New Hampshire’s occurrence data holds 1,375 beaver records, most of them from iNaturalist, with the most recent from July 2026.
River valleys do the heavy lifting
A beaver needs slow water and the standing hardwoods and shrubs, birch, aspen, maple, willow, that go with it. New Hampshire’s Merrimack and Connecticut river valleys carry exactly that mix: wooded corridors, oxbow ponds, and beaver dams that back up water into new wetlands. The Lakes Region’s countless ponds add still more of the same kind of shoreline, while the White Mountains contribute smaller mountain streams where beaver activity is patchier but still real.
A spring surge tied to ice-out and kits
Records jump hard from March into May, right around ice-out, when beavers repair winter-damaged dams and start cutting fresh spring growth, and kits are born in the lodge in May and June. That combination puts beavers out in the open more, near dam faces and along the water’s edge, which is exactly when people are most likely to notice one.
Status in New Hampshire
The beaver is native to New Hampshire, and NatureServe ranks it S5, secure. Its dams keep reshaping the state’s smaller streams into ponds and wetlands, one of the few wild animals here that actively rebuilds its own habitat.
Full species profile
