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Nadav Soroker/Searchlight New Mexico

Beaver Fever

These toothy dam-builders can help recovering wetlands but hinder acequias in villages like Chimayó

by Molly Montgomery, Searchlight New Mexico

As conservationists know, these clever dam-building rodents are a boon to recovering wetlands. But they can also contribute to flooding that causes catastrophic damage to acequias, which are crucial to traditional farmers in villages like Chimayó

Twice last year, in the spring and fall, water burst from the Rio Santa Cruz and poured into the tiny northern New Mexico community of Santa Cruz, between Española and Chimayó. It cracked concrete ditch liners and spilled into houses and a trailer park.

Investigating the first flood, acequia commissioners and mayordomos—the elected leaders of New Mexico irrigators who’ve used the water from hand-dug ditches for centuries—discovered an abandoned beaver dam. It had been there a while: the wood had softened and whitened, and willows had grown up around it. It had trapped more than seven feet of wet silt.

The spring flood, which occurred after a heavy rain, spread so much silt that it was impossible to remove the dam. Come October, the river swelled again during another storm and carried branches, basketballs, stumps, shoes, brush and bottles downstream. The willows around the dam caught the debris and the water rose up against the heap and rushed over the banks.

Dredging the channel and raising the banks required use of a bulldozer, a backhoe and a trackhoe. More than once, the equipment sank into the silt. In all, the surrounding ditch organizations had to spend around $35,000 to repair the damaged waterways.

Acequia organizations typically have very little money. After they spend what they raise from member dues on maintenance and repairs, they’re usually left with a couple of thousand dollars in their annual budgets, at most. That year, the acequia spent whatever extra money they had on flood repair, getting assistance from Rio Arriba County (around $18,000) and the East Rio Arriba Soil and Water Conservation District (around $5,000). The flooded area was in Santa Fe County, but, acequia leaders say, they couldn’t get assistance from Santa Fe officials. Because Rio Arriba constituents were affected by the flooding, the two Rio Arriba entities agreed to help.

In the past few years, citing evidence that beavers can make a place more drought-resilient, Santa Fe County and a prominent national conservation nonprofit, Defenders of Wildlife, have encouraged the presence of the big, paddle-tailed rodents in a stream system that includes the Rio Quemado and the Rio Santa Cruz.

Stemming from those rivers is a dense network of dozens of acequias, which, with gravity and gates, make it possible to divert water to farmers’ fields.  People in the communities around Española and Chimayó depend on it to irrigate their chile, corn, melons, berries, stone fruits, greens, carrots, flowers, alfalfa and other crops. 

Irrigators along the streams are frustrated and worried about the time and money that beavers could cost them. The memory of the floods in Santa Cruz looms—a flood or a block can cost tens of thousands of dollars and leave farmers without reliable access to water in a season when they need it most. With drought intensifying, they’re under increasing pressure to share a limited resource and don’t want to navigate another area of stress.

“Now we have to worry about beavers?” says Brian Martinez, a parciante (water recipient) on the Acequia de la Puebla in the community of La Puebla who grew up digging ditches in Chimayó. “I don’t know of any acequia that would be doing somersaults to do that.”

Several acequias leaders contend that they’ve received inadequate communication about planning by the county and Defenders of Wildlife—some find the communication they have received to be disrespectful and condescending—and many view the two organizations as outside entities that shouldn’t be able to impose their ideas about local waterways without significantly more community input.

The issue is especially fraught, given the history of Santa Fe-based environmentalists in northern New Mexico, who have, more than once, argued that they know better than Chicano residents how to take care of the natural world, and who have sometimes blocked them from practicing traditional agriculture.

“They need to come and see what our issues are,” Ross Garcia, commissioner on the Acequia de los Ortegas in San Pedro, says. “We’ve been irrigating for generations.”

In recent years, environmentalists around the world have been singing the praises of beavers, pointing to them as a natural solution to the climate crisis. The dams they build alter the flow of water, slowing and spreading it. Their storage tactics allow the ground to soak in water, which, during dry stretches, can seep back out.

Streams throughout the western U.S. that once ran year-round started running dry during droughts; when beavers took up residence again, the streams began to flow year-round once more. The wetter an area is, the less likely it is to ignite in a wildfire. And studies indicate that beavers’ aquatic engineering revitalizes biodiversity and mitigates dangerous bacteria.

Beavers are native to the mountains and valleys of northern New Mexico. Hoping to establish the positive trends the creatures can bring about, Santa Fe County and Defenders of Wildlife have implemented projects that involve welcoming the animals—who move in on their own and are not released—into wet areas around Chimayó. Various laws make it illegal to remove beaver dams and kill beavers, and conservationists argue that learning to live alongside them is well worth it.

Peggy Darr, a wildlife biologist who worked with Santa Fe County during the creation of a controversial wetland and now advocates for beaver conservation with Defenders of Wildlife, is planning to install beaver dam analogs (BDAs), which mimic beaver habitats, on the Rio Santa Cruz and the Rio Quemado. BDAs can attract beavers to take up residence.

“One of the goals of BDAs is to have beavers take over and improve upon our restoration work, as there are not enough resources, financial or otherwise, to do the critical work beavers do for free,” Darr wrote in an email.

Santa Fe County also encouraged beavers to move into a Chimayó wetland, called Los Potreros, which the county has worked to conserve over the past few years. Historically a wetland and then a grazing pasture, the area was put up for sale and slated for development in the 1990s. In response to community concern and advocacy, Santa Fe County eventually purchased the area in the name of “cultural preservation and conservation of traditional agriculture and natural habitat,” according to county communications coordinator Olivia Romo.

In 2021, with a grant from the New Mexico Environment Department, the county contracted with Ecotone, a Santa Fe-based landscape planning firm, to restore the wetland. Ecotone built structures that emulated beaver engineering, and beavers moved in and built dams.

The results have been striking. Water has spread across the pasture, turning the grasses emerald. Ducks erupt out of the marsh, and redwing blackbirds trill from the tops of cattails. Meanwhile, the beavers, who tend to come and go, have moved on to other areas in the stream system.

A lack of community input

Several community members say they were excluded from the planning processes for these projects. About four years ago, someone reportedly destroyed a beaver dam at Los Potreros—other dams were breached with a shovel—which prompted Santa Fe County to put up signs saying that the area is under surveillance camera and that “It is illegal to vandalize beaver dams, molest beavers or kill beavers on Santa Fe County Open Space Property.” Some residents found the sign and the camera insulting and viewed it as an instance of the county defending animals instead of the rights of people. (No one, as of now, appears to be planning to molest or kill beavers.)

Acequia leaders are worried about how much water is being diverted from the Rio Quemado into the field. The few meetings the county hosted to discuss its plans left residents feeling confused and unheard. 

“It was done pretty quickly, without much input from the community,” says Michael Diaz, a flower farmer in Chimayó and the mayordomo of the Acequia de los Martinez Arriba, which historically irrigated the former pasture.

Diaz has seen the benefits beavers can bring to mountain wetlands. “I’m totally down for that,” he says. “But not if it’s just for Santa Fe County to look cute.”

He’s watched the wetland soak up huge quantities of water. He wants to know how much of that water evaporates and whether the absorption limits downstream use. He’s also worried that beavers will reproduce and fill the waterways with dams and burrows, which he doesn’t have the time or money to clear. The water has spread so far across the pasture that parts of the acequia are difficult, if not impossible, to access for repair. He’s not sure how irrigators could get equipment to those areas if there is a breach. 

Into a bank of the acequia close to the wetland, about a third of the way down the ditch,  a creature has been digging tunnels. Diaz and a couple others patched the holes with sandbags and plastic from an old greenhouse. He believes beavers are the culprit. (Jan-Willem Jansens, the owner of Ecotone, says it’s more likely a muskrat, a claim that others fiercely dispute. Either way, Diaz has found more tunnels since the wetland expanded.)

Darr agrees that beavers don’t belong in acequias and says she wants to prioritize helping farmers survey and remove dams from the channels. She worked to implement various beaver-human coexistence measures at the wetland—pond levelers to prevent flooding; wire caging around trees that community members didn’t want beavers to chew on; and similar caging around acequia headgates to prevent them from getting clogged.

Defenders of Wildlife has funding to send farmers to training sessions about beaver coexistence, Darr says. She’s offering to enact a cost-share program to help pay for the challenges irrigators experience.

But some of the mitigation tactics seem ineffective to residents: as the landscape of the wetland has shifted, beavers have chewed down supposedly protected trees. And the idea of having to take on more expenses and tasks to coexist with beavers strikes several commissioners, mayordomos and farmers who are working around the clock, often for free, as impractical.

“It doesn’t seem fair to the acequias, because they’re already financially strapped, and they’re strapped for labor,” says Brian Martinez. “To expect an acequia to cost share whatever amount of money it might be isn’t tenable.”

Defenders of Wildlife has also hired a farmer, Emilio Borrego, to talk to community members about how they might make use of the advantages beavers offer. Borrego is the chairman of the Acequia de la Otra Vanda in the community of Córdova, upstream from Chimayó.

“I get that it’s not so black-and-white, and it’s an issue that takes time,” he says. But he believes he’s benefited from the presence of beavers. He says that upstream dams have acted as speed bumps for the water during heavy storms, and they’ve played a crucial role in protecting Córdova from severe flooding. Borrego also accesses regular waterflow for the crops that he grows.

Córdova’s environment is different from the communities between Chimayó and Española. It sits at 7,146 feet in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristos, about 1,000 feet higher than Chimayó,  with a higher stream that feeds it. But it’s still a dense community reliant on acequia water, and Borrego believes beavers will make the entire watershed more resilient to climate change. 

He also notes that beavers move in on their own and “are extremely hard to work against.” Taking apart a dam can cause a bigger mess than leaving one in place, he says. “They’re really tenacious little creatures. They work super-fast. There already is a beaver presence all along the whole watershed.”

“Where’s the community?”

Currently, people don’t know how many beavers live in the rivers, nor do they know whether the wetland is storing more water than it loses to evaporation. The dearth of information is amplifying acequia users’ frustrations about communication.

Steve Finch, a hydrogeologist who has worked with all 64 acequias in the stream system, hasn’t seen data indicating how much water is being stored. He notes that beavers can be beneficial in higher reaches of the watershed, but he’s concerned about the extra labor that the presence of beavers would require from acequia users lower down.

“It’s already too much effort to maintain the acequias without beavers,” he says. Acequia users “are out there every day, managing, maintaining, operating, and the last thing they want are beavers in or around the acequias.”

Community members want more data, something they emphasized at a meeting that the county and Defenders of Wildlife held in Chimayó on the evening of May 29.

The gathering was designed to show that both organizations hope to prioritize conversation with the parciantes, commissioners and mayordomos. But word about the meeting reached very few people. Less than ten residents of the surrounding area were there; some found out about it only after others already there texted them.

Coursing through the conversation was deep anger that people who don’t actively depend on acequias are making decisions that seriously affect the flow of water.

“It seems like we have a majority of people working on this project than people that live in this community,” Diaz said.

Although a couple of the county employees and a contractor with Defenders of Wildlife are acequia users from northern New Mexico, the divide between community members and meeting organizers was palpable. People frequently cut each other off and talked over each other. A beaver proponent grew visibly upset as acequia leaders expressed their anger.

“You guys just want to just protect a certain little area here where you guys can collect your money and have your little group meetings,” said Isaac Martinez, president of the commission of the Acequia de los Martinez Arriba. “Where’s the community?”

There was also a generational divide. Borrego, who’s in his 30s, argued the value of working with the beavers; several of the commissioners and mayordomos in attendance who don’t want the beavers in the water ways belong to older generations.

“I’m going to be doing this for a long time, and I know that the climate’s changing a lot, and that’s the thing,” Borrego said. “If we don’t have a healthier water system, or if we take away these things that are actually helping there be more water in the water system itself, we’re going to be screwed. It’s going to be way different by the time I’m your guys’ age.”

Attendees said that going forward, they need more information that will take into account the harms beavers can enact in their particular community. 

Shelley Winship, an administrator and former supervisor of the Santa Fe-Pojoaque Soil and Water Conservation District, asked that the county perform a cost-benefit analysis for the valley around the Rio Santa Cruz. “You talked about the services and benefits beavers provided, but you haven’t quantified the cost to the ecosystem that beavers are causing in an acequia community,” she said. She noted that acequias, too, provide benefits to the ecosystem, also slowing water and delivering it to plants, and that negative impacts to acequias would result in the loss of those benefits.

“If you don’t understand the particular ecosystem that you’re looking at, you’re going to make recommendations that are going to cause problems,” she said.

Water is Life

The importance of acequias in traditional New Mexico agriculture

Often called the “lifeblood of northern New Mexico,” acequias are collectively tended, democratically governed irrigation ditches, primarily located in the north-central part of the state. The term acequia can refer either to the ditch or to the collection of people who rely on it to irrigate their crops. Those people are called parciantes. They possess a right to a quantity of water determined by the needs of all parciantes along the ditch and the availability of water throughout the entire stream system. They elect a mayordomo to oversee the distribution of water and repairs and maintenance. They also elect commissioners, typically a treasurer, a secretary and a chair.

Running from the rivers are channels with dams, which the mayordomo can open to direct the water down the acequia to the parciantes. Sometimes several acequias depend on a single diversion dam, called a presa. Irrigators move the water through their fields by using rocks and earth to sculpt and shift their own channels.

Acequias have been shown to be ecologically beneficial and have sustained communities in northern New Mexico for centuries. They’ve been celebrated as a model of how we can share resources in the climate crisis, and as an example of enduring resistance to U.S. colonialism and capitalism. Around northern New Mexico, signs and bumper stickers read “El Agua es Vida.”

But as drought intensifies, and commercial development expands, acequias also face multiple challenges: a lower flow; pollution (whether it’s commercial entities dumping chemicals, or individuals dumping septic waste); construction on irrigable land; adjudications over water rights; out migration of the younger generations that would participate in acequia traditions to more urban areas.

There are, however, several young farmers who are working hard to celebrate and protect land and water-based traditions.

Further reading:

Enduring Acequias: Wisdom of the Land, Knowledge of the Water/Juan Estevan Arellano

Acequia Culture: Water, Land, and Community in the Southwest/José A. Rivera

Water for the People: The Acequia Heritage of New Mexico in a Global Context/Edited by Enrique R. Lamadrid and José A. Rivera

Republished with permission from Searchlight New Mexico, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that seeks to empower New Mexicans to demand honest and effective public policy.