Reintroduction or recovery? An interdisciplinary analysis of Vermont's beaver populations

Despite the Euro-American bias of viewing the "New World" as pristine wilderness, Contemporary North American ecosystems have been drastically shaped by colonial activities. As part of the North American Fur Trade between the 17th and mid-19th century, native fur-bearing mammals such as the beaver (Castor canadensis), muskrat (Ondatra zibethicus), and mink (Neovison vison) were hunted for their water-proof fur to the point of extirpation in areas across the United States. Vermont state documents suggest that beavers were historically extirpated from the state of Vermont for over a century or more, and in response, a colony of six beavers were taken from the Adirondacks as part of a reintroduction in Bennington County, VT in 1921 (Kirk 1923). In this thesis, I use an interdisciplinary dataset to evaluate this narrative and determine the accurate chronology of beaver distribution in Vermont using a variety of methods including cranial morphological analysis, radiocarbon dating, and mitochondrial phylogeography. A comparison of VT and NY cranial differences across 22 morphological metrics revealed no significant differences in cranial morphology. Radiocarbon dates on beaver bones from archaeological sites in VT ranged from ~1350-1950 CE, demonstrating that beavers existed and were processed by Indigenous peoples during the period of hypothesized extirpation. The 16s rRNA mitochondrial haplotype network shows that modern Vermont beavers are nested within New Hampshire populations, though sample sizes are extremely limited. Future research would benefit from using other mitochondrial and nuclear genetic loci, a larger sample size across time points, and other forms of historical documentations in order to confirm these preliminary analyses. This study shows that there is some evidence of beaver existence in Vermont during the period of believed extirpation.