Denying dams: Town of Stowe beats beavers at their own game

The town hired Lisle as an alternative to trapping the animals, an option that many wildlife advocates say is an unnecessary and lethal means.

Lisle said killing the beavers won’t solve the problem, but making the area less appealing to them might.

Long before Stowe Elementary School, baseball fields, pickleball courts and the hockey arena were built in the area — along with several nearby homes — the land now occupied by all those places, roughly bordered by Park and Depot streets, belonged to wetland-dwelling flora and fauna.

“All of this development was done in wetlands,” he said. “One of the reasons this is wetland is because beavers dam in the same places today as they did for 10,000 years before the fur trade.”

In December, the Stowe Selectboard appeared ready to hire someone to start trapping the beavers but gave the animals a reprieve to try and mitigate the problem using non-lethal methods. The town has not trapped beavers since 2019, according to town manager Charles Safford.

That’s when Stowe adopted guidelines that encourage more cohabitation and less trapping.

Safford said the town still has the ability to trap, if beaver dams threaten public infrastructure or safety. He added it would require a public hearing first, so people know to keep their pets and kids away from traps.

Safford added the problem area remains Memorial Park, and there are plenty of places along the West Branch River, Moss Glen Falls — which is state-controlled — and other locations where the beavers continue to live, and build.

“There are plenty of dams throughout Stowe that don’t put our public infrastructure at risk, and we leave them well enough alone,” he said.

Lisle said he wagers the town has gone through “scores of kill cycles” over several decades, but the beavers never really go away because they know good terrain when they see it, and new ones will just migrate downriver from the West Branch and make their ways to the wetlands surrounding Memorial Park.

“If you rely on killing, you’ll never solve the problem,” Lisle said. “They’ve been battling beavers here probably since they returned from the fur trade, probably 70 years ago, without ever really solving the problem.”

He said beavers are “great explorers of the landscape” and they’ll just keep coming back to good quality wetlands with plenty of places to dam up. If they are prevented from doing that, by Lisle and the town “degrading their habitat,” they might just move on somewhere else.

Like a house guest wearing out their welcome, eventually they’ll get the hint and leave, he said.

Lisle’s Beaver Deceivers are trademarked “flow devices” meant to keep critters from accessing culverts and other manmade flood control infrastructure. He said his services are in demand and he is kept busy installing them, and he prefers to do it personally because he custom fits every device to a community’s developed and wild landscapes.

Lisle said culverts, especially, are inviting to the engineering-minded animals, who see the space as just another void that needs filling.

“It’s a little tiny hole in a big manmade dam, so it’s perfect damming site,” he said. “It’s really important to prevent them from ever clogging those culverts again.”