A critter that cuts down trees with its teeth sounds like a fantastical, made-up creature, but beavers really are native animals that make their home here in Michigan. Beavers are the third-largest rodent in the world, averaging about 40 pounds but occasionally weighing more than 100 pounds!

In January beavers are snuggled up in their lodges – a large, hollow mound of sticks and mud in the middle of a pond that contains a dry platform above the water inside. Beaver lodge entrances are accessible underwater, keeping the inhabitants safe from predators.

Beavers utilize the ponds they create by damming streams and small rivers with branches and mud. Building a pond allows beavers to swim right up to trees and shrubs, making it easy for them to float branches to where they’re needed to build their lodge.

Why do beavers fell whole trees, though? The trunks are too heavy for them to move, which makes the tasty leaves and young twigs higher up in the tree’s canopy the real goal. In late summer beavers collect large amounts of leafy branches and store them in the bottom of their pond. In the winter months, beavers will swim to this “refrigerator” and grab a snack of fresh tree leaves!

Prior to European colonization, beavers were abundant across Michigan. Their tree felling and pond building activities were an important part of nature’s cycle and shaped our native habitats. Ponds formed by beavers have a cyclical life; the creatures move into a new spot and flood an area adjacent to a water source to create a pond habitat free from trees and shrubs. Eventually, the beavers will exhaust their food supply and migrate to a new location, at which point their dam will fail and the former pond becomes a wet meadow. After decades, the meadow will revert to a thicket of wetland shrubs and the surrounding forest regrows. Once the food supply has bounced back, beavers will return and the pond cycle begins anew.

As with wildfires, this periodic natural disturbance keeps prairie fens, wet prairies and other grassland habitats in Oakland County from becoming permanent forests or shrub thickets.

Beavers have always been valued by indigenous communities for being a source of food and warm clothing. On the other hand, European fur traders, believing beavers to be a plentiful and valuable resource, set up unrestrained trapping operations that caused a severe decline in the beaver population.

In the last several decades, beavers have begun to rebound dramatically in Oakland County and can be found in about half a dozen county parks. Unfortunately, the same behaviors that make beavers amazing ecosystem engineers are often incompatible with modern life. Their dams easily flood roads and backyards, and landscaping trees are often targeted, which leads to many beavers getting tagged and trapped as a nuisance. Oakland County Parks works to avoid removing beavers unless necessary and utilizes a few helpful tricks before resorting to trapping.

For example, the damming of road culverts is often easy to stop with a fence around the upstream end of the water source. Pond levelers or “beaver baffles” can be installed through a dam to let water continue to trickle through, hopefully without the beavers realizing where the leak originates.

For a chance to see a beaver in its natural habitat, visit the fishing dock at Highland Oaks Nature Park. A beaver lodge is located right off the dock, with prime viewing times being close to dawn or dusk.

Nature Insights by Sean Zera | Natural Resources, Oakland County Parks.

For information, visit OaklandCountyParks.com. Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram and X.

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