Beavers look cute, with their big teeth, pudgy bodies and little front paws. But don't let their looks deceive you. Beavers are hard workers and masterful engineers.
They also draw the ire of their human neighbors when they plug culverts and flood roads or fields. As a Vermont Edition listener in Worcester said during Thursday's show about beavers, "There are many places in my town where the Beaver [sic] have created a problem, which is very costly to town budgets. The road commissioner ultimately ends up having a trapper remove the nuisance animals."
For naturalist Patti Smith of the in West Brattleboro, it's important for Vermonters to understand what happened when beavers were overhunted in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. "When all of the beavers disappeared from North America 鈥� disappeared being a euphemism for 'turned into stylish hats' 鈥� eventually those dams degraded and all of those wetlands drained," she said.
The loss of the beavers' tiered dam systems, combined with European settlers' tendency to "straighten out" streams and rivers, led to the issues with flooding our region faces today.
What's so cool about beavers?
Beavers' brains are small 鈥� about the size of a walnut 鈥� but you wouldn't know it from watching them work. "They get up and go to work every single day, never take a vacation," said Skip Lisle, a wildlife biologist in Grafton.
Lisle invented the , a flow device that sneaks water away from beavers and removes the need to trap or kill them.
Beavers can spend up to fifteen minutes underwater, and they have a transparent third eyelid that helps them see underwater. They are the largest rodent in North America and the second largest in the world (here's to you, capybara).
Local conversation efforts
The Addison County-based works to educate private landowners, road crews and selectboards across Vermont about resolving beaver conflicts without killing the beavers.
Some of these groups are pushing for more state and local funding for high quality flow devices. They argue that keeping beavers in the landscape is a cost-saving measure in the long term. "One person who's skilled can eliminate all the conflicts points in a town for for many decades," Lisle said. "Killing is just a guarantee that you'll never eliminate the conflict. It's very, very inefficient."
The House Environment Committee has heard testimony about beavers this legislative session from wildlife biologists, the Nature Conservancy and Vermont Fish & Wildlife.
Vermont Fish and Wildlife considers the state's beaver population healthy and growing. The department receives an average of about beavers every year.
Boosting beavers worldwide
In Wyoming, the Federal Bureau of Land Management is throughout Sublette County that mimic beaver dams. The goal is to encourage beavers to move to the area and reduce the effects of drought and erosion. "Especially as we see climate change, and things get warmer, and we have more rain and less snow, it's really important to keep the water up in the headwaters longer," Emily Fairfax, a ecohydrologist working in Wyoming, told .
In the Czech Republic, beavers built dams on a river near Prague that ended up protecting critically endangered species. Their work .
Beavers were hunted to extinction in the United Kingdom. In late February, the UK government to reintroduce beavers into the wild in a large-scale effort to restore rivers and create wildlife-rich habitat.
Broadcast live on Thursday, March 6, 2025, at noon; rebroadcast at 7 p.m.
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