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Montana's Land Trusts: Best Friends of Beavers
The prospect of the 2026 Annual Montana Beaver Working Group Meeting (see below) has us thinking about a wonderful field trip that capped last year's event, with the Prickly Pear Land Trust (PPLT). The outing took place at The Grove, 80 acres full of mature trees, complex creek banks, leaky floodplains, and plenty of places for people to walk, bike, fish, and view wildlife. For our crew of Muck-booted, meeting-weary beaver believers, it was beyond heartening to see how our beloved rodents were building dams, storing water, and cutting all kinds of sculptures into the cottonwoods.
But as PPLT Parks Coordinator Lucas Orth reminded us, this wild nook of East Helena didn't have to exist. After its beavers were likely eclipsed in the Fur Trade, this site was home to a major lead smelter, processing 70,000 tons of lead bullion per year. That smelter operated for more than a century, and it gave rise to East Helena, plus lots of heavy metals to threaten the water supply. When concerns about the operation's hazards to human and ecological health grew unbearable, a sequence of federal, state, and community-based collaborations helped to remediate the toxins accrued on the land, which was ultimately transferred to PPLT in 2020 for permanent stewardship.
The Grove is just one place reminding us that land can recover from harm, and that land trusts have a crucial role in protecting places where beavers can perpetuate the healing process. As nonprofits that can own and steward land, or hold conservation easements for willing landowners, land trusts can be catalysts enabling the nature-based solutions that all species (including people) need: intact open space, clean water, habitat connectivity, functioning ecological processes, and so many more. The collaborative agreements they forge help conserve the private lands most at risk of losing wildlife habitat, biodiversity, and land-based human livelihoods, and they do this not only for communities now, but for those generations far into the future.
Montana is home to several land trusts: some working in specific regions, others working statewide, and many united in partnerships like the Heart of the Rockies Initiative or the Montana Association of Land Trusts. They each make unique contributions to land conservation, and they're each supporting a better legacy with beavers, too. Do you know which land trust(s) are at work near you? Do you know where their beavers are? 2026 is a great year to learn more about them, support them, and share their story. Many thanks to Montana's land trusts!
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