On Beaver Pond

Judith Wolff/The New Pine Plains Herald

I live on a bucolic, sparsely populated road in Milan that runs for about 5 miles, parallel to the Taconic. My house sits at the midpoint of this road, directly across from a large pond that’s rung round by hundreds of towering maples, along with some ash trees and pines and cottonwoods. Let’s call it a beaver pond since, well, beavers have had a hand in creating just about any pond you lay your eyes on in wetland areas like ours. Dutchess and Columbia counties are awash in tidal and freshwater wetlands – marshes, swamps, bogs, streams, and tributaries – precisely the kind of waterlogged terrain beavers thrive on. And so they do. Our region is home to a dense and prolific beaver population.  

The pond across from my house has probably been here for millennia, but more recently beavers built and maintained a huge dam close to its eastern bank, along with two capacious lodges floating nearby. Over the seven years I’ve lived here their handiwork has completely reshaped and resized the pond — which has had its knock-on effects. Scores of maples have drowned and stand dead in the water; some have toppled, exposing their soggy rootballs. And since the dam minimizes drainage, creating a placid aquatic environment, algae now sit atop much of the pond’s surface, along with a wide expanse of water lilies. This is great news for mammals, birds, fish, amphibians, and insects. Biodiversity thrives on the beaver-built environment.  

And so it goes. A snapshot in ecological time, beaver edition. These sleek, industrious rodents are natural-born landscape engineers with a genius for environmental stewardship. River systems, hydraulic networks, and watersheds flourish. Left to their own devices, beavers create a cascade of benefits for entire ecosystems. But that’s just it: We can’t always leave them be. Where beaver habitats intersect with the human-built environment, problems often arise. Mostly
this means flooding caused by the dams — of railroads, septic systems, farmland, etc., but especially of roads. 

Which is what happened this spring at the end of my driveway. The road curves and dips right there, and a culvert crosses underneath, precisely at the bend, piping the stream from our neighbor’s sodden acreage into the southwestern flank of the pond. Beavers “disperse” in springtime — that is, 2-year-olds reach sexual maturity and strike out independently to start their own families and establish their own territories. In this case they built a small dam in the culvert itself, obstructing the passageway. Meanwhile heavy rains had swollen the stream. The gushing watercourse had nowhere to channel, so it overflowed its banks into the road. And ours was far from the only beaver-related headache this spring. For example, rapid erosion on the banks of the recently installed culvert on Woodward Hill Road in Pine Plains has been attributed to the release of beaver dams further upstream. The fix will likely run to tens of thousands of dollars. 

“Beavers can’t stand running water, it drives them bonkers,” Joel Martz told me, explaining the animals’ propensity to stop up culvert pipes. Martz is a trapper. I met him a few weeks after the road flooded. I was pulling out of my driveway when I saw him emerge from the pond in chest waders, with several clanking chains slung round his neck — beaver traps. “I’m pretty sure I got ‘em all,” he announced as I rolled down my window. 

Over the weeks, Dutchess County had sent roadwork crews to dismantle the culvert dam, using backhoes and other heavy machinery. Their efforts helped briefly but soon enough another heavy rain was swamping the road. Beavers do not rest and do not accept defeat; they kept repairing the dam. Finally Martz was hired to trap and kill them. He harvested nine altogether, and since the traps had stood empty for nearly a week he was confident he’d finished the job. 

“People hate what I do — I get it,” Martz said. “For them, it’s all about emotion.” This may strike some as a glib dismissal of those who press for nonlethal methods of dealing with beaver nuisances. Humane strategies for mitigating the impact of beaver activity have a proven track record. But Martz can readily cite the catalogue of reasons he believes culling beavers is a sound practice. 

Nationwide, the population has dramatically rebounded in the last hundred years, after teetering on the brink of extinction due to a booming fur market that lasted for centuries, but then collapsed. Our marshy region is ideal beaver habitat, and the population is flourishing. According to Martz, the wetland corridor from Hyde Park to Jackson Corners hosts the largest extended beaver colony in Dutchess County. He subscribes to the Sustainable Natural Organic Renewable Resources (SNORR) ethos, skinning the carcasses and extracting every ounce of value contained therein. 

Martz harvests the castor sacs — glands that produce a musky substance beavers use to mark their territory and humans use in perfume formulations. The leathery tails can be fashioned into wallets and belts and knife sheaths. Although the fur trade is a fraction of what it was in days gone by, quality pelts can still fetch high prices on the luxury market, while the dense underfur is felted and made into cowboy hats. Finally, low-fat, protein-rich beaver meat is a prized wild-game option. All told, Martz said he earns $10K to $15K a year in his part-time gig as a self-described “nuisance beaver control operator.” 

Nevertheless affection, even reverence, for Castor canadensis, the North American beaver, runs deep. Long before John Jacob Aster built his fortune on the beavers’ skinned backs, leveraging the fur trade to become the first American millionaire in the early 1800s, this keystone species was instrumental in shaping the United States biosphere. Hundreds of millions of beavers inhabited what is now the U.S., laboring to create and maintain a mosaic of aquatic and terrestrial habitats from coast to coast. 

Native Americans and early European settlers lived in beaver country; now beavers live in ours. Today their population stands at a healthy 10 to 15 million (up from a perilous 100,000 just a century ago). The question is: how best to co-exist? 

Aurore Stanek-Griffiths is livid about the beaver slaughter in the pond. She lives with her family on its eastern flank, and since they moved here four years ago  they’ve advocated on behalf of the beavers, hoping to shift management strategies away from extermination and toward symbiosis. “We love watching them,” she said. “They’re amazing creatures. And they’re so important to the environment. Killing them just kills them, it doesn’t solve problems.” 

By which she means it’s a short-term solution. In prime beaver country like ours, it’s only a matter of time before a new colony takes up where a previous one left off. “Unfortunately it’s very easy to get a permit to kill them, much harder to get a permit to protect them,” Stanek-Griffiths said.

Skip Lisle concurs. Thirty years ago Lisle founded Beaver Deceivers International, in Grafton, Vt, one of several outfits that install flow-control devices that fool beavers into thinking the pond they inhabit and patrol is not leaking. Lisle is frustrated that agencies and individuals are slow to implement practices that, he insists, not only solve beaver problems but save money, enhance wetland vitality, and promote biodiversity. (“I’m not against hunting,” he said, “but killing beavers only degrades the habitats that support so many of the other animals hunters want to hunt.”) 

Properly installed, flow-control devices function by piping water through beaver-built dams, a system that maintains a steady pond depth and averts flooding. But the pipes must be placed at specific depths and at strategic distances from the dams and/or culvert apertures to make sure the sound or pressure of running water does not trigger the beavers to stop the flow by building another dam — though carefully designed cages are placed at the pipe openings to thwart any furry saboteurs. 

Installations are complex undertakings, and each site requires its own specs and analysis, which may help explain the slow uptake on the part of decision-makers. That and the upfront cost, which runs from $3,000 to $5,500, depending on the site. Once installed, however, the devices require little upkeep. They pay for themselves many times over with the savings that come from the elimination of numerous expensive headaches: floods, infrastructure repair, culvert excavation, etc. 

That said, Colleen Meehan and David Borenstein, who live about a mile up the road from me, met with failure in their effort to enlist Beaver Deceivers to solve a problem that cropped up for them several years ago. Beavers had built a dam in a segment of Little Wappingers Creek that runs through their property, resulting in significant flooding. At first they tried to address the matter themselves. Geared up in waders and armed with loppers and machetes they set out to demolish the dam. “Ha! Fat chance,” Meehan said. “That dam was like a concrete barrier.” 

She and Borenstein, an architect who earned his degree from MIT — where the mascot is the beaver, so chosen for its engineering chops — were determined to find a nonlethal solution. But for reasons they never quite understood, and despite the Beaver Deceivers’ record of successes in projects as far flung as Alaska and Belarus, the company came and assessed conditions and concluded that it could not be of service in this particular case. To the couple’s own dismay (“We’re animal lovers!”) and to the tune of thousands of dollars, Meehan and Borenstein wound up hiring a sharpshooter to kill the beavers, followed by a platoon of heavy machinery to dismantle the dam. So far they have not had further beaver trouble. 

New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation says it receives between 2,000 and 2,500 beaver complaints a year. The DEC issues trapping licenses and legislates the hunting season, which lasts from late fall to early spring, with no bag limit. Off-season permits are authorized for problems that arise in specific instances, such as the flooding at the end of my driveway. 

“It’s miserable work,” Martz said of trapping. The water is freezing, the carcasses are heavy and slippery, the traps are hazardous. Displaying an encyclopedic knowledge of beavers’ behavior and biology, Martz clearly respects his quarry. He shakes his head admiringly over their talent for evading traps. Comparing their intelligence with that of other animals he’s licensed to trap, Martz sums it up this way: “A fox reads a book. A coyote reads the fine print. A beaver looks at the text under a microscope.”

It would take just a few strokes to swim from Stanek-Griffiths’s shoreline to reach the beavers’ primary dam, a magnificent structure some 75-feet wide and at least 6 feet high. It is the Great Wall of beaver dams, clearly visible from the road, and now it stands breached. Just days after Martz packed up I could hear water pouring through fissures in it – beaver dams require constant upkeep. And now, months later, it’s starting to slump.  The dense network of mud, logs, reeds, and branches, pristine and foliage-free when beavers are on the job, is camouflaged in summer greenery, fading to autumnal gold. The sagging edifice feels like a historic relic. But history rolls on. At some point beavers will be back.