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Beavers may be good for the land and water, but one southern Utah county is saying "thanks but no thanks" to the state's offer of web-footed transplants.
Garfield County, stretching from Panguitch past Boulder and including the lush streams on Boulder Mountain and the Aquarius Plateau, is historic al beaver country and therefore a target area for the state's beaver recovery plan. Environmentalists had high hopes for naturally restoring wetlands there, but this month the Garfield County Commission told state biologists to take their rodents elsewhere.
It's not that they dislike beavers, commissioners say. They're just suspicious of the motives.
"We're not against the beaver," Commission Chairman Clare Ramsay said, "but we've been down that road before on a lot of different issues over the years. We know that it might become a tool for the environmental community to use against cattle."
One of the beaver proponents said there's no such conspiracy and that the county would know that if it engaged in talks with reintroduction-program supporters.
"They're depriving the whole county of beavers over unfounded fears and lack of conversation," said Mary O'Brien, director of the Grand Canyon Trust's Utah forest program.
O'Brien said it seems the commissioners want to control what happens on public lands.
"When the ideology is, 'We can tell you to stay out of the county with your beavers, stay out of the state with your wolves,' then it becomes unhinged from ecosystem needs and long-term needs of watersheds," she said.
State biologists will honor the county's request but seek to reopen talks later in hopes of gaining permission to stock beavers in some high-elevation streams, where they can't damage irrigation canals or other structures, said Bruce Bonebrake, southern Utah regional supervisor for the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources.
"We'd very much like to transplant them there," Bonebrake said. "They're great riparian managers. You really can't get a species that does better management as far as wildlife habitat and sediment control."
The state started transplanting nuisance beavers from other parts of Utah into remote parts of Garfield, Kane and Washington counties last spring — to keep from killing them and to restore watersheds. So far they have moved 12 animals.
Beavers are native to Garfield County and, according to DWR, still exist in small numbers in some of the headwater streams that feed the Escalante River. Where they exist and dam streams, they are credited with enhancing fish and wildlife habitat and increasing a watershed's natural storage capacity, potentially retaining and then releasing spring runoff when downstream irrigators need it most.
Last year, advocates of the state recovery plan touted an economics study by ECONorthwest, commissioned by the Grand Canyon Trust, suggesting that the Escalante River basin and its ranchers would benefit from a restored population of up to 9,000 animals. Ramsay said he knows beavers could help, if they came without red tape.
"I think, myself, that the beaver would be good," he said. "They would tend to create reservoirs and hold up water and perhaps be a source of water when dry conditions come along.
"But some people are really against it and afraid of what [else] it might bring."
bloomis@sltrib.comTwitter: @brandonloomis