TDIH August 14, 1948: Idaho parachuted beavers into the wilderness. 76 went out the door, 75 survived.
After WWII, people moved into the McCall and Payette Lake area of Idaho and started complaining about beavers flooding yards and wrecking orchards and culverts.
Fish and Game didn't want to kill them. Beavers build wetlands, slow erosion, and create fish and bird habitat.
So the plan was to move them to the Chamberlain Basin, now part of the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness.
The problem was getting there. No roads.
- Overland relocation meant trucks, then horses and mules. Officer Elmo Heter wrote that it was "arduous, prolonged, expensive, and resulted in high mortality." Beavers overheated, refused to eat, and died.
- Heter's exact complaint about pack animals: "Horses and mules become spooky and quarrelsome when loaded with a struggling, odorous pair of live beavers."
- His fix used surplus WWII parachutes. First attempt was a woven willow box the beaver could chew out of after landing. He scrapped it when the beavers started chewing immediately, raising the odds of a loose beaver inside the plane.
- Version two was two lidless wooden boxes hinged together like a suitcase, drilled with one-inch air holes, held shut by rope that released when the parachute collapsed on landing. Two beavers per box.
- Test drops ran with an older male beaver named Geronimo, over and over on a landing field. Heter wrote: "Poor fellow! He finally became resigned, and as soon as we approached him, would crawl back into his box ready to go aloft again."
- Ideal altitude worked out to 500 to 800 feet. Low enough for accuracy, high enough for the chute to open.
- On August 14, 1948, a twin-engine Beechcraft took off with a pilot, a conservation officer, and eight crates of beavers. Over the following days, 76 beavers were dropped into backcountry meadows.
- 75 survived. The one death came from a lashing broke, the beaver climbed on top of his box mid-descent, and jumped or fell at about 75 feet. Heter wrote that had he stayed put, "all would have gone well."
- Cost came to roughly $7 per beaver. Hikers, ranchers, and forest rangers returned most of the parachutes for reuse. The Forest Service recovered the crates.
- Geronimo got what Heter called "a priority reservation on the first ship into the hinterland," sent in with three young females. They formed a colony.
- Funding came from the Pittman-Robertson Act, the federal excise tax hunters and anglers pay on guns, ammo, and tackle.
- One ear-tagged beaver later turned up about 100 miles from its drop zone.
- Heter published the whole thing as "Transplanting Beavers by Airplane and Parachute" in the Journal of Wildlife Management, April 1950.
The story nearly vanished. Fish and Game historian Sharon Clark heard about it from a retired trapper in the early 2000s and spent years calling the Idaho State Archives asking about a film called "Fur for the Future." It had been mislabeled and misfiled during a building move. An archivist found it by accident around 2014. The reel was too brittle to run through a projector, so a Utah company restored it frame by frame. Fish and Game posted it in October 2015 and it went viral worldwide.
Parachuting beavers are now on Idaho coffee mugs and T-shirts. Fish and Game says they'd use helicopters today.
Sources: Elmo W. Heter, "Transplanting Beavers by Airplane and Parachute," Journal of Wildlife Management 14(2), 1950. Idaho Fish and Game film "Fur for the Future," 1948. Boise State Public Radio, National Geographic, Cowboy State Daily.
Image By Idaho Department of Fish and Game - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/22/idaho-historic-footage-parachuting-beavers, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=145814168