Pipe Dreams

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, City Reports, Creative Solutions October 28, 2011

Eastford pipe system fools beaver, keeps street flood-free

What’s going on: Eastford Public Works installed a homemade “beaver deceiver” this summer at the pond at Westford and Church roads. The beaver dam causes Westford Road to flood. The system of pipes channels water from the pond through the dam and toward a culvert that runs under Westford Road. The beaver can’t block the pipe, Public Works supervisor Ben Schmidt said.

Ahhh there is NOTHING I love to read more than a story about public works solving beaver problems humanely! Yeahhh Eastford! Of course you will remember per our discussion last week that this is not technically a ‘beaver deceiver’ and calling it one would be classified as a TYPE I error, but still it looks good from the front. I’m hopeful that the other end of the pipe is still artfully protected and that since its back east it has already survived a few rains and the beavers truly aren’t going to simly plug it up when the water level rises.

In the meantime I would just remind everyone that Connecticut is a beaver-complex state with some folks dedicated to preserving their value and others ready to exterminate at a moments notice. It takes all kinds I guess. Hopefully the good works going on in Eastford will encourage a few others to try it on their own.

Additional measures: This week, Schmidt installed a grate at the entrance to the culvert that runs under Westford Road. “Beavers are smart,” Schmidt said. “They started damming up the backside of the culvert and blocked it.” It flooded Westford Road again.

What’s next: Public works will continue to monitor the situation. “This is the most success we’ve had at stopping it,” Schmidt said.

It’s Always Elk Grove…

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports October 27, 2011

My parents called me about this exciting report Monday night. Seems the a woman in Elk Grove saw a beaver in her neighbor’s backyard! Mind you, the kind of neighbor with a stepladder to look over her back fence saw the beaver in the house next door and is worried about her safety – (so worried apparently she called the news station instead of actually going next door). The ‘beaver’ sleeps in a pile of grass all day and nibbles on her trees. It leaves droppings on their patio and it’s the ‘biggest beaver she ever saw’.

Here’s what it sounds like in Heidi’s brain when we hear a story like that. Of course, there’s the usual WTF chorus, then a scouring of the video provided. (you see no beaver tail is visible). Then a reminder that beaver droppings are sawdust and underwater and nutria droppings look more like they’re from big hamsters. Then a quick google search to see if nutria are in the Sacramento Valley. (They are.) Then the time-honored question what are the odds that a beaver would be sleeping on a back porch in the open and allowing himself to b e filmed in the day time? And finally, “It’s the biggest beaver I’ve ever seen!” Really? I just have to ask, then. How many beavers have you actually seen, Nicole?

And since the camera can’t show us the tail, I just have to ask, did the droppings you saw look like this, or this?

Well, if for some bizarre reason this is a sick or insane juvenile beaver living in a backyard (and I’ll eat a bug if it is) then it nicely proves what we all warned them about back in 2007: The Elk Grove Beaver Massacre produced an unbelievable population rebound and will cost the city more money in the long run. It should never, ever, have happened.

Is Elk Grove in the news for anything else besides beavers? Anything?

Squirrel Season

heidi08 Beavers October 26, 2011

Did you ever have one of those exciting and unanticipated moments in your life that was so awesome and life-changing once it was over everything started to seem pale by comparison? Almost as if the magic moment was real and everything else was pretend? Apparently that’s how the great state of Pennsylvania feels, because a week after the neighbor’s night of terror and trial that left 18 magnificent tigers and a host of wild animals shot they are itching for action of their own. Connellsville is just 2 hours away from Zanesville and just one state over. Don’t worry if your trigger finger is feeling limp after last weeks excitement because Squirrel season is finally here!

The Cranberry Township native works as the Pennsylvania Game Commission’s wildlife conservation officer in northern Washington County. He was staffing a hunter safety course when a couple of his volunteer instructors told him they were taking time off to hunt — of all things — squirrels.

The animals are almost everywhere — you’re allowed to keep six a day in a three-part season that encompasses more than 80 days — but just don’t get the attention they once did.

That’s right, you’re can shoot six squirrels a day for 80 days and mother nature will do the math. All you have to do is find what they’re eating and point. People don’t value squirrel meat as much as they used to but don’t let that dissuade you, remember if the economy keeps on like this that could all change! Don’t you want to see the hunter’s face bursting with pride when he brings home a string of bushy tails for evening supper? The obvious question is when’s hamster season?

heidi08 Beavers October 25, 2011

Beavers Menancing Wetlands!

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beaver News, Beavers elsewhere October 25, 2011

Lifelong trapper recalls life where the wild things are

By Eugene Scheel, Published: October 24

Check out yesterday’s Washington Post for the sepia-toned memories of wistful trapper Tom Frye who literally scraped his livelihood off the backs of the animals foolish enough to walk into his traps. I don’t know why the Post decided we need another such article at this moment in our collective lives, maybe because the AP article mentioned in passing that trapping was controversial?

“There’s not many of us left,” Tom Frye said as we talked recently at his Furnace Mountain home, above Taylorstown. For 50 years, he has trapped raccoon, skunk, mink, muskrat and beaver, from Loudoun County south to Prince William and Orange counties.

“I started out when I was 5, maybe 4, in 1940. We lived next to Bush Hall’s livery stable on West Loudoun Street [Leesburg], and this time of year, mice and rats would come out of the hay into our house. Then I started trapping muskrat in Town Branch and Dry Mill Run. I caught my first mink in the Town Branch; they were pretty much everywhere — up around Lincoln, in those streams there a lot.”

Let me get this straight – the Post is asking us to feel wistful about the lost art of trapping without ever feeling responsible for the lost species that were trapped? But obviously it was this paragraph that got my attention…

Frye’s prowess as a trapper caught the ear of Loudoun game warden T.A. Daniels when beavers began menacing wetlands. “We didn’t start seeing any beaver until the late ’60s. Just like the deer, there just wasn’t any here. They migrated from the [Potomac] river up those feeder streams.

“The mother will kick the young ones out when they’re about a year old, and they go to find a new territory upstream. They build a dam, and then they build a house [upstream from the dam]. Any time beaver hear running water, they try to stop it.

“They had cut down a half-acre of corn near Aldie [at Oak Hill Farm] and built a cornstalk home aside a stream coming into Little River,” he said. Frye laid large traps, as adult beavers weigh up to 60 pounds. “I think I caught four or five the first night. All I could carry. Caught one or two after that.”

Menacing wetlands! What an idea! No wonder something had to be done! Thank goodness you were there Tom with your beaver-crushing devices to preserve our wetlands from these fiendish aquatic rodents. Whew! Maybe with all your spare time now you can help stop all that money from menacing our banks and those children from menacing our schools?

Oh, and Bonus Points Post for hi–jacking Maurice Sendak’s beloved title.