Living with Beavers

Living with Beavers

Beavers provide innumerable benefits to stream and wildlife habitat as well as to humans such as increased water storage and water quality, however, their work can cause unwanted property loss, damage or change. The loss of ornamental trees, agricultural products such as fruit trees or alfalfa, or the flooding of a road, home or pasture is often more than a landowner wants to live with.

While we can’t go back in time and don’t expect everyone to tolerate beavers flooding of lowlands or felling of apple trees, we have a coexistence bag of tricks that helps reduce the negative side effects that occasionally accompany coexisting with beaver.

Are beavers damaging valuable trees?
Fencing or sand paint can protect those trees while living with the ecosystem benefits of beavers. Electric fencing can be an excellent deterrent to larger treed areas such as orchards.

Is flooding from beaver dam building threatening your home, agricultural land or roads?
Flow control devices or culvert protectors may be the answer to successfully managing the water while enjoying the security of increased ground water, increased hay and orchard production and improved natural pest management from birds and bats that beaver habitat can bring.

Are beaver dams making it difficult for endangered salmonids to utilize your restored floodplain or side channel?
With human development in our river floodplains, these once complex systems have been simplified and one beaver dam in a single side channel can reduce or prevent adult fish passage. If high seasonal flows or deep jump pools below a beaver dam don’t exist in the system, then flow control devices with built in fish passage may be the simplest answer to meeting restoration priorities. Beavers are known to coexist with salmon species and even provide essential rearing, overwintering and climate refugia habitat but context is everything. If the system is lacking complexity, beaver management strategies may help resolve the issue.

Have you tried all the coexistence strategies we offer and find that beaver activity is still a barrier to success?
Translocation is an option for beaver challenges but often short term for the landowner and risky for the beaver. When beavers have chosen an area to live in, they make improvements to the system. When a previously occupied site is vacated by human removal of beavers, other beavers quickly find the improved habitat and happily utilize it.

We have found that most landowners can agree that they would not mind living with beavers if their activity wasn’t damaging or threatening their property. Let us help you find the right beaver management solutions for your property and restoration site challenges.