Tennessee’s occurrence record for the American beaver is one of the more thoroughly documented in the state’s mammal atlas, 936 records tracing nearly the full length of the state, from Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the Unakas to the bottomland forests of Chickasaw State Park and State Forest in the far west.
A dam builder from the mountains to the bottoms
A beaver needs standing or slow-moving water and a supply of bark, twigs, and water plants, and Tennessee supplies that from one end of the state to the other. Records run through Cherokee National Forest’s mountain streams, past Radnor Lake State Natural Area’s ponds just south of downtown Nashville, and out to the sloughs and creeks of Pickett State Park and Pogue Creek Canyon on the upper Cumberland Plateau, showing the beaver holds on in slow water whether that water sits in the mountains, the Basin, or the bottoms.
Building a home it doesn’t have to leave
It cuts bark, twigs, and water plants for food, and stores extra branches near its lodge to get through the colder months without leaving open water. The dam it builds to hold that water in place also raises the water table and floods dead trees, turning a stretch of stream into the kind of wetland many other species depend on, a side effect of the beaver simply meeting its own needs.
Status in Tennessee
NatureServe ranks the American beaver S5, Secure, and the species is native to Tennessee. USGS NAS doesn’t list it as nonindigenous in the state.
Full species profile
