Southeast Beaver Alliance

05/01/2026

April Showers Bring May Flowers 🌧️🌷... but also Beavers? 🦫

With longer days and lush vegetation everywhere, May is basically a beaver’s dream—plenty of food, high water levels for dam-building, and lots of activity just beneath the surface 🌿💧

Right now, North American beaver families are welcoming their newest arrivals! Late April through May is peak baby season, which means tiny kits are tucked safely inside lodges while parents stay busy gathering fresh spring snacks and keeping their wetlands in top shape.

If you’re taking advantage of the warm Spring evenings outdoors, you might just catch a glimpse of these ecosystem engineers hard at work. This beaver has been spotted by SEBA member Jayne Willard several evenings in a row, chewing down branches from these Japanese Knotweed (an invasive!) plants along the Tennessee River.

04/23/2026

Happy Earth Day from the Southeast Beaver Alliance! 🌎💙💚🦫

This past weekend, several of our members hosted our very first in-person outreach table at Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest‘s annual Earth Day celebration, RESTORE: Healthy Planet, Healthy Us.

Beavers are powerful ecosystem engineers—by building dams, they create wetlands that improve water quality, reduce flooding, store carbon, and provide critical habitat for countless species. Coexisting with beavers means working with nature to build more resilient landscapes for both people and wildlife.

A huge thank you to Beaver Institute, Inc. for helping make our presence at this event possible! 🦫

04/10/2026

04/07/2026

Happy International Beaver Day from the Southeast Beaver Alliance 🦫🥳

03/26/2026

Our Chair, Tony Able, and member Victoria Webb recently did an online presentation on beavers to the Dekalb County GA Soil and Conservation District, of which Victoria is a District Supervisor. The presentation opened with a discussion of how beavers and beaver dam analogs might help partially restore community ponds drained due to breached dams in the County caused by Hurricane Helene (see photos).

BDAs and/or beavers dams can be a solution to partially replace a lost pond or lake with wildlife habitat made up of wetland-stream complexes. The presentation then gave an overview of beaver history, importance, and coexistence as well as pointing out the strength of the beaver movement across the country.

03/17/2026

Our Southeast Beaver Alliance Chair, Tony Able, spoke to the Fluvial Geomorphology class at Western Carolina University, NC, on March 5, 2026. The lecture covered process-based restoration as a growing practice in stream and wetland restoration, highlighting that beaver dams are one of the natural processes that shape and maintain these systems. The presentation also discussed how, prior to European colonization of America, beavers managed stream valleys as stream-wetland complexes.

The Fluvial Geomorphology class at Western Carolina University is taught by Jerry R. Miller, co-author of the textbook Process Geomorphology (4th ed., Waveland Press; originally published by McGraw-Hill).

03/05/2026

A beaver’s ears are small and rounded—but don’t let that fool you. They have excellent hearing on land, helping them detect predators and communicate with tail slaps and vocalizations. When they dive, special valves close off their ear canals to keep water out 🦫👂

03/04/2026

Disney Pixar’s new movie Hoppers follows a young woman’s adventure to save an endangered ecosystem—with a little help from her new beaver friends. 🦫✨

Want to sound like the smartest person in the theater? Here are a few terms to know before you go.

Take action and help protect wetlands and wildlife today. Join the Southeast Bever Alliance by reaching out at [email protected] or learn more at southeastbeaver.org.

02/19/2026

Beaver Biologist Barbie (a.k.a. Jayne Willard; a.k.a. SEBA’s Education & Outreach Committee Chair) stopped by the UT Roane County 4H Extension Office yesterday to talk all things beaver dams to a group of homeschoolers. They were fascinated to learn how beavers not only build their own homes but create habitat for so many other species 🦆🦇🐢🪰🪱

After designing and testing their dams, most students concluded that altering hydrology is harder than it looks… and that dam building should probably be left to the professionals (with orange teeth and built-in wetsuits).

02/14/2026

Love is in the air… and in the lodge. ❤️

Beavers are one of nature’s true partners for life, forming long-term pair bonds and raising their kits together year after year. They build homes, share the workload, and stick by each other through every season.

Now that’s a relationship built to last. 🦫💕

02/02/2026

🕳️🌤️ Happy Groundhog Day! 🌤️🕳️

But… which one is the actual groundhog? Groundhogs often get lumped together with any chunky, buck-toothed critter, but not all rodents are created equal.

Swipe to play Rodent Roll Call!

🦫 Beavers = aquatic engineers with paddle tails and a passion for dam construction
🐀 Nutria = semi-aquatic grazers with orange teeth and zero respect for wetlands
🐹 Capybaras = the world’s largest rodents and most popular on TikTok
🌾 Prairie dogs = social, chatty town-builders of the plains
🕳️ Gophers = underground specialists with cheek pouches for days
🌿 Muskrats = wetland dwellers often mistaken for tiny beavers
🐿️ Groundhogs (aka woodchucks) = burrowing marmots famous for predicting the weather

They may look similar, but their habitats, behaviors, and ecological roles are wildly different.

Swipe for answers ➡️ and let us know—how many did you get right?