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How to attract a butt load of beavers

 
pioneer
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I'm opening a thread to ask: hey, just how does one attract a buttload of beavers? We love the little guys and want to have a phalanx of them! We have wetlands with obvious historic beaver activity but nothing current. What do we do to get them back??
 
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Hit up the wildlife rehabbers in your area (state/province), find out who rehabs beavers and offer to be a release site for their rescues.

Release sites for beavers are notoriously hard to find, they would LOVE to hear from you. They would come, evaluate the site, and if deemed suitable, would be thrilled to have a release site where beavers are valued and wanted.
 
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D.W. Stratton wrote: ........just how does one attract a buttload of beavers? We love the little guys and want to have a phalanx of them! .....



Our tried and true method is to plant a lot of trees that you dearly love.  Beavs will wait until those trees have juuuuuust enough growth for you to appreciate them and your efforts,.....and will arrive to mow'em all down during a high water event. ;-/   But that's speaking of a situation where you know they are present and just waiting for the right, critical mass of timber.  If they really are gone from your area, Lorinne had a good suggestion.  Just a side note in case it impacts your decision, your lack of Beavs currently may be due to zealous neighbors or local trappers who are not as enamored with them as you and will continue to eradicate those wander onto their property.  If you get a chance to cross paths with the locals and the issue comes up, you may be able to find out quickly if this is an issue.  Good luck!!
 
D.W. Stratton
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John Weiland wrote:

D.W. Stratton wrote: ........just how does one attract a buttload of beavers? We love the little guys and want to have a phalanx of them! .....



Our tried and true method is to plant a lot of trees that you dearly love.  Beavs will wait until those trees have juuuuuust enough growth for you to appreciate them and your efforts,.....and will arrive to mow'em all down during a high water event. ;-/   But that's speaking of a situation where you know they are present and just waiting for the right, critical mass of timber.  If they really are gone from your area, Lorinne had a good suggestion.  Just a side note in case it impacts your decision, your lack of Beavs currently may be due to zealous neighbors or local trappers who are not as enamored with them as you and will continue to eradicate those wander onto their property.  If you get a chance to cross paths with the locals and the issue comes up, you may be able to find out quickly if this is an issue.  Good luck!!



Ah, but the river and wetlands around us are all protected wetlands, and beavers are protected if I'm not mistaken. So we will promptly notify authorities of any anti-beaver activities. But noted, we will talk with neighbors about it. There is an intact dam maybe a quarter mile upstream of our land and it's very obvious someone was using it as a fishing pond at some point, so we reckon if they can see fit to use a beaver's hard work, they can damn well let the rascals live there!
 
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Around here, beaver seem most attracted to willows, poplar/cottonwood, and aspen.

 
D.W. Stratton
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Joseph Lofthouse wrote:
Around here, beaver seem most attracted to willows, poplar/cottonwood, and aspen.



Oh that's perfect! We have that growing around here. Now we just need to get a beaver rehabber to hook is up with like 50 chunky lil beavers.
 
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Beavers reintroduced themselves in my area a couple decades ago.  It's amazing as all I ever knew of them is that they build dams. Well it would take one hell of a beaver colony to dam the Ohio River. Instead they build big "huts"  if that's the proper term at least that's what they look like. They are attached to trees,mostly willow that have fallen over but still alive or with their roots extending into the water. The huts rise and fall with the water level, the entrances are under the water. Periodically, every several years at least, the water gets high enough to wash the huts away but the beavers just build new ones.
 
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John Weiland wrote:Just a side note in case it impacts your decision, your lack of Beavs currently may be due to zealous neighbors or local trappers who are not as enamored with them as you and will continue to eradicate those wander onto their property.  If you get a chance to cross paths with the locals and the issue comes up, you may be able to find out quickly if this is an issue.  Good luck!!



In Oklahoma the state licenses trappers to catch and kill (no rehab) various otherwise protected varmints who are deemed nuisances by property owners.  My relatives were out of town for a season and their neighbors called in the beaver trappers.  Trapped all the ones on the neighbor's land and then (seeing sign further down the watercourse) came onto their property and trapped their beavers too.  Everybody involved just assumed that's what my relatives would have wanted if they were around to ask.

I am also aware that if any of the traveling beavers who have built small dams in my ravines ever colonize and start raising a family, every neighbor I have will not only kill the beavers as soon as they cross the property line (illegal, they're supposed to call the trappers, but there's no enforcement) but probably trespass onto our property to do it, and think they are doing us a favor.  It will take serious effort to protect a colony if we ever get one.  (Our habitat is far from ideal, so I have only moderate hope.)

 
D.W. Stratton
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Mark Reed wrote:Beavers reintroduced themselves in my area a couple decades ago.  It's amazing as all I ever knew of them is that they build dams. Well it would take one hell of a beaver colony to dam the Ohio River. Instead they build big "huts"  if that's the proper term at least that's what they look like. They are attached to trees,mostly willow that have fallen over but still alive or with their roots extending into the water. The huts rise and fall with the water level, the entrances are under the water. Periodically, every several years at least, the water gets high enough to wash the huts away but the beavers just build new ones.



Actually they do BOTH! The dam is not where they live, it's where they eat. Sort of.

There are oodles of great videos on YouTube of beavers being adorable and making dams and storing food for the winter (they use aquaponic refrigeration!!! so friggin' cool).

The lodge is, as you correctly state, where they live, and everything you've said about how they are constructed and flow with the rise and fall of tide is correct. The interior is usually around a 6-foot radius with something like 2-3 foot height. Quite a small space where up to 6-8 beavers will reside, though usually more like 3-5.

FASCINATINGLY, musk rats will ALSO take shelter in beaver lodges! The beavers don't seem to mind a bit, and it may be because musk rats are good at foraging stuff the beavers can't easily get in the water and are not nimble enough to grab for themselves safely on land. So this would be a cool form of either commensalism or symbiosis! Huzzah!

The beavers build the lodges because they are somewhat lumbering, slow, and ridiculous on land. Source: a beaver lives maybe 1/4 mile away from our house and is absolutely absurd on land, but nimble in the water like nothing else in fresh water. The dams flood a low-lying area and drive just about any predator a beaver might have away from their lodge. This allows the beaver to swim under water and chew away at any trees an shrubs unhappy enough to be thus assailed. The dam is of utter importance to a beaver in a small creek as without it, her home would be exposed to attack from snakes and coyotes and what-have-you and she would have no safe browsing grounds. With the dam, you have to be a darned good swimmer to even attempt an assault on a beaver lodge (watch out for those teeth!!!) and you're not going to wait around at water's edge for the off chance of a beaver paddling too close when there are much less obnoxious prey to hunt.

Beavers are so important to the ecosystem. They are a keystone species that increase the fertility and biodiversity of the land all around their abodes in a way that is tremendous. We ought to befriend all beavers and never again curse them for their tree-chewing ways. It is relatively simple to protect trees from them with a bit of wire fencing wrapped about the trunks, and you can even get dam-management systems that can help you control the water level rise caused by beavers if it is threatening to inundate your field or your home.

We could, also, as the alleged top-sentient beings on the planet (very much open to debate in my opinion) get a clue and not build our homes or put our fields in super low-lying spots near rivers in beaver country. They were, after all, here first!
 
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If you've got good habitat, they'll show up on their own.  If the habitat isn't what they're looking for, there's not a whole lot you can do. Specifically, they'll want food and deep water, or a place that they can make deep. Beavers won't make a dam if they don't have to, they only do it if they need to make the water deeper. There's tons of beavers around here, but not a whole lot of dams. And they generally seem to want to put their dam somewhere that's a natural boundary. I find a whole lot of dams at road bridges, for example. For some reason, they use that road as a border, and build their dams right near the bridge. They also like to plug up road culverts for the same reason.

Regarding lodges-almost all lodges start out as bank dens (a hole on the side of a tall steep bank.) Once they raise the water high enough, they keep building up their bank den and it becomes a lodge.  If the water is already deep enough that they don't need to make a dam, they generally won't make a lodge either, at least not the stereotypical lodge in the middle of a pond. They'll sometimes pile a bunch of sticks up against a bank den, though, especially if the bank caves in.  Also, in flowing water, they'll want to make their den/lodge somewhere that has some structure, to keep the den/lodge from getting washed away. Typically this means a tree that has collapsed into the water; they'll build their den up inside the root ball of the tree.
 
James Bridger
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Typical bank den here, under a fallen tree. Actually, I've got a buttload of random beaver pics, maybe I'll make my own thread for beaver pics.
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A state wildlife expert told me that beavers are attracted to the sound of running water. It is their instinct to stop the flow by building their dams. We had a problem with one particular dam that caused the main access road to flood & become impassable. There were many flowing creeks there & they definitely preferred that particular spot presumably because of the sound. I once read about someone who was trying to attract beavers by playing a recording of flowing water. Don't know how that worked out. Seems like it was feasible though.
 
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