Syracuse.com - Beavers have a friend in retired SUNY ESF professor

[HuntingNY-News]

"Beavers were here first and we followed with our houses and roads -- not the other way around," he said.

For some, beavers are nothing but a bother.

They dam up streams and culverts and flood fields, residential areas and roads. Local wildlife nuisance control experts and county road crews are constantly busy during the warm months, trying to take them out or working to undo their handiwork.

Dietland Muller-Schwarze counts himself among those who has a "more balanced" attitude toward this busy, water-friendly mammal.

"Beavers were here first and we followed with our houses and roads -- not the other way around," he said.

Beavers were almost extinct in this state at the beginning of the 20th Century due to excessive trapping and loss of habitat due to farming and development. Only a few were left in the Adirondacks near Old Forge. However, due to protective measures by the state, their numbers came roaring back during the last 80 years.

Muller-Schwarze, 78, a retired SUNY ESF professor in wildlife biology, studied the animal in parts of the Adirondacks and in the Alleghany State Park for more than 25 years. He wrote two books on them -- the most recent, "The Beaver: Its Life and Impact," was published in 2011.

His research focused on the animal's use of chemicals (scent) to communicate with other beavers. Today he writes and occasionally gives talks. He was interviewed this week at his home in Manlius.

Of all animals, why did you chose to study beavers?

My specialization was chemical ecology and animal behavior. Although they're largely nocturnal, they stay in one place and for many years. You can count on them being there.

A beaver swims across the flooded area that's home to the great blue heron rookery at the Sterling Nature Center in Sterling. The flooded 40-acres was created when a beaver dam was built on a stream running through the area.Mike Greenlar | [email protected] 

Talk about how they use chemical communication.

Beavers use scent or castor mounds to communicate with other beavers. They dig out loads of mud with their paws and dump it one area on the water's edge of their territory. Then they go on top of it with their rear end and mark it with secretions from their castor glands. It has a strong smell, even to people. We did all kinds of experiments, such as how they reacted to odors from other females and males, other juveniles and adults and from a neighboring beaver.

What happens if a beaver smells the scent of a strange beaver on its mound?

That's an outrageous situation. He'll swim around and look for the intruder. And if he finds him, he'll chase him off. More than once, we found beavers with notches and as much of a quarter of his tail bit off. The beaver will then go back to the castor mound, paw it apart and then go with his rear end and mark it again with his own scent.

You mentioned your "more balanced" attitude toward beavers. Please explain.

They do a lot of good. Their dams create wetlands, which cleanse the water. The water percolates slowly through the area and gets purified, everything from bacteria to toxins get taken out. In addition, these wetlands create habitat for other large animals, birds, insects and plants. In the Adirondacks, beaver-made wetlands are assisting the comeback of moose. Finally, beaver-made, wetland/meadows were attractive to the early settlers of this country, who drained them and easily turned them into farm land because of the fertile soil.

Talk about ways that beavers and humans can live in harmony.

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During the times when beavers were scarce, humans built all sorts of roads, homes and vacation homes near streams, rivers and lakes that didn't take beavers into account. Nowadays, we know there are many ways to design and regulate things like stream flows by doing things like putting pipes in beaver dams so that beavers and humans can live peacefully together. There are such things as "beaver deceivers' that can be set up in front of culverts so that beavers can't block them up.

Still, there comes a time when a beaver becomes a nuisance and there is no answer apart from trapping it, or killing it. The DEC used to trap and relocate these animals, but no longer does so because it ran out of places to relocate them. Your thoughts?

With all the development we have, there will always be conflicts...with residential developments. shopping centers, golf courses. Last I read, there were an estimated 18,000 beaver colonies in this state (with family size of 4 to 5 animals). Before, there were predators such as bears, mountain lions and wolves to keep their numbers check. We don't have those big predators any more. Frankly, I don't have any problems with trappers. They play the role of the predator.

What do beavers eat? Just bark and trees?

They're vegetarians and eat mostly soft plant material, such as grasses, ferns, the leaves of raspberry bushes. As for chopping down trees, they use them to make their dams and lodges after eating the bark off. They also make a pile of branches with the bark still on underwater near their lodge. They depend on that as their main food source during the winter.

Beavers created this damage last to trees along the Onondaga Creekwalk near the Inner Harbor off Onondaga Lake.Mike Greenlar | [email protected] 

This past spring, there was a news story about a man in Belarus who was fatally injured while trying to grab an adult beaver. It bit him several times in the leg, severing his femoral artery. Comment?

Really, the beaver did not kill the man. It just defended itself. The man could have just as well suffered fatal injury from a dog, a snapping turtle, or for that matter, by barbed wire. The key is, you just don't handle a wild (or even domestic) animal in that manner. You are asking for trouble.

Tell me something interesting or funny about beavers.

In 2004, down in Louisianna, police were chasing robbers of a casino, who threw their stolen cash into a stream while trying to get away. Police later found some of the cash packed in a beaver dam. It was an odd way to launder money.

View the full article on The Syracuse Outdoors Blog