A recent drive through the township revealed a number of beaver ponds located nearby the roadsides, all looking pastoral with a light blanket of snow laying on the newly formed ice. One of these ponds also was ringed with freshly gnawed stumps, indicating the recent activities of a beaver family preparing for winter.
Beavers are active all winter long, as they do not hibernate like their rodent cousins, the groundhogs and meadow mice. To ensure they have enough branches to use as food to survive the winter, and rather large pile of fresh cut tree bits is created near the lodge, close to their underwater entrance hole.
Beavers, cute little nickel-backs that they are, have a knack of drawing attention onto themselves, usually by way of a misplaced dam and the subsequent buildup of water. If the new pond is within eye-shot of a landowner, reaction is often swift: "Oh look dear, we now own waterfront property. Should we sell before it all washes away."
Many a dam has been picked apart by amateur dam-busters and, as I can personally attest, this is a futile task. What a family of beavers hath wrought in a night, let no man put asunder in a day.
You can pull, pry, cut, shovel, push and cuss at a dam all day, and the next morning it looks as if you've never been there ... the dam's all fixed up pretty like, and holding just as much water as before.
Now, before one rushes in to 'reclaim' the landscape, 'evict' the beaver and 'save' the neighbourhood, a little biology about the buck-toothed invader should be considered.
First of all, despite your first impressions, the beaver has not singled you out for malicious intent. It just needed to build a dam, and your place was better for it than the neighbours (there, don't you feel a little bit special already).
The reason beavers build big dams is because they have short legs. I don't think it's an inferiority thing, more of a survival thing. Their short legs have to support a big, fat body, which means that running and leaping is out of the question (ah-ha, perhaps a trait you may have in common with this critter, so maybe you can now start to empathize with it).
While running is not a beaver’s strong point, they do excel at swimming. Webbed feet, waterproof fur, and specialized eyes, ears and lips, allow this mammal to escape predators, find food, and move about their territory. Lacking a deep pond, they have the remarkable ability to create one. Hence, the dam.
While natural and wonderful when occurring in their place, I agree there are times when the beaver has perhaps pushed its luck a bit and in the course of making its home-sweet-home has managed to submerge most of the nearby landscape. And when that line is crossed, when that time arrives, when something's got to give ... it's most likely bye-bye beaver time.
So, how does one relocate an errant beaver? It's not a simple task. Again, voice of experience here, and once you wade into the situation you will not like the outcome. Because the beaver family either dies now, or it dies later. But it will die once humans intervene.
And here's why. These animals are very territorial; they seem to know just how much area they need to find just the right amount of food to sustain their family. Should another beaver trespass or intrude, the resident animals will defend the home pond and seriously maim or even kill the interloper. Injured animals soon become food for the next trophic level (meaning they are eaten by a predator).
The process of live-trapping and transporting a beaver (one family member at a time) will cause a huge amount of stress on the animal, stress that will debilitate an individual. And so, after somehow capturing Bucky and 'setting him free' in a distant likely looking pond, the odds of him surviving a week are pretty low as that beaver pond is already occupied by other healthy beavers.
Another inhumane method of beaver removal is to blow up or back-hoe out the dam in wintertime. Without the water to hide in, the beavers are now exposed to coyote or otter predation.
And without the water to seal the underwater entrance to the lodge, cold air now enters and does a slow dance with death as the beavers freeze and die from starvation. Cruel as it is, many a beaver family has been snuffed out with this errant method.
Believe it or not (and I'm sure many of you won't), the most humane way to remove a beaver is to have a professional trapper do his thing. Conibear traps have been nick-named "quick kill" traps, because the Humane Society and Trappers Associations worked together to design a trap that kills almost instantly (when used properly). Snap, and the deed is done, just like the mouse trap in your pantry.
The other option is to try and live with the situation. So you lost a few trees along the shore, so what? Just because a beaver has set up residence on your property does not mean it has to be removed ... just because, you know, it’s there.
There have been many designs of a device called a ‘beaver baffler’ which is a pipe stuck through the dam to control the water level. Seldom works as the industrious beavers take it as a personal challenge to find a way to plug the upstream end, and are usually successful with their ingenuity.
However, should the backed up water become a small lake and the dam breaks and causes washouts of roads and laneways downstream, you may be on the hook for financial compensation for the repair work.
After all, the weak dam and high water threat were located on your property, and you did nothing to prevent this neighbourhood disaster. Many a court case has been arraigned on this topic.
So there you have it. Dealing with beavers can be a dilemma, especially beavers that are in a high visibility location. I don't envy municipal engineers when they get that call from an irate landowner to deal with beaver flooding, because the final solution will be (although sometimes prolonged) inevitable.
