In the Carp Hills beavers are responsible for enhancing the landscape of wetlands and ponds that benefit many plants and animals. Their dams deepen ponds in natural depressions, create new ponds, and expand biodiverse marshes and swamps.
When a beaver arrives at a new site, it needs the water level to be high enough to swim in, protect its lodge from land predators, and support the plants that it eats like willow and waterlily roots. The beaver is attracted to the sound of running water. Its instinct is to block the flow with a wall of mud, interlaced branches and even stones, thereby creating or enlarging a body of water behind the dam.
The beaver will construct a lodge, raise a family, and live at the pond, sometimes for many years, until its food runs out (or it dies). Then it will move on. Eventually its dam will break and the pond will empty, returning to a stream or small pond or wetland.
Taken between 2016 and 2023, the photographs below show the lifecycle of a 4 hectare (9 acre) beaver pond in the Carp Hills. The beavers were active in this pond for many years, repairing the dam when it broke in November 2015, but they abandoned their lodge in 2019 for unknown reasons. The dam – a very old one – quickly breached without regular maintenance and the pond drained.
In 2020 the pond became a beaver meadow, a wetland fed by streams from nearby active beaver ponds. Dormant seeds lying in the pond’s sediment or new seeds blown in by the wind quickly germinated and now thrive in the rich, moist soil. Butterflies and other pollinators dance among the wild flowers, an abundant display in the otherwise harsh conditions of the acidic rock barrens.
Beavers returned some time in late 2020 or 2021, raising water levels again, but still one meter below high levels. Shallow water allowed cattails to grow. Cattails and the raised water level attracted muskrats, which built five small lodges in the pond in fall 2021. Cattails are muskrat’s preferred food, but they will also eat a variety of other wetland plants and even become carnivorous if edible plant material is scarce.
The cycle has come full circle: the pond water level returned to near pre-2019 levels in late spring 2022.
Learn more
Read about beavers in the Carp Hills.
Read more about muskrats at Hinterlands Who’s Who.