The beavers won. That’s how Clemson University alum Jim Kaplan ’87 describes his long-running battle with the industrious animals that share his property in Pickens County. For Kaplan, an engineer by training who spent decades solving complex manufacturing challenges, there’s a certain irony in that outcome. After all, beavers are often called nature’s engineers. Kaplan has spent recent years improving the roughly 80-acre property for wildlife, birds, insects and pollinators.