Sherri Tippie leads a beaver-trapping mission (VIDEO)

This week’s cover story, “Leave It to Beaver,” explores the work of Sherri Tippie, who’s spent more than 25 years rescuing beaver from trash-choked urban streams and drainage areas and relocating them to high-country habitat, or installing flow devices in dams so that beaver can thrive in the inner city. She’s one of the best in the country at what she does — and we have the video to show how she does it.

The clip below comes from a recent excursion by Tippie and Matthew Niffen, a volunteer with Tippie’s Wildlife 2000 grassroots organization (find them on Facebook here), into the turbid waters of West Toll Gate Creek in Aurora. The mission: to trap and relocate a beaver colony. The traps shown here were left overnight; in the morning, they contained three beaver.

The rest of this particular family had already been caught by Tippie — they make an appearance at the end of the video, when she returns home with some willow branches from the creekside to feed them. A few days later, the entire clan was on its way to a ranch southwest of Denver, in an area known (fittingly enough) as East Beaver Creek Valley.

But we’ll let Tippie explain the process herself. Here’s the video:

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