Idaho’s Great Beaver Airlift

Remembering a time when the woodland animals dropped from the sky.

Meg Godlewski

Friday, October 17, 2025 at 09:06 AM ET

Verified

Edited By:

Travis Tingle

Parachuting beaver boxes dropped from an airplane. [Credit: Idaho Department of Fish and Game, Pittman Robertson Trout Fund]

Key Takeaways:

In 1948, 76 beavers were successfully relocated from the expanding city of McCall, Idaho, to a remote wilderness area by being dropped via parachute in specially designed boxes.
Conceived by Fish and Game warden Elmo Heter, this unconventional method, tested by a beaver named Geronimo, proved to be more cost-effective and less stressful for the animals than ground transport.
The "parabeaver" project was highly successful, establishing new colonies whose descendants continue to thrive in the area over 15 generations later.
Although the Idaho Department of Fish and Game no longer uses this specific technique, aircraft remain important for other wildlife management tasks.

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Usually, aircraft and wild animals, such as deer, rabbits, and birds, are a bad combination.

You have probably heard about aircraft and animal collisions at your airport, and the animal always loses. But sometimes, aviation comes to the rescue of animals. That was the case in 1948 when aircraft were used to relocate beavers from the growing city of McCall, Idaho, to central Idaho, where they thrived. And the beavers didn’t just fly aboard the aircraft for relocation—they were dropped by parachute.