Living With Beavers

Why are Beavers Important?

Beavers play an important role in our local environment. Beavers provide multiple beneficial services including slowing and storing stormwater, capturing excess sediments, recharging groundwater, creating wetlands and providing critical habitat for threatened juvenile salmon and countless other plants and animals. While providing all these important functions, beaver activity can occasionally cause headaches for landowners, land managers and municipal governments.

Beavers can be found in rivers, streams, lakes, marshes and even roadside ditches and stormwater detention facilities. Any wet location that has adequate vegetation, used for food and building material, will be a prime location for beavers to establish. Additionally, beavers prefer sites with deep, calm water and will create those conditions by building dams, backing up water and creating ponds. It is this modification of habitat that can cause conflict when it occurs in areas used by humans.

The major issue with beavers tends to be flooding of yards, homes, driveways and roads. Additionally, beavers will take down trees and other vegetation for food and building materials. There are options available to help mitigate the impacts of beavers, allowing us to live alongside them. In extreme cases removal is also an option, however if a beaver is removed from a preferred habitat it is extremely likely that another beaver will move into the available habitat.

Options to Prevent Conflicts

Protect Vegetation

Control beaver access to food sources and building materials. You can fence off large areas of vegetation or protect individual plants. Fencing and/or plant protectors should be a minimum of 3’ tall. Materials you can use range from welded wire fencing, plastic fencing to corrugated drain pipe. Any protection methods should be inspected regularly to ensure they are not damaged.

Control Pond Levels

By allowing water to flow through beaver dams, the water level of beaver ponds can be managed to reduce local flooding issues. The most common method to control beaver pond water levels is with a Flexible Leveler (also known as a Pond Leveler). This device consists of a long corrugated pipe that is installed through the dam to allow water to flow through the dam. Metal caging should be installed around the pipe inlet to keep the beaver from clogging the pipe with debris. This option likely requires a permit, contact your Watershed Steward for more information.

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Prevent Clogged Culverts

Beavers will often try and plug up anywhere water is flowing out of their territory, which includes culverts that run under driveways and roads. Installing an exclusion device (often referred to as a Beaver Deceiver) around the inlet of culverts keeps beavers from stuffing debris into the culverts in order to back up water. An exclusion device consists of metal fencing and posts to anchor the fencing around the culvert inlet. In some cases a device may need to be installed on the outlet of a culvert as well. This option likely requires a permit, contact your Watershed Steward for more information.

Dam Notching/Removal

In general dam removal is not recommended, since beavers will often rebuild the dam in a day or two, but this can be an appropriate action in certain situations. Removal of dam material can release large amounts of water and sediment which can flood neighboring properties downstream, so care should be taken to remove materials slowly as to not cause damage downstream. Landowners are encouraged to research your watershed and be aware of possible beaver activity downstream and especially upstream of your property. In most cases dam removal requires a permit, contact your Watershed Steward for more information and help researching beaver activity in on your stream.

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Although the beaver management options above can often be successful and cost effective, trapping and removing animals is also an option. Trapping and removing all animals in a colony can eliminate beaver impacts, but it is important to consider that more often than not this relief is temporary. New beavers are likely to quickly move into habitat made available by trapping. Beaver trapping, whether for sport or to remove problem animals, is regulated by Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. For problem animal removal, WDFW maintains a list of certified trappers or wildlife control operators.

Lethal Trapping

Use of body-gripping traps is only allowed in exceptional circumstances and requires a special trapping permit. Therefore most professional trappers trap with “live” traps. These traps are often set using a legal “kill set” which traps and holds animals underwater. Alternatively, trappers are allowed to use a live trap set and humanely euthanize a trapped beaver on site. Because trappers use different techniques and have a wide range of fees for service, finding a trapper that meets your needs may require contacting and interviewing multiple trappers.

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Live Trap and Relocation

Recent changes to Washington’s Administrative Code make it conditionally legal to trap and relocate beavers. A special permit is required for a beaver to be released on property other than that on which it was trapped. Studies have shown that survival rates among relocated beaver are very low and animals that do survive rarely stay in the location they are released. Site selection for the release of a beaver is important in order to insure site conditions are appropriate, other beavers do not occupy the site and that the release will not create problems for other landowners. The Tulalip Tribes wildlife program traps and relocates beavers for restoration purposes and is well equipped to trap and move whole families at once, which increases the chances of success. The Tribes occasionally trap and relocate problem animals from private land in Snohomish County when other methods of control aren’t successful.

Content adapted from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife's Living with Wildlife-Beavers.