Louisiana holds 182 documented American beaver records, most of them iNaturalist entries clustered around Kisatchie National Forest and the bottomland country near D’Arbonne National Wildlife Refuge and Fontainebleau State Park. That count reflects where people have looked, not how many beavers actually work the state’s bayous.
A dam-builder across two kinds of Louisiana water
A beaver needs little beyond a permanent channel and woody plants along the bank, and Louisiana supplies that in very different settings. Kisatchie National Forest’s rolling, sandy uplands in the west-central pine belt carry small spring-fed creeks cutting through longleaf pine and hardwood draws, while D’Arbonne National Wildlife Refuge sits in bottomland hardwood forest on the Mississippi Alluvial Plain, where sloughs stay wet most of the year. Fontainebleau State Park adds a third setting, pine flatwoods and bayous draining toward Lake Pontchartrain’s north shore. A beaver works whichever of these it settles into, as long as the water moves slowly and the bank grows willow, sweetgum, or tupelo close enough to reach.
Cutting wood without a frozen winter to plan around
Elsewhere in its range, a beaver stockpiles branches underwater to eat through a frozen season. Louisiana rarely forces that habit; bark, twigs, and aquatic plants stay reachable through most of the state’s mild winters, so a Louisiana beaver leans less on a stored larder than colonies farther north do. It still gnaws through streamside timber and can dam a narrow bayou enough to raise the water around its lodge, work that shows up as cut stumps and slowed channels long before anyone spots the animal itself. Reports peak in April and May, a stretch that likely tracks young beavers dispersing from their birth colony to claim a stretch of bayou rather than any snowmelt pulse, since Louisiana’s waterways don’t ice over.
Status in Louisiana
NatureServe ranks the beaver S5, secure, and it’s native to Louisiana. USGS NAS doesn’t list it as nonindigenous, and its presence across both the state’s pine uplands and its bottomland hardwood country points to a habitat generalist that only needs a bank to gnaw and water that doesn’t dry up.
Full species profile
