“An adult beaver may consume … roughly the amount of bark and smaller branches obtained from a two-inch diameter tree every two days.” — Jim Parkhurst, Virginia Cooperative Extension
Images © Ginny Neil
After we lost several acres of meadow to wild water during the flood of 1985, I planted a dozen willow sprouts along the river to stabilize the crumbling bank. Willows are opportunistic. They develop roots and grow wherever their stems touch the ground. The willows growing below the bluff beyond my house represent 40 years’ worth of relatives from my stabilization project. Except now they don’t. Last summer, my shrubby willows started disappearing.
I was puzzled, but a walk down to the river revealed pencil-point stumps and the submerged curve of a barely visible dam. Beavers were using my willows to build a new home. By August, they had constructed a small lodge near the shore, and the pond was large enough to overrun the shore and drown three sycamores along the river’s edge.
For the next couple of months, I sat on the bluff at sunset and watched the beavers work. As best I could tell there were four. Two took turns cutting and floating stems to place in the growing dam, while the other two dove down and bobbed back up with rocks from the river bottom pressed against their bellies. They placed these and some mud into the growing dam.
I had wanted a pond for years. The beavers were obliging. As winter drew near, they paddled further upstream for longer willow wands which they stuck upright in the river next to their now massive lodge. When the river iced up, the wands disappeared one by one as the beavers ate their winter survival cache. Beavers stay under ice all winter for protection, so we didn’t see them again until spring.
I was sure the beavers would swim away as soon as the river opened back up. There was no willow left for them to eat or use for building materials, but they started working upriver on a line of cherry trees as big around as telephone poles. One by one, they dropped them, chewed off the upper limbs, stripped them of the bark they wanted for food, and put the remains into the now massive dam.
Then, the summer rains hit. The raging river breached the dam six times washing parts of it away. We restrung water gaps tangled up in beaver sticks at all four fences that cross the river downstream. The beavers rebuilt their dams. Our summer hours were annoyingly tied up with patching fence and chasing escaped livestock. I don’t know if the beavers were annoyed.
Even as we marveled at the audacity and work ethic of the beavers, we mourned the loss of the majestic trees that shaded our part of the Bullpasture River and the cooler trout habitat they had supported.
Farming often gives us dilemmas for which there are no easy answers. I love watching the beavers working. I love the ducks and geese that have found the pond. I love the way the still water captures sunsets and silver skies. I love the quiet boink boink of the banjo frogs each evening and the song of swallows as they dip and dive for insects above the pool. I love the quiet hush of a frozen pond.
But, I do not like chasing cows or flooded hay meadows, or the loss of stately trees that took half a century to grow. I don’t like the fact that beavers carry giardia so I can’t wade in the river below the dam with my grandchildren. I really don’t like the mosquitoes that never lived here before but now swarm me at dusk as they rise from the marshy areas the beavers have created.
I don’t know how this story will end. I am hoping the beavers will move on because surely they will run out of food soon. I have read that they usually spend a couple of years in one place and then leave. But, those rascally willows: the ones that were cut to pencil-sharp nubbins. This past spring they sent up new branches. Of course they did. They were designed to survive floods. They don’t have a choice.
I do have a choice. Beavers are not endangered. According to the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources landowners may tear down dams, trap to kill or hunt any beavers that are creating havoc. The dilemma is do we act before all the trees are gone, or hang on and hope the beavers will leave on their own? No matter which comes first, we will miss the beauty and wonder of what they have created.
The story above first appeared in our November / December 2025 issue.
