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Beaver is the largest North American rodent. It has large orange teeth and a flat paddle-shaped tail. The pelt of beaver is composed of long, coarse protective hairs over a thick, wooly undercoat in various shades of brown. Beavers are known to reach a length of five feet; but 35 to 40 inches is typical. They typically weigh 40 to 50 pounds, but can reach the weight of 90 pounds.
During the spring and summer, beavers eat leaves, buds, twigs, fruit, ferns, stems, and the roots of water plants. In fall and winter, they eat soft cuttings from trees stored beneath the water.
Beavers make several sounds--churrs, mumbles, whines, snorts, hisses--as well as slapping their tails against the water to sound an alarm.
Nuisance Concerns: Beavers can cause problems and damage in a variety of ways.
- Environmental changes - Beavers are habitat engineers. They are one of the few animals capable of modifying their environment to make it more suitable for their needs. The use of dams to flood large areas with deep standing water where once only shallow, slow-moving water, or no water existed. When this happens, plants and other animals that are attracted to pond life and associated wetlands quickly establish themselves in the newly flooded area.
- Damaging trees - Beavers prefer to fell small trees from 2 to 6 inches in diameter but have been known to cut trees up to 3 feet in diameter. They can also damage even larger trees by stripping off the tree bark. Even if the bark is not stripped around the full circumference of the tree trunk, it often will kill the tree.
- Crops, timber, and damaging structures - Beaver ponds can cause significant damage to human interests. Flooding can remove pastures and crops from production and drown stands of trees. Flooding may also threaten public safety by compromising the integrity of levees, dikes, roadways, bridges, and trestles through saturation of the soil with water.
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