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Published in The Seattle Times online on Aug. 28, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Aug. 31, 2025
A new West Seattle film encourages us to leave it to the beavers
By Clay Eals
We’re deep into a construction craze, the landscape changing overnight. Of course, this is hardly news anymore. Except this particular furor is fueled by … beavers.
Yes, beavers, the sizeable waterborne rodents that many of us have encountered in copious cartoons, from Mr. Busy in “Lady and the Tramp” to the dam builders in “Curious George.” With exaggerated buck teeth and paddle tails as tools of their trade, these amiable avatars sport wide-eyed smiles and hardhats to convey a busy, zesty persona.
But few Seattleites have seen actual beavers. That’s because they surface primarily at night. So we aren’t aware of their existence here.
Pamela Adams is out to change that. The one-time California fine-arts student and insurance broker moved to Alki three years ago and joined a wide if unheralded world of beaver advocates, morphing into what she calls “The Freelance Beaver Detective.”
That’s also the title of Fauntleroy filmmaker Kay D. Ray’s new 56-minute documentary, which, besides Adams, features other beaver promoters and city officials, along with waterway chronicler and former Seattle Times photographer Tom Reese.
Adams’ passion to track beavers found a ready “lab” in one of Seattle’s 49 streams, West Seattle’s Longfellow Creek.
Stretching 4-1/2 miles, according to the documentary (nearly 3 miles in daylight), it runs south to north, from Roxhill Park and beneath Westwood Village mall to the creek’s buried endpoint, beneath Nucor Steel and the West Seattle Bridge, in Elliott Bay.
Despite myriad human barriers, Adams says the creek boasts five beaver families that diligently chew trees and build dams and lodges, creating ponds that foster other wildlife — a far cry from the fur trade of centuries past when beavers were hunted to near-extinction for their pelts.
“The beavers are actually water keepers,” Adams says in the film. “They’re doing what they can, what they’ve always done for thousands of years, and they are part of our ecosystem. In this place that we have urbanized, we’ve channelized, we’ve paved over, they’re doing the natural process.”
A key example: Just north of West Seattle Golf Course, the creek’s culminating culvert and a trash-catcher that Reese nicknamed “Monstro” (for the vicious whale in “Pinocchio”) have existed for at least 87 years. Today, Reese says beavers’ tenacious ponding has helped adult coho salmon to spawn there.
Adams’ advocacy does require compromise. She works with Seattle Public Utilities to keep ponds from flooding footbridges and other property. She also buys and installs wire fencing to protect homeowners’ trees.
But it’s hard not to be captivated by the film’s industrious critters. In scores of sequences, many recorded with night-vision cameras, the real beavers are more compelling than any cartoon.
WEB EXTRAS
Big thanks to Pamela Adams, Tom Reese and Kay D. Ray for their invaluable help with this installment!
To see Clay Eals‘ 360-degree video of the “Now” prospect and compare it with the “Then” photos, and to hear this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.
Below, you also will find a trailer for “The Freelance Beaver Detective” documentary and 3 additional photos.
