desk. Clients can be “hard-headed and upset” about the extra, state-mandated step, says Krawitz-Greenspan. But once they learn about the benefits of coexistence, he says, many come around. Grey Hayes, the manager of Occidental’s Beaver Coexistence Program, says only about 5 percent of the 70 people who have contacted the Beaver Help Desk so far gave up on beaver coexistence. 

Primarily, it’s money that talks: state grants cover the cost of a beaver coexistence professional’s assessment of someone’s beaver problems, and up to half of the cost of any coexistence work done—including travel, device materials, and installation costs. With a Beaver Back Saver or other coexistence device in place, landowners recoup hours of expensive staff time and laborious permit applications. On top of that, land managers will end up with a landscape that’s more resilient to floods and fires, courtesy of the pro bono beaver-built wetlands. “They’re doing all the things that we spend billions of dollars doing, and they’re doing it for free, and they’re doing it better,” says Manning. 

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Even if beaver coexistence seems like your calling, maybe don’t quit your day job, yet. The industry is still “in the startup phase,” says Brock Dolman, the co-founder of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center. He says the Help Desk gets almost one request a day from counties across the state. Not all the 30 people trained through BeaverCorps are finding enough jobs in California to keep them busy, says Grey Hayes, the manager of Occidental’s Beaver Coexistence Program. Hayes is attending ecological restoration conferences around the state to drum up work. Newly minted beaver coexistence professionals must complete four independent projects to be officially certified.

Part of the issue is geography: beaver coexistence professionals aren’t all based where the beaver conflicts are. Beaver conflicts, and deaths, concentrate along what Dolman calls “the beaver murder corridor”—the string of counties stretching from the Bay to the Sierra foothills. Professionals like Krawitz-Greenspan and Manning, near Sacramento, are “getting all the work they can manage,” says Hayes. “But there’s a gentleman in San Luis Obispo—not so much.” That soon may change. Hayes says California Department of Fish and Wildlife officials “have been leery of pushing coexistence harder,” because the Beaver Help Desk is so new. “They’re convinced now that we’re ready. They warned us to watch out for a fire hose of work coming up.” 

Another challenge: despite the economic savings, despite the ecological benefits, despite the state funding and the trained professionals, coexistence is fundamentally a hard, time-consuming sell. Within CDFW, Alves is running webinars and giving talks introducing staff to the Beaver Help Desk. She’s finding that even within a wildlife-focused state agency, “coexistence is a new concept.” 

For any given problem beaver, based on the state’s 2023 policy change, once a land manager has attempted coexistence, the state is still legally required to hand out a depredation permit. Heidi Perryman, who tracks statewide depredation permits through her Martinez-based beaver advocacy nonprofit Worth a Dam, says permit numbers remain high. Permits that allowed the take of 1,477 beavers were issued in 2025—up from 1,412 in 2024. “Just because the [Beaver Help Desk] is there, [that] doesn’t mean people come to the desk,” says Perryman. At Cosumnes, Helms hasn’t convinced rice-farmer neighbors that beaver coexistence is worth their while. “We invited them to the training last year,” Helms says. “Crickets.” 

Nearly 20 years ago, Perryman fought to convince the City of Martinez to install California’s first flow device to save a family of beavers that had moved in. They flew out a beaver coexistence professional from Vermont for the installation. “I’m a child psychologist. I worked with prisoners, I worked with child molesters, I worked with really difficult people,” Perryman says. “The hardest thing I ever did was save the beavers in Martinez.” 

But beaver coexistence professionals can count on the field expanding as beavers do, and as “beaver believers,” like Perryman, continue to spread the good beaver word. Alves, who’s leading beaver reintroductions, is bullish. “We need hundreds and thousands of [beaver coexistence professionals],” says Alves. “Coexistence is the way forward.” 

Should you be ready to commit to the beaver life, the hard work ahead may get easier if you see beavers as not just a source of employment, but as mentors. That’s what Staychock, the career-changer, says he does: “Hear the water, address the problem, and take it one stick at a time.” 

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Getting started

Job: Beaver coexistence professional.

Pay range: Depends on how much work you get. Many beaver coexistence professionals run their work as a consultancy that offers beaver services as well as other restoration work, which may require hiring more contractors, surveyors, and laborers. Hourly consulting rates range between $35 to $250 an hour, based on experience and the work needed. A beaver site assessment nets between $1,500 and $9,000; installing a beaver coexistence device can run between $2,000 and $15,000 in consulting costs. Manual labor and materials for one project can cost up to $100,000.

Requirements: Pacifism, tolerance for hard physical labor, general handiness, a furry rodent-shaped space in your heart. 

Training: A 40-hour, $2,500 online training program is offered on a rolling basis by the Beaver Institute; some scholarships are available from the Beaver Institute. After the online training, you need a year of experience installing beaver coexistence devices to get certified.