Today’s blog is less about gardening for wildlife as it is coexisting with wildlife. If you encourage wildlife to visit your yard, you have to expect the unruly visitors to stop by as well as the more desirable types. With your birds, butterflies, and frogs, you also get the raccoons knocking off the trashcan lids at midnight and an assortment of rodent pests, including those pesky beavers dragging a bucket around…

Beavers aren’t your usual rodent problem, but I have them, anyway.

My property borders on a large pond shared with three neighbors. It’s a large pond, and the overflow from the pond runs down a long spillway bordering the edge of my property. This isn’t a concrete spillway, mind you, it’s more of a wooded, rocky stream bed. When the pond overflows, I have a lovely waterfall where the water cascades over a four or five foot drop and then dances down a long, rocky stream bed into a wooded ravine. When we first moved in, the ravine was just a marshy area, with lots of horsetail reeds. There was a narrow area where I considered constructing a dam to make a wooded pond, but there wasn’t an easy way to get down there, and I am not an engineer.

I have a waterfall when the pond overflows.

Conveniently, beavers are good engineers. It wasn’t very long before a suspicious pile of sticks started blocking the very spot that I had pegged for my dam. Now, this could have been coincidence. It took almost a year before deciding that, yes, this is the work of a very stealthy beaver building himself a pond, because the dam eventually went over the top of my narrow area and started to grow.

The pond went from a few inches deep and a dam a foot across, to a pond several feet deep and a forty-foot dam from end to end. My wooded marsh is now a pond. I’m a little ambivalent about that, but last fall we heard wood ducks on the pond, so all is well.

Trying to remove them

Yesterday I went to check out the big pond up top. It has been a wet spring, but I thought the pond looked unusually high. Suspicious, I checked the spillway, and sure enough, the beavers had started a second dam across the spillway. Well, this just won’t do. So, I put on my rubber boots, grabbed a metal rake and set about excavating a channel through the middle of the beaver dam. This is easier said than done, because beavers know how to build a dam. It was well-constructed. It took me over an hour to dredge a small breach down to the original level of the spillway.

I figured the pond would drain to its normal level overnight. So, I was surprised today that the pond had not drained more than a few inches.

I checked the spillway again. Overnight, those darned beavers had plugged the hole I’d made in their dam. They’d used cans and old Styrofoam in the original construction. I was astonished when I saw the old bucket they’d used for the repair.

There weren’t any buckets near the dam yesterday. At some point last night, the thought had to blossom in a beaver mind, “Gee, I know just the thing I need”. Then this beaver had to waddle or swim off to heaven-knows where to grab this dilapidated bucket and haul it all the way back to the spillway.

And how does a beaver carry a bucket, anyway? You just have to laugh.

So, next time you’re cursing about the mice getting into your birdseed, be grateful. You could have beavers.