Wetmore – Bubba smells funky.

It’s no wonder. The two caged beavers in the back seat of Sherri Tippie’s aging red Isuzu Trooper – affectionately named Bubba – are awash in their own dank musk as ice bags drip down their backs.

“I love that smell. Don’t you just love it? Nothing smells better to me,” says Sherri Tippie, inhaling deeply. “I was born for beavers.”

As Colorado’s lone licensed live trapper and relocator of beavers, the opinionated part-time jail barber from Lakewood has become a legend among beaver lovers. For 22 years, she has battled stereotypes – and centuries of history – that paint beavers as water-hoarding pests worth more as soft hats than wild animals. Tippie has relocated several hundred, maybe even a thousand of the industrious, family-centric creatures.

She traps the engineering animals in metro Denver’s urban streams and releases them in rural areas where their labor is appreciated for creating wetlands, raising water tables, restoring silty top soil and cleaning water.

“We need to change people’s perceptions,” Tippie says, slapping her leg in frustration. “Too many people today have a golf-course mentality. Water goes here. Flowers here. Grass here. Trees there. It goes against nature. We’ve spent too long working against nature.”

And her beloved beavers, she says, support “nature’s dance.”

“When people complain about beavers, they don’t know enough about them,” she says, nearly screaming over the din of Bubba’s laboring engine. “They are the most important wilderness species out there and they are the most degraded. If you want to control the beaver, control their food supply. It’s as simple as wrapping trees.”

After a three-hour haul from Denver to south-central Colorado’s Wet Mountain Valley, Tippie and longtime volunteer Dick Northrup lug the dripping beaver cages down the steep banks of the south fork of Hardscrabble Creek near Wetmore. She upends the cages and reaches inside, groping the docile creatures to determine their gender.

Gretchen Holschuh is obviously impressed. Or maybe she’s a tad uncomfortable with Tippie’s fearless fondling of the wild animals. The wildlife manager for the Pueblo West District declines Tippie’s invitation to scratch the beavers.

Tippie lifts them out of the cage and embraces them like a doting mother, even smooching the heads of the 40-pound creatures that appear to be canoodling back. Then she drops them to the ground and the beavers scamper into their new watery home.

“It’s really neat to see the enthusiasm for beaver because most people view them as such a nuisance, even some of us in the division,” Holschuh says, admitting that her organization is often too quick to issue a 30-day trap-and-kill permit to landowners struggling with beaver impoundments.

In 2005, the division issued 102 30-day trapping permits. But a growing number of ranchers, like the alfalfa farmer on the south fork of Hardscrabble Creek who called the division bemoaning a lack of beavers upstream, are discovering how beavers can be assets.

“Properly managed, beavers can be a great thing,” said Eric Adams, executive director of the nonprofit and educational MacGregor Ranch near Estes Park, where Tippie has delivered the animals.

“Beavers slow the water down, which lets it soak into the river bank. They have allowed new growth of aspen trees, which act like gigantic sponges underground for water storage.”

Converting suburbanites

The pair of beavers released above Wetmore – numbers 30 and 31, and likely the last for Tippie this season – came from Left Hand Ditch north of Boulder. Homeowners adjacent to the ditch saw the telltale signs of the annual beaver gathering and quickly called Tippie before the ditch company arrived with beaver-busting backhoes, just as it had the previous two years.

Wearing her faded “Beaver Believers” T-shirt, Tippie arrives at the home of Diane and Doug Seitz in a new community near Niwot. She delivers hugs to the family before heading into the backyard.

“The ditch company obviously has the right to do away with the beaver,” says Diane Seitz. “But we are trying to teach our daughter that just because they have the right to kill, it’s not the right thing to do.”

Fannypacks dangling and sneakers laced tight, Tippie and volunteer Chris Gasser wade into the ditch and snip green limbs of cottonwood and willow. They thread the wisps of green through the suitcase traps and smear castoreum, a musky beaver-gland secretion Tippie reluctantly buys from kill trappers, on the traps’ triggers. They anchor the traps on shore, carefully lashing each halfway above the water near a freshly gnawed stump.

Leslie Seitz, a giddy 9-year-old on her way to her first day of school, is ecstatic to finally meet the family that has been building in her backyard. Neighbors stop by and stroke the beaver bellies at Tippie’s behest. She playfully slaps a neighbor who mutters aloud that the soft, silky fur would make a nice coat.

A few more converts in Tippie’s crusade.

“I get the feeling Sherri is capable of feeling like a beaver,” says Alex Hiller, who has twice traveled from his home in southern Germany to train as a live trapper under Tippie. “Sherri always acts for beavers first.”

Indeed, Tippie is biocentric. She believes all life is valuable and equal to that of humans, particularly the beaver. Her bright blue eyes can quickly turn choleric, her voice a scream, her language coarse, when her attention turns to anything that can be construed as cruelty to animals.

“The only creatures we need to be actively managing are humans,” she says, those eyes raging. “This world has a carrying capacity for humans, you know.”

It started on a golf course

It all began in 1985 when the hairdresser and dance teacher saw a television news clip about Aurora wildlife officials killing beavers that were felling trees on a golf course.

“I’d never even seen a beaver. Never thought of a beaver,” she says.

But she went down to the Aurora Division of Wildlife offices and asked to borrow their traps. An officer haughtily handed over two new ones, still in their boxes. He was too busy to show her how they worked.

“I think they thought that once I did it and saw how much work it was, I wouldn’t want to do it anymore,” she says.

They were wrong. She learned how to work the traps’ stiff steel springs in her Capitol Hill apartment and by the next morning she was cuddling her first beavers. Her life was forever changed. Today, aside from a Saturday job trimming inmate hair at the Arapahoe County Jail, her sole work is fighting for beavers.

Soon after delivering those first Aurora beavers to Rocky Mountain National Park, Tippie found herself one of the nation’s leading live trappers and relocators of beavers. Today, the group she formed in 1987, Wildlife 2000, is one of the few resources for anyone seeking an option beyond killing dam-building beavers.

She travels the West, speaking to groups and advocating live trapping. She promotes wrapping trees to control a beaver colony’s food supply. She installs steel cages over culverts where beavers like to build their lodges and dams, allowing a beaver family to thrive without disrupting water flow. She shows devices known as “beaver deceivers” – pipes snaked beneath a beaver dam allowing water to continue moving downstream while leaving the beaver pond intact.

After trapping her beavers, she rushes them to beaver-savvy ranchers and public land managers across the state. In the winter, she lines up homes for her beavers long before she sets her first traps in late June.

Tippie’s fight for the beaver rakes against history. French beaver trappers forged the American West. Beaver pelts anchored this fledgling country’s economy after demand for soft beaver hats soared in Europe, where the animals were trapped into near extinction in the early 1700s.

The history stacked against beavers and the ingrained mindset toward trapping and killing the animals does not faze Tippie. One beaver at a time, and one person at a time, she pursues a new world where beavers and people coexist happily.

“She has a big history up in this valley,” Holschuh says, describing the stories of Tippie hauling beavers on mules deep into the Sangre de Christo range. “If people like Sherri would come and educate us, we could really do some good for the environment up here.”

Staff writer Jason Blevins can be reached at 303-954-1374 or jblevins@denverpost.com