It’s a sign that beavers are
continuing their comeback in Rhode Island after being extirpated from the
region about 300 years ago.
“There’s a historic culvert on the
property, and we noticed it was being plugged up with
sticks, but we didn’t
know how,” said Randy Tuomisto, president of the land trust. “So we removed the
debris, but it subsequently got filled in again. That’s when we noticed small
twigs were being cut, telltale signs of a beaver.”
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| Beaver lodge and drain pipe at land trust property (Todd McLeish) |
When the white cedar trees began to
die, the land trust took action to address the situation. They hired a
Massachusetts beaver control expert to advise them on how to install a series
of water flow devices – a combination of wire fencing and plastic pipes going
through the beaver dam that tricks beavers into thinking their dam is still
working but which allows the water to flow down the stream unhindered. While
Tuomisto said he believes there are six or eight beavers on the property, along
with a six-foot tall beaver lodge, flooding has been reduced considerably.
“Now they’ve moved down Sneech Brook
to other areas in town, to Diamond Hill Reservoir and Abbot Run Valley Stream.
And they’re aggressively on the Blackstone River,” he said. “If you take a trip
on the Blackstone bike path from Manville to Valley Falls, you’ll see the
destruction of all the trees that they felled.”
According to Charles Brown, a
wildlife biologist for the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management,
beavers were probably the first animal to disappear from the New England
landscape after the arrival of European settlers. Their fur was in great demand
by Native Americans and the new arrivals, and many beaver pelts were shipped to
Europe as well. Brown speculates that the animals were extirpated from the area
by the end of the 1600s.
It took until 1976 for the first
ones to return. That’s when a beaver lodge was discovered on the brook that
leads into Carbuncle Pond in Coventry.
“They’ve been expanding ever since,”
said Brown. “By 1982, my predecessor Charlie Allen did a float trip around
Coventry and Foster and found several colonies within that watershed.”
Communities in western Rhode Island
have been dealing with the inevitable flooding that beavers create for more
than 30 years, but Brown said the animals have only recently arrived in the
area of the lower Blackstone, Pawtuxet and Moshassuck rivers, where municipal
public works officials are now being called on to address flooding issues.
“Beavers have been entrenched in
Burrillvillle and other parts of western Rhode Island for some time, and the
towns there know how to deal with them. But they’re still finding new habitat
and expanding elsewhere in the state,” Brown said. “It takes them a while to
move around and get established in new areas. They were pioneering into the
Cumberland and Lincoln area about 10 years ago, and now they’ve become a
regular part of the landscape there.”
Brown had meetings with Cumberland
officials to discuss how to address the flooding caused by beavers at the
Monastery and Diamond Hill State Park, and he often has similar meetings with
officials in other communities. He offers counsel about beaver behavior and
life cycle and offers advice on how to reduce the flooding using water control
structures and how to protect notable trees with perimeter fencing.
Sometimes he advises officials to
consider hiring a trapper to capture the beavers during trapping season, which
runs from Nov. 1 through mid-March. Rhode Island fur trappers typically harvest
about 100 beavers each year, many of which are captured due to nuisance
situations.
Despite their reputation for damming
streams and flooding roadways, beavers play an important role in the
environment by creating habitat upon which many other species depend, from
river otters, mink and muskrats to ducks, dragonflies and amphibians.
“Great blue herons gravitate toward
newly flooded areas with dead standing trees,” said Brown. “But beaver ponds
aren’t perpetual. They come and they go. Beavers create a dynamic state of
change that can benefit a lot of things.”
According to Ben Goldfarb, author of
the award-winning 2018 book Eager: The Surprising, Secret Lives of Beavers
and Why They Matter, beaver ponds also help to recharge aquifers, dissipate
floods, filter pollutants and ease the impact of wildfires. A 2011 report he
highlighted estimated that restoring beavers to one river basin in Utah would
provide annual benefits valued at tens of millions of dollars.
“Even acknowledging that beavers
store water and sustain other creatures is insufficient,” Goldfarb wrote.
“Because the truth is that beavers are nothing less than continental-scale
forces of nature, in large part responsible for sculpting the land upon which
we Americans built our towns and raised our food. Beavers shaped North
America’s ecosystems, its human history, its geology. They whittled our world,
and they could again – if, that is, we treat them as allies instead of
adversaries.”
Randy Tuomisto of the Cumberland
Land Trust has a similar perspective.
“We want to keep the water level
high enough so the lodge can sustain the beavers through the winter. We would
rather live with beavers because they provide an ecological benefit in creating
wetlands and wildlife habitat,” he said. “We understand the destruction they
cause to neighbors and roadways, and we could have trapped them out. But we’re
willing to take the bad with the good.”
This article first appeared on EcoRI.org on November 29, 2019.
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