The City of Bellevue Utilities quietly won a battle of wits against nature’s most determined engineers this week, and the weapon they used was something called a Beaver Deceiver.
Somewhere in Bellevue right now, a family of beavers is completely convinced their dam is still doing exactly what they intended; it is not. And that is entirely the point.
It sounds made up, but is very real.
The Beaver Deceiver Changed How Humans Deal with Beavers
The Beaver Deceiver was invented in the 1990s by a man named Skip Lisle while he was working for the Penobscot Indian Nation in Maine. What he created was a trapezoidal-shaped culvert fence, picture metal fencing with wider gaps between the wires, that works against beaver behavior in three remarkably clever ways.
The perimeter of the fence runs 40 to 50 feet long, making it nearly impossible for a beaver to dam the entire thing. Second, as beavers try to dam the culvert, the fence forces them to dam in a direction away from it, which goes completely against their instincts and confuses them into giving up.
Third, the farther out on the fence they try to build, the wider the stream opening gets, which reduces the sound and feel of moving water that triggers their damming instinct in the first place.
If the fence sides are at least 12 feet long, beavers will generally leave it alone entirely. They simply lose interest and move on.
The fence only needs to stand 24 inches above the waterline since beavers, surprisingly, do not climb. A floor is added to the fence to prevent them from tunneling underneath, because beavers absolutely will try that. They are nothing if not persistent.
Water Level is Six Inches Down on Bellevue Flooding Street
Bellevue Utilities installed two Beaver Deceivers on SE 26th Street at Kamber Road, where a locally ambitious beaver colony had backed up enough water to flood the roadway with standing water.
The first beaver deceiver alone dropped water levels by six inches and cleared the standing water from the road entirely.
Crews are continuing to work downstream to provide additional relief while the beavers remain completely and blissfully deceived.
The beavers think their dam is fully intact and working perfectly. The road is clear. Nobody got relocated. Nobody got trapped. The habitat is fully protected.
The Bellevue Utilities crew deserves credit for choosing the solution that works with nature instead of against it. And the beavers deserve credit for inspiring one of the greatest names in municipal engineering history.
The Beaver Deceiver.
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