Stay tuned for 2025’s Adopt-a-Salamander program!
Join us in our symbolic animal adoption program and adopt today!
Launching in 2024 with Adopt-a-Beaver, our symbolic animal adoption program has been instrumental in raising funds to support BEEC’s conservation efforts and our work on behalf of the natural world. All symbolic adoption donations receive your choice of a custom BEEC patch (iron-on) and an adoption certificate. The minimum donation to receive a patch and certificate is $25, and you may choose from the current year’s animal or from previous year’s. A new animal will be added to this project each year. For donations over $200, you will have an opportunity to meet one of BEEC’s rehabilitated beavers in her natural environment!
Choose your symbolic animal here
2025’s Adopt-a-Salamander Program
Info coming soon!
2024’s Adopt-a-Beaver Program
Meet Bebryx, one of BEEC’s ambassador beavers.
Why Beavers?
As climate change brings drought, fires, and floods, holding cooling water on the land and slowing its journey to the sea brings many benefits. That’s what beavers do.
Beavers are built for the water, and they can’t live without it. That is why they are so dedicated to building dams to keep it in place. As beavers move upstream and downstream creating new ponds, the areas they leave behind become meadows and shrub lands. These are important ecosystems for many plants and animals, from moose to mink. Beavers are a “keystone” species—essential for other species to thrive. By holding water and trapping silt, beavers and their wetlands are one of our greatest allies in reducing the impacts of climate change and slowing the loss of biodiversity.
However, when beavers’ plans conflict with peoples’, they can cause a lot of trouble. They clog culverts, cut down favorite trees, and flood fields and cropland. At many sites that are attractive to beavers, they are killed whenever they arrive. These sites become death traps and leave neighboring areas devoid of ponds and wetlands. We need your help – because beavers are so important, BEEC promotes solutions that work for people and beavers.
BEEC’s role:
Beavers have been a feature of BEEC programming for over fifteen years—that is when BEEC naturalist Patti Smith began studying the beaver colony near her home. Since then:
- Hundreds of people have been introduced to beavers in the field.
- Many college, school, and community groups have enjoyed BEEC presentations on beavers.
- Readers of the Brattleboro Reformer have followed the lives of the beavers in Patti’s monthly column, A View from Heifer Hill.
- BEEC has become a resource for people looking for humane ways to solve beaver conflicts.
- BEEC is working with the towns of Halifax and Westminster to solve beaver conflicts and build support for beavers’ work.
Pumpkin, the orphaned beaver raised by BEEC’s Patti Smith, enjoys one of his first days as a free beaver.