As I mentioned in my last beaver post, we are dealing with an issue where a beaver keeps trying to clog up the overflow for our lake. We used to have a different overflow solution but moved to a simpler design that just has one flaw: it is much easier for beavers to dam.

And now our beaver is bringing along a kit to help out:

There are several methods for dealing with beavers, but a couple, shooting and trapping, are off the table. When the lake is full this overflow feeds over thirty acres (twelve hectares) of protected wetlands on our property and we don’t care what they do there. We just don’t want them causing issues with the lake.

In researching mitigation methods we decided to install a “keystone fence”. This is a fence around the overflow that keeps beavers from clogging it, and the shape of the fence is such that it would be much more work if they decided to try to dam all 50 feet of fence versus the small area around the drain.

I created a trapezoidal fence where three sides are 16 feet long with the narrow end being 4 feet long. All of those posts are 6 feet tall so you can see it does get deeper in that one corner. It was a bit of a pain to install (it took about six hours) and I couldn’t tell if my waders leaked as it was so hot I sweated through my clothes on the inside of the waders. (grin)

So far they have left it alone, but despite getting some much needed rain the lake is still down about six inches from reaching the overflow. I guess time will tell.

If it works we are supposed to expect some damming around the fence but as long as that is cleared off every three months or so it should last for several years. And it beats cleaning it back out every three days or so when the beavers get into blocking it.