This commentary is by John Aberth, a licensed volunteer wildlife rehabilitator who rehabs beavers, raptors and other animals at Flint Brook Wildlife Rescue in Roxbury.
In her Oct. 9 commentary, “There’s no silver bullet for beaver conservation, coexistence and management,” Kim Royar claims, “Our current beaver trapping season assists in sustaining and coexisting with Vermont’s healthy and abundant beaver population by minimizing the need to take beavers as a ‘nuisance’ in conflict situations.”
Yet there is absolutely no credible, scientific evidence to show that trapping plays any meaningful role in wildlife management and control. Indeed, the mere fact that town road crews throughout Vermont kill, on average, 500 to 600 “nuisance” beavers every year is a rather high “minimum” trade-off for the 1,400 beavers killed by recreational trappers every year.
In the words of Bryant White, lead researcher for the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, “Broad generalizations about the effectiveness of avocational trapping at reducing human-wildlife conflicts are unwise.”
Beavers, like all furbearers, self-regulate their populations in accordance with the carrying capacity of the land — that is, the amount of food available on the landscape to sustain their numbers. This is a fundamental biological principle that all biologists should be familiar with.
In the case of beavers, some of the best field research available to us proves this to be the case. At Quabbin Reservation in Massachusetts and Sagehen Creek in California, on-the-ground studies and counts of beaver colonies over the course of nearly 50 years, from the 1940s to the 1990s, showed that beaver populations follow a cyclical pattern, rising to a peak before falling back to almost the original population level.
Since trapping was not allowed at either site, all this was done entirely through beaver self-regulation, without human intervention.
Of course, it is true that when beaver populations expand, opportunities for conflicts with human-built infrastructure, such as road culverts, will increase. Fortunately, high-quality flow devices can be built and adapted to almost any conflict situation in order to resolve such conflicts in a non-lethal and sustainable manner, thus preserving both the human infrastructure and the valuable wetlands that beavers create.
However, this requires a willingness and commitment to non-lethal, humane solutions over trapping, but it is one that will reward towns in the long run, both in terms of cost savings and habitat protection.
It has long been a shibboleth of state wildlife agencies that bans on trapping will result in Beaver Armageddon, when beaver populations will immediately “explode” to the point that human-beaver conflicts will become overwhelming. This is a fantasy that has no basis in fact.
Many state biologists, including Royar, point to the example of Massachusetts, where a trapping ban called the Wildlife Protection Act passed by ballot measure in 1996. In a graph produced by the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, beaver population in the state supposedly increased by 50% in the year immediately after the ban, whereas in the year just prior, it allegedly grew by just 2.4%.
Like Vermont, Massachusetts relied entirely on trapping data to estimate statewide population trends of beaver; yet this database obviously was eviscerated by the ban, going from 1,136 pelts in 1995-96 to just 98 in 1996-97 (when beavers were caught only by cage traps).
In a communication from 2021, Dave Wattles, Massachusetts furbearer biologist, admitted to me that it was a “valid question” as to how the “greatly reduced” trapping harvest after 1996 affected beaver population estimates, on which he was not willing “to even speculate.”
The public must have confidence that state wildlife agencies are making policy decisions on managing wildlife based on science, not political pressure from lobbying groups such as trapper associations, which represent a miniscule proportion of our overall population.
In its own Media and Communications survey from 2018, the Vermont Department of Fish & Wildlife found that 53% of respondents expressed concern that it was being influenced by politics. A trapping ban would have the immeasurable benefit of taking politics out of the equation of wildlife management. It also would be enormously popular, supported by 75% of Vermonters. Additionally, throughout the Northeast, 79% of those surveyed oppose recreational trapping.
It’s long past time that we have a recreational trapping ban. Our wildlife, and the humans interconnected with them, deserve no less.
