Maryland leaders say they鈥檙e confident, but not yet certain that the waters around Hunting Creek Lake in Cunningham Falls State Park are safe again. They want to be certain of that before they open up that area of the park again to swimmers, hikers and others.
Initially, the lake was closed for swimming after someone was attacked by a beaver that later tested positive for rabies. A second similar attack prompted the area around the lake to be closed off.
鈥淲e feel reasonably confident that the lake is safe. However, I think in this instance we need to corroborate that,鈥� said Joshua Tabora, a furbearer biologist with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. 鈥淲e don’t have a prospective date for reopening, and we are beginning to talk about what benchmarks we need to hit in order to guarantee the safety of the public.”
Tabora said the department is in its “fact-finding phase” and they don’t have all the information needed to guarantee that there is no risk to public health and safety.
He said beavers are rarely, if ever, associated with the rabies virus, though their behaviors make it likely that one of the beavers involved in a recent attack gave the virus to the other.
鈥淏eavers aren’t what you’d think of as like your typical vector species, which would be something like a raccoon, a striped skunk, or a red fox,鈥� Tabora said. 鈥淧resumably, how this spillover case happened is that鈥ne of these infected beavers previously would have had an encounter with one of those primary vector species, like perhaps a raccoon because they share similar habitats.”
He said animals can spread the virus through salivary contact, so the nearly constant grooming that behaviors conduct on themselves and each other is the likely mode of transmission of the disease.
The nature of the Frederick County park, with a creek that鈥檚 not very rapid and a lake that鈥檚 pretty isolate, along with the way beavers tend to live, lead Tabora to believe it鈥檚 likely those are the only two beavers to contract rabies.
鈥淚t’s entirely plausible that the two animals involved in the attacks are the only animals in the area,鈥� Tabora said. 鈥淲e’re doing a lot of follow-up surveys and on-the-ground work to confirm that is the case, and we’re trying to be as thorough as possible.”
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