“We need some mud!”
“More sticks!”
Small hands scramble to fortify a miniature dam — of rocks, dirt and branches — before a blast from a water hose puts their craftsmanship to the test.
“Let’s see if there are any leaks. Here comes the water!” a volunteer announces, pointing the hose toward the child-built structure and turning on the stream.
The kids watch as waves pool behind their dam. “It’s holding!” a young boy yells victoriously.
The experiment was one of the hands-on lessons at the Watershed Management Group’s eighth annual BeaverFest, where Tucsonans gather to celebrate beavers.
All around the festival, photos of beavers were on display, but one furry face appeared again and again. Spotting a beaver during the annual surveys is rare, so when volunteers encountered one in the wild during last year’s survey, she quickly became a mascot. Gushing with excitement, one volunteer showed Arizona Luminaria photos of the beaver and explained that the survey leader had even given her a name: Petunia.
People also learned about the keystone species — an animal that has a disproportionately large effect on its surrounding ecosystem — and how beavers can help restore Southern Arizona’s desert waterways.
The late September event brought together families, scientists and conservationists for an evening of beaver-themed activities and updates on efforts to restore beaver populations across the region. The Tucson-based watershed nonprofit hosted the festival at Living Lab, the organization’s headquarters where they display various sustainability measures they promote.
The children’s mini-dam challenge demonstrated the same process that makes beavers important to desert ecosystems. Their barriers slow water and keep it on the landscape, creating wetlands and habitat that support other wildlife.
“They’re nature’s water harvesters,” says Dan Stormont, a local conservation leader and docent with the watershed management group. “We talk about water harvesting all the time, and it’s kind of nice to aspire to be a beaver, because we can only hope to do as much as what beavers do.”
The water conservation group is trying to replicate some of that work. The organization builds beaver dam analogs, human-made structures constructed largely from natural materials found on site. The structures are designed to slow water and trap sediment in degraded waterways. At one restoration site along the Babocomari River, a San Pedro river tributary in Southeastern Arizona, beavers have even added material to the human-built structures.
Get involved
Participate in beaver surveys and other conservation initiatives by joining Watershed Management Group volunteer efforts.
“So we are basically being the beavers,” says Nadira Mitchell, a restoration ecology coordinator with the watershed group, during a presentation at BeaverFest 2026.
Beavers historically lived along the San Pedro River but were wiped out by fur trapping in the 1800s, Mitchell says. The river flows from México through Southeastern Arizona before joining the Gila River in Pinal County, supporting riparian ecosystems along the way.
Story continues below.
Read More
Following teeth marks: How volunteers are tracking beavers on the San Pedro River
The crew fans out along a riverbank, boots sinking into the mud as they follow the San Pedro’s patchy channel when someone suddenly yells, “BEAVER!”…
The Arizona Game and Fish Department and the Bureau of Land Management reintroduced about 20 beavers in the late 1990s and early 2000s. By 2010, community members estimated the population had grown to about 100 before it began declining.
Steve Merkley, an instructor at Cochise College, presented his research on beavers in the San Pedro watershed during the event.
“The beavers are really instrumental in keeping that flowing water in the ecosystem and supporting wildlife in our area,” he says.
Merkley says a strong monsoon season can benefit beavers by deepening the water in their habitat, providing greater protection from predators and potentially helping them reproduce and expand their population along the river.
Merkley also shared footage of baby beavers recently documented along the San Pedro River.
“That was the first time I had ever seen evidence of reproduction since I’ve been studying them the last six or seven years,” he says. “And then to see them again, another one on my cameras again this year, was super exciting.”
For the past five years, the Watershed Management Group and its partners have organized volunteers to track the animals along the San Pedro River in Arizona and Sonora, México.
The community volunteers look for dams, lodges, tracks, chewed trees, muddy slide-like ramps into the pond and even beaver poop to identify clusters of activity and estimate the population.
About 430 volunteers have participated in the surveys over the past five years, Mitchell says during a BeaverFest presentation of the 2025 survey results. Last fall alone, volunteers surveyed 63.5 miles of the San Pedro across 23 sections in Arizona and México.
The results offered a little progress after years of declines.
The estimated population increased slightly between 2024 and 2025, Mitchell says, although some of that increase was linked to Arizona Game and Fish relocating a male and female beaver to the lower San Pedro.
“We were actually able to see that they were still persisting when we surveyed them last winter,” Mitchell says.
The population remains vulnerable. Groundwater pumping, development, cattle grazing, drought, intense flooding and predators such as mountain lions, all make it more difficult for beavers to persist along the river, Mitchell says.
But BeaverFest 2026 wasn’t all population estimates and river restoration.
At one booth, children could touch a surprisingly oily beaver pelt and learn what the animals eat by examining pictures of their poop. One young visitor kept bursting into laughter whenever the subject came up.
“They love the beaver poop,” says Esther Wroth, a community conservation apprentice with the watershed group. “They all think that beavers eat fish until you show them the poop and they’re like, ‘Wait — sawdust!’”
For the organization’s staff and volunteers, that silliness is part of the point — making complicated conversations about climate, water and ecological restoration tangible and accessible.
Wroth says environmental solutions do not always have to be new or complicated. Indigenous communities have practiced water harvesting and lived with the rhythms of desert ecosystems for generations, she says. Beavers, too, have been shaping waterways long before humans began constructing structures intended to mimic them.
“Even though climate change is a new problem,” she says, “the solutions aren’t necessarily new.”
Republish our articles for free, online or in print.
