Why NASA Is Watching Where Idaho's Parachuting Beavers Landed

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8. The Story of Geronimo the Parachuting Beaver

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In Idaho, the various mountains, heavily forested landscape, and lack of roads made beaver transplantation a difficult and convoluted process, as Elmo W. Heter from the Idaho Fish and Game Department described in a 1950 edition of The Journal of Wildlife Management. First, the targeted beavers would be packed into boxes, and spent days strapped to a horse or a mule, enduring the heat, dust, bumps, and general lack of breathing space on their way to the home of a designated conservation officer. By the time they'd arrive, it’d be almost dark, so they’d have to spend the night with a strange conservation officer they’d just met. What even would they have talked about over tea and biscuits?

They needed a faster, cheaper and more humane way of getting these beavers from A to B, and the solution they came up with? Planes and surplus World War II parachutes. And here’s where our friend Geronimo makes his greatest contribution to science. Says Heter:

"Satisfactory experiments with dummy weights having been completed, one old male beaver, whom we fondly named ‘Geronimo,' was dropped again and again on the flying field. Each time he scrambled out of the box, someone was on hand to pick him up. Poor fellow! He finally became resigned, and as soon as we approached him, would crawl back into his box ready to go aloft again.”

A tough job, but a thankless one? Not even a little bit!

More...

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/why-76-beavers-were-forced-to-skydive-into-the-idaho-wilderness-in-1948/