About half a century ago, the Idaho Department of Fish and Game struggled with an influx of beavers and settled on a novel idea—parachute them to another part of the wilderness.
The Associated Press reports that beavers and other rodents were captured, placed in special boxes, and dropped from a plane into the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness. Well, that’s one way to fight a pesky population issue. (New York, take notes.)
The event was captured around 1950 in a video called “Fur for the Future,” which was thought to have been lost for good. That was until Fish and Game historian Sharon Clark recently discovered the fragile film that had been mislabeled and stowed away in the wrong file. The film has since been digitized and even uploaded to YouTube.
"We haven't done airplane drops for 50-plus years, but it apparently worked pretty well back then to re-establish them in remote places," said Fish and Game's statewide fur bearer manager Steve Nadeau. Instead of the drop-and-go missions of yesteryear, they now carefully move the creatures to the Owyhee desert to help restore vegetation.
