Castor Camp 2025

Castor Camp - September 12 - 14, 2025  (DRAFT)

Castor Camp 2025 is a three-day, small-format gathering for a curated group of beaver conservation practitioners. Held at Pine Creek Conservation Area in Eastern Oregon, this immersive experience is for those committed to supporting beaver success—viewing beavers first as individuals with their own needs and natural history, and by understanding beavers on their own terms.

This camp is about sharing grounded, practical knowledge. It’s a space to learn directly from peers, explore what truly supports beavers and their habitats, and deepen our understanding of their behavior and needs.

With Robinson Creek as our backdrop, we’ll follow a light agenda that anchors open discussions, field-based learning, and collective reflection. The intimate, non-conference setting ensures space for meaningful exchange and collaboration.

Goals include strengthening relationships, broadening conversations around human roles in beaver success, and shaping a shared voice to support the restoration community through a beaver-centered lens.

Castor Camp celebrates the expertise in the room. Come ready to share, listen, and return with clearer insight and renewed purpose.

Camp themes are expected to include:

  • What's on the Menu
    The ecology of Riparian veg communities, establishment, regeneration, and natural history.  Preferred beaver forage, forage requirements, foraging behavior/patterns and nutritional needs.
  • Field protocols for getting to know you local beavers better, through the American Beaver Activity Survey Protocol, and Occupancy Intent and habitat scoring.
  • Fun social event Saturday evening
  • Where do we go from here? Taking the beaver conversation forward.

Camp Cost:  $35 per participant

20 participant spots are available, with a first round of invitations registration close by May 31, 2025.

Questions? Contact pamela@westernbeavers.org.

Castor Camp 2025
Payment
Payment

Please complete the Pine Creek Conservation Area waiver form here, and bring it with you to camp or email it in PDF to __________________

WHY CASTOR CAMP?
When thinking  about the next frontier for understanding and supporting beavers in North America,  there's  not enough research done in beaver forage science. We’re looking outside to get more collaborative work, mixed methods, and pulling the lived experiences in to move forward our understanding of the sociocultural drive of what beavers needs are and, how we  can make really good judgment calls as ecologists and restoration practitioners — that’s where we’re seeing the push going.

Pine Creek Conservation Area Campground on Robinson Creek