AMESBURY — The developers hoping to build a new Hampton Inn on the corner of Elm Street and Route 110 are battling a flood of resistance to their planned 90-room hotel.
Their trouble is not from the Planning Board or Conservation Commission, which are currently reviewing the plan. It's not from angry neighbors — at least not the kind that walk on two legs.
It's coming from a family of beavers living next door.
The industrious beavers have done what comes naturally. They built a dam in a streambed, which flooded the area around it, including a portion of the hotel land. They built their den in the middle, and with a stack of laws granting them some protection, they are a proving to be a formidable foe.
The beavers live on land owned by Carriagetown Marketplace LLC, 15 acres that encompasses Stop and Shop and a number of retailers. It's the plan of developers True Homestead Partners to use the parcel of land east of the marketplace for the hotel, a 10,000-square-foot retail complex and parking. But working within the confines of their 2.5 acre site, the beaver-made swamp may make it difficult to accomplish that. Mayor Thatcher Kezer said the town's hands are tied when it comes to the nesting family.
"Unless we determine it's a public health hazard, it has to be the landowners who bring it forward," Kezer said.
It is illegal to tear open or disturb an active beaver dam unless one obtains a permit, which isn't easy to obtain. But while the beaver's mass of bundled sticks and mud can't be destroyed, the law allows landowners some options. Unfortunately for the animals, those options for the most part involve killing them.
There's only one method that provides a win-win for the beaver and developer. Water-level control devices, for instance, make the beaver habitat less desirable, as long as one has a permit. The theory behind the measures is to alter the dam in a way that can't be fixed by the animals, and hence ultimately persuades the critters to move on. But this option can be tricky since beavers are attuned to the sounds of water escaping their dam and by instinct will move quickly to shore up any weaknesses in their home. Other than that, the law does not provide any other means of relocating the animals.
"It's not legal in Massachusetts to just trap them and move them elsewhere," said Marjorie Rines of the Massachusetts Audubon Society. "The only thing you're allowed to do in Massachusetts is to get a permit and kill them."
A ballot question that passed in 2000 restricting the trapping methods formerly used to trap beavers and other fur bearers bars the use of lethal traps with names like the Steel-jaw foothold trap, padded jaw trap, body-gripping (Conibear) trap, snare, or deadfalls. They must be trapped in a cage and then disposed of, and according to the Division of Wildlife and Fisheries, the animals may be trapped without a permit from Nov. 1 through April 15 by a licensed trapper.
Kezer noted that the state law has some inconsistencies, as trappers can't legally kill them with a trap but are allowed to "club or drown" the animals.
"It restricts your ability to mitigate these types of situations," he said.
Kezer said the town has been discussing the situation with the owners of Carriagetown Market Place, and he believes they will act to get rid of the beavers.
"If the beaver dam remains and the water keeps rising, it will affect other property owners," he said.
Though it appears an unlikely avenue in this situation, there is one other option for those grappling with beavers and their handiwork, Rines said. And that's to tolerate them.
"It's a shame to interfere with beavers," Rines said, adding that they live a mostly benign existence alongside humans. "They've really started coming back fairly nicely, and they create fabulous habitat because of their dams. They create wetlands that didn't exist before, and these wetlands can become great blue heron rookeries.
Once hunted widely for their pelts, which caused a depletion of their numbers and sparked the trapping restrictions in 2000, beaver numbers have been coming back to old levels, and for the most part, the troubles they cause can be mitigated, Rines said.
"There are solutions that don't involve killing the beavers," she said.
But the solutions don't involve relocating them.
"Often people want to capture problem animals and release them someplace else," reads guidance on beaver relocation in a fact sheet put out by the Division of Wildlife and Fisheries. "However, moving wildlife is detrimental to both people and wildlife populations and is against the law. This law has been in effect for many years, protecting both people and wildlife."
Beaver Facts
Beavers measure between 32 to 48 inches, with their tails making up 12 to 20 inches of their size. They weigh between 27 to 67 pounds.
They are muscular animals with a massive skull and large incisors. Their broad, flat tails can be used to scull or steer and their large, webbed hind feet aid that process as well. The small and un-webbed front feet are used for carrying and digging. The brown fur is short and thick, with a waterproof underfur.
A single family unit is called a colony and consists of two adults, the young of the year, and the young of the previous year. They have between two and nine kits, or young a year.
They are vegetarians, feeding on any number of plants and trees in the summer, but in the winter they feed on the inner bark of trees, particularly aspen, willow, birch and alder.
In the fall, they collect edible branches and anchor them in the mud at the bottom of the pond near the entrance to the lodge. In the winter, the colony stays inside the lodge, leaving only to gather the cached food from the bottom of the pond.
Beavers are most active at night, so human observation is often limited to evening hours.
http://www.newburyportnews.com/local/x693285983/Hotel-plan-faces-unusual-foe-in-beavers
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