“Beavers matter,” Alison Zak told her audience in an Oct. 22 Zoom presentation to the Friends of Dyke Marsh, Friends of Mason Neck State Park, Friends of Huntley Meadows Park and Nature Forward. Zak is the founder of the Human Beaver Co-existence Fund.
She urged people to “reframe their thinking that beavers are pests.” Beavers have a valuable ecological role. They improve water quality, restore freshwater systems, protect wetlands, enhance groundwater recharge and increase biodiversity. Their foraging can promote plant growth. By building dams and creating ponds, they slow water which can reduce harmful sedimentation. A beaver-created wetland can attenuate flooding.
Mount Vernon-area Beavers
Beavers usually inhabit water bodies that have a reliable and plentiful supply of woody vegetation nearby.
Greg Crider, a Williamsburg Manor resident, reports, “For decades beavers have lived in Little Hunting Creek. They come out of Colonel John Byers Park behind our neighborhood and chew their way into our yards on William and Mary Drive. They have also taken down trees and shrubs at our neighborhood entrance on Collingwood Road.”
Beavers are busy in the Stratford Landing area too. Betsy Martin, president of the Friends of Little Hunting Creek, says that beavers have built dams and lodges in the creek there for some time. One industrious “beaver came across the street, Thomas Stockton Parkway, which parallels part of the creek, and gnawed off some big branches on this side of the street,” Martin said.
In Hollin Hall Village, near the swimming pool and Lafayette Drive, beavers took down trees this year, says Leo Milanowski, president of the Hollin Hall Village Citizen Association. “We saw a lot of gnawing marks on big trees,” he reported. “They were not shy about leaving the woods and going into yards.”
Karen Stein, who lives in that area, says that beavers have been active near her house since 2022, chomping down some trees and bushes. This year, they cut down a pear tree in a neighbor’s yard.
Beavers have been at home in Dyke Marsh off and on over the years. This past spring, some River Towers Condominium residents could watch beavers in the western part of the preserve from their condo windows. Beavers built a lodge and dam there and this summer, the dam was breached, cause unknown.
A Big Rodent
Beavers are North America’s largest rodent and can live into their twenties. “Their ancestors go back at least a million years,” Zak said. They primarily eat herbaceous vegetation, woody and aquatic plants. Beavers build lodges of sticks, branches and mud, usually in the water, with the lodge entrance underwater. They can live in large river systems where water flows fast or deep and may live in river banks, Zak said.
They are adapted for semi-aquatic life, with a broad tail that can “whack” the water, claws for digging and webbed feet like flippers. Their predators are coyotes, bobcats, bears, raptors and at times, people.
Beavers are primarily nocturnal and live in colonies of four to eight related individuals, according to Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources (DWR) website. “The colony has a home range size of about eight acres,” notes DWR.
Almost Eliminated
Before the 1600s, there were 12-to-14 million beavers in North America, but in the mid-1600s the fur trade took off, said Zak. Beaver pelts were in demand in the U.S. and for trade with Europe and beaver numbers plummeted to an estimated 100,000 at the height of the fur trade. “We almost lost our population of North American beavers,” Zak said.
In Virginia, beavers were nearly extirpated in the early 1900s. In the 1930s, wildlife managers reintroduced them. “Beavers have recolonized much of their historic range,” Zak said. Most beaver trapping today is what she called “nuisance trapping.”
How to Live with Beavers
Most conflict between people and beavers centers around tree felling and flooding. With their large teeth, beavers cut down trees for food, dams and lodging. To prevent a beaver from chewing down a tree, the most practical solution is beaver fencing or metal cages wrapped around the tree. Zak recommends 14-gauge welded wire, four feet tall with two-inch by four-inch mesh.
Zak’s website offers tips for living with beavers and non-lethal management methods such as pond levelers, flow devices and culvert fences. She said that relocation is not legal in Virginia.
“Beavers teach us to embrace change. This critter shows up and does a lot of changing in a short time,” she said.
More Information
Beaver management, https://coexistwithbeavers.org/ and https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/wildlife/beaver-management
North American Beaver, https://dwr.virginia.gov/wildlife/information/north-american-beaver/