Who knew that beavers are some of the best architectural and engineering professionals in the animal kingdom? I attended the NYC Parks educational beaver event in Staten Island, which took place in Long Pond Park and led by a trio of rangers. The entire event consisted of walking throughout the Park and visiting the large pond, where the main ranger, Vin, provided an extensive education of beavers. Long Pond Park was the site of a beaver lodge several years ago, and Vin said we may see remnants of it. He started off with a preface of how, compared to the past prior decades, NYC has a lot more different wildlife now, such as hawks, eagles, whales, and seals. Just in Staten Island, there has been a significant increase in the number of deers and in the future we will start to see many coyotes, which have been spotted more in other boroughs over the recent years. 

Education started off with the history of the North American Beaver. Unfortunately, they were almost exterminated due to the fur trade. Around the 1600s, immigrants arrived in North America and beaver fur was highly sought after because beaver numbers in Europe were declining. These people would trap beavers, bring the fur back to Europe, and become rich. Vin pulled out a sample of real beaver fur and had the group feel it; it was incredibly soft, luscious, and dense. It was so dense that every square inch of fur has 70-150 thousand hairs. The only other animal that exceeds this amount of hair per square inch is the sea otter! Vin went on to discuss other reasons why beaver population declined, such as how NYC’s wetlands worsened through dumping chemicals into waterways, and this not only impacted beavers, but NYC wildlife as a whole. On top of that, beavers can be exterminated because they may damage properties and flood basements.

Nonetheless, he explained that there are a lot of ecological benefits to beavers. For example, streams can overtime carry sediment from one location to another, but where beavers dam a stream, they create a new pond that forms habitats for fish, frogs, turtles, insects and the ponds become nursing grounds. The sediment is prevented from being carried across the stream and the water quality becomes cleaner at the site of a dam through filtration. Dams and ponds also protect beavers from predators because they don’t want to go into these waters to catch them, unlike by river banks. Another ecological benefit is that these ponds allow for the fish to flourish and become a new food source for other animals. Interestingly, out in the west, beavers help in slowing the spread of wildfires from their pond creations.

The group eventually walked over to a large pond, where Vin explained how Beavers build their homes on the water. Their lodges can be over 20 feet long and 6 feet above the water, which have underwater entrances so predators can’t get inside. Impressively, these structures have air vents to let warm air out at the top, have multiple rooms, such as where babies are nursed in, a bathroom, food room, and they may also have non-related guests living in the same lodge, such as muskrats. Beavers are apparently engineering geniuses! They even use the frozen ponds as refrigerators, as they are able to go underwater to collect their food. 

At the end of the nature walk, I asked Vin: “Despite the fact that we did not see any beavers today, or any remnants of their structures around the large pond we stood at, let’s say that today they showed up, how long would they stay in one spot?” Vin stated “it can be for their whole lifetime that they stay here. We actually did have beavers in historic Richmond Town, but unfortunately they kept flooding the area, so the department of environmental protection took them. So, unfortunately beavers can be relocated depending on the situation.” It’s clear that human conflict is one of the main challenges of having beavers thrive in an environment.