Pond Boss Forums GENERAL QUESTIONS Wildlife Management Beavers-Are they bad?

I have a 1/2 acre pond with a fairly large Dam on the back side. I have noticed several trees have fallen into the water. Most are at lease 6" thick. I'm certain these otherwise healthy trees were cut down by a beaver. I'm not too concerned because I was planning to cut them down myself. I don't understand why they would have any interest in these trees, they are at leaset 500 feet from the overflow. Will this beaver cause any more issues that I should be concerned with in regards to the integrity of my pond or the fish?

It is obvious when a tree is dropped by a beaver. A tree just falling over does not mean you have a beaver. Can you see on the stump that it was chewed off and are there wood chips on the ground? Beavers are typically a bad thing in a pond and will work to stop any moving water that they can hear. They often dig into the pond bank to den as well.

If you have beavers and want any trees around your pond then get rid of the beavers (or wire around trees). They will go a long way to find trees to eat - hunger does that.

Beavers cannot haul heavy tree loads over land. However, I have encountered a beaver swimming across a 500-acre lake while towing a full 25' tall tree.

Beavers will eat the tasty trees. Beavers will use the handy trees right at the edge of the water for their construction projects.

As soon as your pond level goes up enough to send some water through your overflow pipe, I predict the beaver(s) will quickly block that water flow.

They are amazingly dedicated creatures to what THEY consider to be a priority!

Note that beaver teeth never stop growing, so they must wear them down even if they are not hungry. Beaver eat lots of plants besides trees.

Just an FYI- beavers are very tasty critters. If you have them & have to trap or shoot them, you're missing out if you don't harvest the meat.

Our dogs certainly like beaver meat.

A tree that a beaver chewed on and dropped will look something like this:



Only you can determine if they are good or bad for the pond. Unfortunately you cannot tell them NOT to tunnel in your dam, or NOT to cut down a certain tree.

My brother used to work at our local park board. They had a tame beaver that they used to take to grade schools as part of their wildlife presentations.

For their "demonstration" food, they used to cut off mulberry trees at ground level in the fall. In the spring, they would gather a few of the 6-8' tall new shoots. My brother would give the beaver the thicker end, and the beaver would then eat the entire shoot just as quickly as his little hands could shove it in his mouth.

My brother said the giggle rate for 2nd graders was 100% while watching the beaver eat!

And make sure that wire extends at least four or five feet high. We had some redbuds planted with 2.5 to 3' tall wire and most got annihilated.

Yep. They particularly seem to enjoy dining on cattails, though I did once observe one eating fish food pellets.

They like water lily rhizomes too.

A few years back we had beavers establish one pond on our property and one downstream a couple hundred yards. In the process they cut down some good size trees and almost every birch, dozens of trees, and they dropped a few in the road that ran between the two sites. They appeared to drop a tree, cut it into manageable sections, and drag them off to their target dam site, and they could drag those sections pretty far.

I had a pair of beavers move into my pond, not long after it got full, I didn't have a big problem with it, they chewed off a ton of smaller trees last winter, I guess to eat on, then last spring they started ringing and killing beautiful white oak trees, all around the pond, nice straight log trees, then we ran into problems, I could tell we were going to have to part ways, wasn't going to tolerate that destruction of property so I had to remove them.