A Franklin County father and son are featured in a PBS documentary series for their pioneering work to restore beaver populations to a local creek — and the remarkable results that followed.

Jay Wilde and his son Casey are highlighted in an episode of "Shared Planet," a PBS series that examines ways humans have found to live in concert with nature. The program streams free at PBS.org and on the PBS app through June 20.

The Wilde family has raised cattle in the Birch Creek Canyon area northwest of Preston for six generations. When Jay took over management of the family ranch several years ago, he noticed a significant reduction in water in the area.

"Water is life," Jay says in the program — and for a sixth-generation ranching family, the shrinking supply was an existential threat to everything his ancestors had built. He also noticed there were no beavers damming up the canals his forebears had helped build to farm the foothills of Mink Creek. He remembered his own earlier efforts to remove those dams and destroy beaver.

That realization led him to reconsider everything he thought he knew about the animals he had once worked to eliminate. He contacted Joe Wheaton, a riverscapes professor at Utah State University, who confirmed the connection Jay had begun to suspect — that beaver were critical to water conservation. Together they developed a plan to reintroduce the animals to Birch Creek.

Using university research resources and the labor of student volunteers, the Wilde ranch became the proving ground for their experiment. Five beavers were released in the fall of 2015 into dams Wheaton's students and volunteers had built along the stream. It took a few attempts, but eventually the animals colonized the waterway. Beaver have since built as many as 250 dams in the Birch Creek drainage area.

The results have been striking. The dams back up spring runoff and rainwater into the surrounding hillsides, which act like sponges that slowly release water through the summer months. Jay has observed that water now remains in the stream as much as three months longer than before the project began.

Today Jay and Casey share their story with landowners and conservationists across the West. Jay frequently travels with Wheaton, taking the lessons learned on the Wilde ranch to help other landowners improve water retention across the region.