Vermonters work to broker peace deal with beavers

Vermont Edition

Town and state leaders are working to improve humans' relationship with beavers to support flood resiliency. Beavers' brains are small — about the size of a walnut — but you wouldn't know it from watching them work. "They get up and go to work every single day, never take a vacation," said Skip Lisle, a wildlife biologist in Grafton. Lisle invented the Beaver Deceiver, a flow device that sneaks water away from beavers and removes the need to trap or kill them.For naturalist Patti Smith of the Bonnyvale Environmental Education Center in West Brattleboro, it's important for Vermonters to understand what happened when beavers were overhunted in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. "When all of the beavers disappeared from North America — disappeared being a euphemism for 'turned into stylish hats' — eventually those dams degraded and all of those wetlands drained," she said.