A recently unearthed film made by Idaho’s Department of Fish and Game in the 1950s is full of dramatic music, untouched wilderness...and flying beavers?

Fur for the Future demonstrates how rangers redistributed fur-bearing animals to maintain populations depleted by fur trappers and human development. The video, laden with orchestral swells and fascinating grainy footage, shows rangers trap, tag, and transport muskrats, beavers and martens.

But while the muskrats and martens are carried by truck, the beavers are given a more bizarre treatment.

After gathering the animals, rangers sort them by size and pack them into crates, which are then loaded onto a small plane. Finally, in a Noah's-Ark-meets-Mission-Impossible scene, the crates are parachuted into the remote wilderness. Once on the ground, the beavers emerge from the broken crates unharmed and amble off to find water. 

Fortunately for the beavers, times have changed. A representative confirmed by phone that Idaho's Deparment of Fish and Game no longer uses planes to drop animals into new habitat.