Breakdown: New rules to help Colorado’s beaver population recover start Oct. 1

Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) will implement new harvest regulations designed to increase the amount of information wildlife managers collect on beaver harvest and support implementation of CPW’s recently finalized Beaver Conservation and Management Strategy (BCMS), CPW said in a statement on Wednesday, Sept. 23.

CPW said the new requirement will provide wildlife managers with more precise information on where beavers are being harvested to help implement the BCMS.

The core news:

• Starting with the 2026/27 season, CPW is requiring avocational beaver hunters to personally present harvested beaver carcasses or pelts for physical inspection and sealing.
• This takes effect Oct. 1, and applies to anyone harvesting beaver under a small game license with a furbearer permit, or a furbearer license.
• It’s part of implementing CPW’s newly finalized Beaver Conservation and Management Strategy (BCMS).

Why CPW wants this data:

• Mandatory in-person checks let CPW verify the exact location of each harvest, not just self-reported totals.
• According to CPW Beaver Conservation Program Manager Kris Inman, that finer-scale data helps guide where the agency focuses conservation, restoration, and translocation efforts statewide.
• Inman was explicit that the goal isn’t to maximize or minimize harvest, but use better data to manage beavers where they’re ecologically and socially compatible.

Why beavers matter enough to warrant a whole strategy:

• Beaver dams slow and retain water, expand riparian habitat, and support a wide range of other wildlife.
• The wetlands they create act as natural sponges, storing water underground to release during dry spells and keeping surrounding vegetation hydrated.
• CPW specifically calls out beaver wetlands as natural fuel breaks that can help slow wildfire spread across the landscape.
• The BCMS is built around five focus areas: population/habitat monitoring, harvest management, restoration opportunities, nonlethal conflict-reduction tools, and translocation policy.

The harvest numbers, in context:

• Current avocational harvest has held steady at roughly 1,300 beavers per year in 2023, 2024, and 2025.
• Against an estimated statewide population of 43,000 to 64,000 dam-building beavers, that’s only about 2-4% of the population removed annually.
• That’s a dramatic drop from the 1960s, when avocational trapping and hunting took an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 beavers a year.
• Today’s average hunter who pursues beaver takes only about two animals per year.

What’s actually changing for hunters:

• Season shortened by a month, now Oct. 1 through March 31, down from the previous Oct. 1-April 30 window.
• A new statewide daily bag limit of two applies across all 17 furbearer species, including beaver (possession limit remains unlimited).
• Legal take methods stay the same: rifles, handguns, shotguns, airguns, handheld bows/crossbows, and live trapping with cage or box traps.
• Live traps must be checked daily, and any beaver not released must be dispatched using a legal hunting method.

“Hunters play an important role in helping us better understand Colorado’s beaver populations,” CPW Beaver Conservation Program Manager Kris Inman said. “Having hunters personally present harvested beaver allows us to identify and verify the location of each harvest. Over time, those finer-scale data can give a clearer picture of population and harvest distribution to help guide where we focus conservation, restoration, and translocation efforts statewide.”