By Camille Thomas, Director of Marketing, Museum of Idaho
In the late 1940s, an influx of settlers gravitated to Idaho's picturesque lakeshores. The burgeoning populations faced a challenge with the native wildlife inhabitants, particularly the industrious beavers residing in locales such as McCall and Payette. As towns expanded, cohabitation with the beavers became increasingly untenable. Nature's toothy engineers damaged infrastructure and private property as they gnawed away on the landscape, causing floods and felling trees.
Realizing the importance of beavers on the environment—for example, maintaining water sources—the Idaho Department of Fish and Game decided to relocate the beaver population to the remote Idaho backcountry (present-day Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness area). The goal was a bit lofty, though, (pun intended) as the undeveloped area lacked roads to those remote regions.
Enter Elmo Heter, fearless beaver-wrangler with the Fish and Game Service in McCall. Heter's initial efforts to use pack mules as a mode of transport failed, since the stressed beavers spooked the mules. Undeterred, Heter seized upon an unconventional solution inspired by the surplus of parachutes left over from World War II. Recognizing the potential of aerial deployment to access otherwise inaccessible terrain, he conceived the wild yet ingenious plan of parachuting the beavers into remote wilderness areas.
Heter devised specialized wooden boxes to safely transport the beavers during their journey, engineered to automatically open upon impact with the ground.
Before the beavers' "big move," Heter meticulously tested his contraptions, employing a beaver named Geronimo in numerous trial runs. The critter was aptly named after the exclamation parachutists started using in the early '40s, inspired by the Native American legend who is said to have jumped off a cliff on horseback.
Geronimo's undoubtedly epic test runs proved effective, and a whopping 76 beavers were relocated to new homes in the backcountry. Remarkably, only a single beaver perished during the project.
Today, Idaho mostly uses helicopters to relocate wildlife, but the efforts of the 1940s and '50s remain a testament to the intersection of ingenuity and environmental stewardship.
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