Protective custody

Seeking a balance between beavers and trees

Outwitting the industrious beaver has proven more difficult than first thought. Readers will recall last year about this time that municipal officials had to resort to trapping the flat-tailed rodents in the Wellington harbour and moving them out of the area. Where they were moved, or their condition upon arrival, were never disclosed. For weeks, beavers had been busy gnawing down trees on the municipal beach and surrounding land that forms the emerging protrusion of the sandbar into Lake Ontario that becomes the sandbanks formation. An excavated channel serving as a link between West Lake and Lake Ontario is the demarcation line between the provincial park and the muncipality’s beach and docking areas.

In recent years the Wellington Rotary Club has invested many thousands of dollars—and as much sweat equity— into improving the beach, enhancing accessibility and amenities specifically for the humans. While there have long been beavers keen to build a lodge in the harbour, lately they have taken to consuming many of the young trees that provide stability to the sandbar—threatening, in the view of some, the channel and the piers that form the wall of the channel.

Neither do the beavers confine their tree cutting to municipal property. Last year several large trees on private property lining the harbour were felled during the night.

Now as winter approaches the beaver or beavers are at it again. Dozens of trees have been taken down and cleaned of branches. Most are along a boardwalk that runs along the beach. The animals drag the bits down the beach and into the water. Then they swim across the bay and drag them up and over the pier that extends out to the lighthouse. Then back into the water the beavers manoeuvre the freshly cut wood and place it neatly among the mud and branches that form the beaver’s lodge.

Captain Bowles and his white whale: Harbourmaster Chris Bowles and the beaver lodge.

It is estimated that about 70 trees have been toppled by the beavers over the past few years. None have been allowed to grow along the pier.

Some are concerned that left unchecked, the beavers will clear the sandbar—making it much more susceptible to erosion and thus compromising efforts to keep the channel open for boat traffic.

Yet others say the beavers will not destroy their own habitat—that they only target trees that coppice, meaning they sprout new growth from the stumps left behind. Further, they suggest the beavers are shrewd stewards of their habitat—careful not to take more than can be sustained.

So this year the beavers are being allowed to stay in the harbour. As a compromise the Wellington Harbour Improvement Project has donated about 300 feet of galvanized wire fencing four feet high. Last week municipal workers wrapped the fencing material around about 100 of the trees on the parkland.

“We are trying to find a balance,” said Chris Bowles, spokesperson for WHIP. “They are clever little animals. They can destroy a lot of trees in a short amount of time. We have to learn to co-exist with them in the harbour.”