UConn tries to track beavers as numbers in state increase

Engineers, commodity, lost keystone species, and pest — beavers have played many roles in Connecticut’s landscape.

Their survival is also an astounding conservation success story, according to a new book by local author Leila Philip who explores our relationship with beavers. Where they were once expatriated from the state by the fur trade and trapped to near extinction, in recent decades their numbers have rebounded.

A 2001 state report estimated that there were around 8,000 beavers in Connecticut, but it’s unknown how many more there are now as they’re not tracked by the state. But a University of Connecticut project seeks to map where beavers are returning, to better understand their growth and recovery.

And then, how to coexist alongside them and their often beneficial water manipulating habitats.

Most people don’t spend much time thinking about beavers, and many people have never seen one. Philip said she was driven to understand beavers, and their significance after a chance encounter while walking her dog in her hometown forests of Woodstock.

“I heard that iconic beaver slap, but I didn’t know what it was,” she said. “I thought a gun had gone off, truly.”

But when she looked for the source of the sound, she didn’t find a hunter, nor did she find what was normally a muddy clearing in the trees. Instead she found a silvery pond glinting in the sun, the stillness cut by a little brown head swimming back and forth.

“I was transfixed because of the tenacity of this animal,” said Philip. “I came out to watch the beaver every day and saw the transformation of this wet part of the woods into a beaver pond and it was one of the most incredible things I’d ever seen.”

Beavers are native to North America. The iconic rodents sport large paddle-shaped tails, webbed paws and teeth laced with iron. They build dams out of small trees, mud and sticks to serve as fortifications for their lodges, dens built out in the water that create dams.

There were millions of beavers on the continent when European settlers arrived. Philip said the scale of beavers on the landscape made the dense acres of trees a “waterworld of great spreading fans of waters throughout the forests.”

“That’s what we’ve lost,” Philip said. “We filled in 50 percent of our wetlands and that’s a problem for us now because those wetlands play such an important function in cleaning our water, slowing our water so it recharges the aquifers.”

The fur trade was critical for the formation of Connecticut as a colony, and eventually a state. Philip said beavers were essential for jump-starting transatlantic trade.

By the mid-1800s, beavers were all but locally extinct as over-hunting moved them farther north. Early conservationists worked to bring them back. Some were reintroduced to the Yale Forest in 1914. Other reintroductions saw them recolonize local river systems.

But it took until the 1960s for them to truly rebound. Philip said this was due to many river systems being gummed up with industrial uses and the reforestation of farmlands. The beavers finally had habitats that connected, and they thrived.