Inside the hunt for the biting beaver that wasn’t there

The first rabid beaver attack sent a screaming 13-year-old to the hospital in a helicopter. The second prompted the lake’s closure. There would not be a third, if local officials had anything to say about it.

A small boat crept through the secluded quiet of Tuesday night at Cunningham Falls State Park. Two wildlife staffers trained their eyes on the water’s surface and the shore, scanning for rabid beavers they hoped they wouldn’t find. I’d asked to accompany them on this Bigfoot-esque pursuit following the recent bizarre beaver attacks. In both cases, a human had been hospitalized and a large rodent that later tested positive for rabies had been killed.

One rabid beaver biting a human is rare enough, but two is unprecedented, even grounds for a scientific study. Beavers almost never get rabies and almost never attack people. The back-to-back strikes within 10 days this summer had confounded experts and prompted local authorities to take the uncommon step of closing Hunting Creek Lake, a popular summertime hangout — when beavers aren’t chewing on visitors.

Now, staffers were seeking to do the impossible before reopening: to prove a negative — that no other rabid beavers waited in the wings. They’d canvassed the 45-acre lake for days, looking for beaver activity, aside from gnawed branches left behind by the slain pair.

“It is so hard to prove that something doesn’t exist,” Joshua Tabora, a furbearer biologist with the state’s Wildlife and Heritage Service, told me as he searched. He’d been doing his best, casing the place on foot, by boat and now using thermal imaging (“a potent technology,” he said) to scan the night for heat coming off of warm-blooded animals. It was dusk, the time that a hypothetical beaver might raise its softball-sized head out of the water long enough for the thermal camera to capture it.

As I learned more, a tragic tale — for the bitten humans and the infected beavers, likely a mated pair — came into focus.

Tabora characterized the beaver couple not as indicative of a larger trend, but an anomaly. It’s akin to the infinite monkey theorem, that a monkey tapping on a typewriter long enough will write up Shakespeare, he said. Put beavers in proximity to rabies, and one is bound to catch it. The second, he admitted, surprised everyone. He didn’t expect a third.

Still, we trawled the lake. It was like “Jaws,” if the shark had been caught in the opening scene but the mayor wanted to double-check.

The usually bustling lake was peaceful. Eerie, even. As the sun set, bugs and birds sang. A bullfrog hummed. Our boat’s propeller purred around the lake’s perimeter until it got tangled in lake vegetation, bringing us to an unplanned halt, adrift under the stars.

If a third beaver were to attack, I felt like now would be the time.

The attacks

Belligerent beavers lurking near Camp David as the president hosts a cabinet meeting — which Donald Trump did, just about a mile away, as the crow flies, on July 31 — sounds like the plot of a wacky made-for-TV movie. The first attack played out like a campy horror flick, too.

Dozens of people were soaking in a warm Sunday morning on July 26 when the screams of children began to echo from the water. The cries were vague, but they sounded terrified, witness Matthew Baker recalled.

“Everyone started backing out of the water as soon as these two kids started screaming,” Baker, of Falls Church, Virginia, told me.

“The screaming was like one minute long,” added his girlfriend, Almira Calista.

Authorities rushed in. Someone with a megaphone told everyone that there was a medical emergency. Confusion reigned. Park visitors asked: Was it an alligator?

Even the 13-year-old boy who’d been attacked didn’t initially know the identity of his assailant, he later told police from the hospital. He’d heard a splash, felt a bite, grabbed his attacker by its tail and neck, then was bitten again. His mom said the beaver “targeted him” and that the boy was “not messing with its dam or anything,” according to the incident report I’d obtained in a records request. The boy was later airlifted to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, where he was treated for hand and chest injuries. The whole ordeal sounded awful.

A hunt began immediately. Onlookers advised authorities about the beaver’s whereabouts. “After approximately 45 minutes of searching, we located the beaver,” a Department of Natural Resources police officer later wrote in an incident report, “and I dispatched it.” (That doesn’t mean the officer called it on a radio.)

The lake was then closed for swimming, but on Aug. 5, another beaver charged and bit a 19-year-old fisherman, who drove himself to a hospital. The man had been recording video of the incident, according to a police report; Tabora, the biologist, called it “regrettable” that the man didn’t give the beaver a little more space.

Shortly after the attack, a police officer armed with a shotgun “dispatched the beaver as it charged a rock on the shoreline,” according to an incident report.

It was hard for me to envision Cunningham Falls as the site of such chaos and carnage. At dusk, the place seemed mystical.

In the days after the beaver attacks, officials shuttered the lake, barricading parking areas and padlocking the entrance. Closures due to wildlife concerns are “pretty rare,” said state wildlife staffer Jeff McAfee. Tabora called it almost unprecedented. Officials continued their comprehensive beaver survey. A trapper had been hired, a veterinarian consulted.

Would-be visitors had to go elsewhere. Within 15 minutes outside the park Tuesday, I watched three cars pull up, pause and depart, their occupants bewildered that infected beavers were keeping them from a favorite watering hole.

Alexandra Schilling, of Carroll County, heard about the first attack but still planned to visit this past weekend.

“I thought, by this week, that should all be dealt with. Then there was another one,” she told me over the phone.

Star-crossed beavers

The sex of the first beaver was never confirmed, Tabora said, but authorities assume that the two beavers were a mated pair. (Beavers mate for life.) At about 35 pounds each, they were definitely adults. The lake didn’t seem big enough to host other mated adults, so the concern was that the pair had kits.

Staffers raided their lodge — a dome-shaped home made of sticks — for evidence of offspring and scoped the surrounding area. Sticks that had been gnawed in the last few days, after the killing of the two beavers, would be a smoking gun. There were none.

Both human victims are expected to be fine. Rabies treatment, a series of vaccine shots administered after an attack, is not fun, but it is supremely effective. It’s a key reason that only a couple of Americans die each year from the disease, though it remains a widespread killer worldwide. About 60,000 people annually die from rabies; it is almost certainly fatal once symptoms, such as agitation or an aversion to drinking water, appear.

Rabies in small carnivores is common in the eastern U.S., I learned. Hundreds of animals, mostly raccoons, test positive for it annually in Maryland. On Monday, a bat in Frederick County was found to have rabies, prompting treatment for children who may have handled it.

Over the past decade, 16 different species of animals — including otters, horses and ferrets (oh my) — have tested positive for rabies in Maryland, but they’re almost never rodents. Beavers, which can weigh up to 70 pounds, are the largest rodents native to North America.

The CDC doesn’t track rabid beaver bites nationally, but the Frederick County attacks are the most recent in Maryland, since Beau Ouimette felt a sharp pain in his side while metal detecting in the Potomac River in 2021. He turned around, noticed a beaver lunging, and began backing away. The beaver followed.

“It kept chasing me,” he told me this week. “I’d retreat, and it would chase me, I’d retreat, and it would chase me.”

Ouimette, who runs an outdoorsy YouTube channel with over 1 million subscribers, was advised to kill the beaver and did so himself. It later tested positive for rabies. (An animal cannot be tested while it is alive.) It was the state’s first documented rabid beaver attack since a kayaker was bitten at Montgomery County’s Black Hill Regional Park in 2016.

Authorities disagree on how the Cunningham Falls beavers likely became infected. Guided by the timeline of events and the disease’s lengthy incubation period, Charles Rupprecht, who served as the CDC’s Rabies Program chief for 20 years, hypothesized that another animal, maybe a raccoon, bit both beavers in a single skirmish. Laura Pfeiffer, with the Frederick County Health Department, believed similarly.

But Tabora suggested that one beaver was infected — then, either by grooming or biting, passed it onto its mate.

I couldn’t help but feel bad for this tragic couple, particularly that second beaver. It was infected by a cruel, unrelenting disease, perhaps watched its partner bite someone and then get shot, and then carried on for 10 more days before meeting its own demise.

Of course, I felt for the humans, too.

“It’s usually a pretty horrible experience when people encounter a rabid, aggressive animal,” Pfeiffer had told me.

A fruitless quest

Back at the lake, after 9:00 p.m. on Tuesday, the boat’s propeller whirred, returning to life. We hadn’t been attacked, and our quest for the absent beavers continued, at least for a bit longer. Rupprecht, who co-founded the annual Rabies in the Americas conference in 1990, had warned me that the search would be fruitless.

“I would be very, very surprised if you came up with a third beaver. Two beavers is unprecedented,” he said.

The park could fully reopen soon, depending on monitored beaver activity. Given the rarity of it all, Rupprecht expected local officials to “investigate the thunder out of it,” but he was surprised they’d opted to close the lake. He reminded me that, without realizing it, we regularly exist in proximity to rabies. It’s one of the oldest known infectious diseases, dating back thousands of years.

He found it fascinating. “Rabies is, was and always will be,” he said.

Frankly, I’d expected a bit more of an adventure Tuesday. If not a beaver sighting, maybe a rustling on the shore or a nondescript splash. Instead, I got an inside look at a tedious task, but one necessary to reopen the park.

Our boat had circled the lake twice. It was the third time Tabora had spent his evening this way. One night, he’d stayed at the park until 2 a.m., trying to prove a negative.

Through the thermal imaging camera, we saw bats, deer, ducks and herons during our 90-minute cruise. As we docked, park ranger Thomas Schlauch approached.

“No beavers,” Tabora told him. Schlauch didn’t seem surprised.