- Philip Thibodeau
- Dec 2
It was in the summer of 2024, on a quiet stretch of the Eight Mile River off Churchill Street in Southington, that the first dam was spotted. There was no doubt about its origins – only beavers would have taken the trouble to weave branches into a water-tight barrier there. On occasion locals would hear the thwack beavers make when they slap their tails on water.
During their first year of residence, the beavers kept a low profile. That changed this past summer when they began constructing a dam up against the roadway. Kevin and Renee Hastings were among those who would come out to watch the animals. At the start of the summer they saw two beavers, dubbed ‘Bucky’ and ‘Penny’ by their daughter. The two were not always visible, but when they were, they put on a show for onlookers as they collected branches for their dam or played in the stream.
Their return was not just a source of delight for nature-watchers; it also marked a historical turning-point. There is, at the moment, a healthy population of beavers in Connecticut. Yet for many years, our state had no beavers at all. In the case of Southington, none have lived here for a very long time – certainly for decades, quite possibly for over two hundred years.
A Long Absence
When European settlers first reached this part of the world in the 1600’s, they were eager to find things they could ship home for profit. One of the most abundant and valuable products they identified were furs – the pelts of bears, foxes, deer, muskrats, beavers, and other mammals. The colonists relied on Native Americans to do most of the trapping, exchanging wampum, metal, and other goods for furs. Four centuries ago, cities like Hartford and Springfield were basically trading posts that received thousands of pelts each year and sent them down the Connecticut river to be shipped abroad for sale.
The trade in beaver furs was not destined to last long. European demand was insatiable; meanwhile, beavers reproduce slowly, and they are easy to catch. Before long, the species had been completely eliminated from our area. In his classic history of the New England landscape, Changes in the Land, William Cronon cites a Connecticut historian, Benjamin Trumbull, who wrote in 1797 that otters, foxes, martens, raccoons, minks, muskrats, and beavers could no longer be found in the state.
The end of the fur trade gave the mammals a chance to recover, but deforestation, hunting, and development hampered their return. It was only in the last century that deer, foxes, bears, and raccoons came back to Connecticut in significant numbers, spreading from the northern parts of New England.
The year beavers officially returned to Connecticut was 1914, when a breeding pair was released in the town of Union. Very slowly, they spread. The animal is now fairly common in the wetlands of eastern and western Connecticut, with a population estimated at around 6,000.
In the more densely populated center of the state, however, beavers are still relatively rare. Val Guarino of the Southington Conservation Land Trust recalled seeing a pond a few years ago in Berlin that had a beaver dam. But Guarino could not recall any sightings of beavers or dams in Southington prior to 2024. David Lapreay, the Town’s Superintendent of Highway, Parks, and Recreation, offered a similar assessment; he and his co-workers, who keep a close watch on Southington’s streams and roads, had not encountered any beaver dams in town before last year.
If these assessments are accurate, it would appear that Bucky and Penny are the first beavers to visit Southington in a very long time – possibly more than two centuries.
A Struggle To Co-exist
When beavers dam up a stream, a pond can quickly form where none had been before. In the summer of 2024, a neighbor whose property borders the Eight Mile River was alarmed to find such a pond forming near his house. According to his post on Facebook, he brought in a backhoe to remove the dam twice; twice, the beavers rebuilt.
This summer the beavers were back at work. Churchill Street crosses the Eight Mile on a short causeway that has a culvert in the middle to let the water through. Jeff O’Donnell and Jan Gatzuras, who live down the street, described how, in early summer, the beavers constructed a dam that blocked the upstream mouth of the culvert and caused the water behind it to rise to a point that the road would sometimes flood during a downpour.
After a crew from the Town cleared the dam, the animals started building another one just south of the road:
But then the beavers abruptly abandoned that effort in order to take a different approach. This time they plugged up the culvert from the inside, in effect turning the entire causeway into a dam. Once again a pond formed, and once again the Highway Department, concerned that nearby residents might be stranded by floodwaters during a storm, dispatched a team to clear out the pipe.
Beavers, though, are persistent; it is only a matter of time before they come back. So the question arose: what is the most effective way to deal with an animal that can change the landscape in a way that humans may find inconvenient?
The “Beaver Deceiver”
Like birds, bees, and other creatures that construct nests, beavers work primarily by instinct. They collect woody material by habit, and follow clues in the environment to determine where they should stack it. One of the strongest triggers for their building response is the sound of running water. Even a small leak in a dam will set them working until the leak is fixed. And despite the expression 'busy beaver,' beavers try to do as little work as they can get away with, in order to conserve energy.
In the 1990’s a Vermont native named Skip Lisle was brought on by the Penobscot Nation in Maine to solve the problem of beavers blocking up culverts on their land. Lisle figured out how the beaver’s instincts could be used against them. The device he patented is a large trapezoidal fence anchored to the stream bed that surrounds the upstream mouth of a culvert. He named his invention the Beaver Deceiver.
Lisle's Deceiver uses three tricks to discourage the animals from blocking a stream. First, its long perimeter presents beavers with a high-effort task. Second, beavers who are attempting to cover the mouth of the culvert will find themselves building away from rather than towards it, so they give up in frustration. Third, even if they do persist in building along the device’s flanks, the sound of rushing water grows fainter as the intake gets wider, which deactivatives their instinct. When properly installed and maintained, Beaver Deceivers have a near-perfect record of keeping the mouths of culverts clear.
At its meeting of November 6, the seven members of Southington’s Conservation Commission approved the purchase of a “Keystone fence sytem" for the Churchill Street culvert. The vendor, Beaver Solutions of Southampton, Massachusetts, promptly fulfilled the order, installing the system on November 18.
It remains to be seen what the beavers will do next – whether they will stay in the same area, or move upstream or downstream, to a site with less human interference. O’Donnell thought he had seen signs of new construction upstream in early November. “It wouldn’t surprise me,” he said, “if the beavers were smart enough to realize they’re better off building a dam well into the woods, away from where humans travel. That would be great; it wouldn’t affect the road, and it wouldn’t be a safety problem.”
With winter fast approaching, the beavers may not have time to construct a full dam. Whether they make it to next spring depends on the amount of food that they were able to store away this fall. Bucky and Penny may come back next year, or they may not; no one knows for sure.
There is only one thing we do know for certain beavers have finally returned to Southington, a piece of land that their species once called home for many thousands of years.
