I'm John Bachelor, Professor Lila Philip. Her book is Beaverland, how one weird rodent made America.

Two huge rainstorms and then a hurricane named Nida. We're now at a Edwin Way-Teele's sanctuary for he's a naturalist who's left us but behind is a sanctuary for all manner

of creatures including beavers and one day the beaver dam that is constructed series of beaver

dams but the big one is breached and the flood waters pour into the neighborhood and the phones

start ringing and there is a solution, and we call upon

Mike Callahan of beaver solutions. And what is the solution, Professor? What does it look like

when we don't have enough beavers, and we have to deal with climate change upon us?

Well, this is a really interesting example of where just the director of that local

Audubon, Sarah Hemingway, was educated about beavers and she understood their value in bringing

water and biodiversity. She knew that particular spot, in particular, is a migratory stopover for a

lot of important migratory birds. She also had been watching the water. And so when people

were calling up and saying, you've got to kill the beavers because this is too dangerous, I mean,

it was dangerous. Nine million gallons of water came out of that breached

dam, you know, overnight. The caretaker said it sounded like a train had gone through the forest.

So this can happen. And instead of trapping out the beaver and breaking the dam and taking the pond apart, she called

this company Beaver Solutions where they specialize in putting in what are called flow devices.

So what they basically did, I watched them, they put a 40 foot pipe through the dam.

They've figured out that if they put this pipe 40 feet out, if the inlet is 40 feet from

the dam, the beavers don't stop it, try to stop it up with sticks.

They put a cage around the end.

So the beavers, even if no animals get in, et cetera, they know exactly how to do this.

So it works. They have a very, very high success rate. They know exactly how to do this so it works.

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