Beavers in Pond...

[PILOON]

We have our fair share of beavers on our lake.

Tree protection is relatively simple.
Wrap the bottom 4 ft with hardware mesh or metallic stucco mesh but fairly loose as trees do grow. (I like the stucco mesh as it is cheap)

Next for the dam or pond outlet.
Run a 6" or so pipe under their dam (or yours) with 2/3 being downstream and add a central 'T" then short pipe (2-3') followed by a "T" on both sides of the central "T",
The idea is to camouflaged the output eddy currents that they will try to plug.
It helps if the output array is well downstream as they won't find the 'leak'.

A beaver's food choice is the soft woods, Popular, Aspen Cedar etc but when desperate he'll attack maples and birch.

Good luck!

 

[oosik]

The beavers chewed down a 20 foot tall P. pine. It was on the shore about 150 feet from their lodge. I was VERY PLEASED to see that they didn't eat the bark off this pine. They hauled it up on the lodge and used it as a structural member.

A thought - this coming spring I will throw some of the small pines I thin off the cliff. See if they use them on their lodge. There just aren't any trees for them to use. The closest stands of young pines are a long distance. Up a 40 foot high basaltic lava cliff and across an open field about 200 feet. I'll definitely have to remember and do that.

 

[BoylermanCT]

I get beavers on my pond, and they have never caused any problems. I enjoy getting to watch them. Mine took down smaller trees around the pond which I am fine with as the forest will overcrowd the pond if left to its own. They also cleared a lot of small bushes on the shore for food.

Attachments

• 
  DSC_0077.jpg

  97.9 KB · Views: 430
• 
  DSC_6330.JPG

  3.3 MB · Views: 521

 

[oosik]

I'm glad to see that others can enjoy beavers also. Nice property - BoylermanCT.

 

[Fixastuff]

They made me a sweet fishing hole out of a small creek. The swamp is a little swampier but water stays well below the fields so no worries.

 

[Jstpssng]

Everything has it's place. Years ago when they clogged up a road, the decision was made to move it and let them have the first road.
They then proceeded to plug the culvert in the second...
Last year I had the old 4 foot culvert replaced with a nice concrete bridge with a 12 foot span. This spring the plugged it... I had someone come in, remove the beaver, and unplug the dam. That worked for about 2 weeks until another moved in. Now I'm looking into some type of "Beaver Deceiver" so that we can have our road back.

I went to a class on putting in stream crossings a few years ago. They told us "to avoid beaver problems, don't put your road where they want to build a dam." They may as well have said "Don't put in stream crossings"... The above mentioned dam is behind a 3 acre beaver pond. I still haven't figured out where the water comes from, as there is no major inlet upstream. In another place I saw an old,abandoned series of dams built from a trickle of seasonal runoff. They certainly are industrious little buggers.

 

[oosik]

I can see you are trying to be a good neighbor - Jstpssng. However - there are those times when the ambitions of a beaver family are simply incompatible. It may be best to get the Game Dept to live trap and move them.

Around here - if they are causing damage - the Game Dept is Jonny-on-the-spot to move them to a better location.

 

[the old grind]

If you relocate trapped animals it can take them up to a week to find their way back.

 

[GeneV]

Ok well, we had them in our 1/2 acre pond at the back of our property. Back there borders a creek, and across the creek is an industrial park we very much don't want to see. Anything I would plant back there to block the view of that park soon turned into beaver food. I'm talking about stuff they supposedly don't eat, like green giant arbs. So what I did was, I welded wire fenced the entire property up to where their lodge was, then lit their lodge on fire which got one of them to leave. The other guy refused to leave. So I finished with the fence, trapped him with a conibear 330, and ate him. He was delicious.

 

[rgr33]

We have had beavers damming up our creek for the last 35 years, it resulted in a nice 2 acre pond in the woods below our house. there is a lot of forage for them to eat in the area, but it also is home to cougars, coyotes, and the occasional bear.

when the saplings get cleared out by the beavers, and it becomes too dangerous to venture that far for new forage, they abandon the pond and move downstream to a safer area. After a few years, they come back to the pond, which has regrown with new trees, and the cycle starts again.
They have never caused any problems, and we don’t bother them.