Landowners complain about too many beavers

“I’m tasked with catching every beaver, not just one or two beavers,” Williamson said. “I have to catch every beaver at the place and warranty it for three months. You’re looking at the difference between a $300 job, versus the same job outside a BMAP county might be $800 or $1,000.”

Just 300 miles away from the beaver-appreciation article I talked about yesterday and whose author was thrilled to learn about flow devices and wrote me back several times, at the other end of the Blue Ridge Mountains the Kanuga conference center in Hendersonville just can’t kill them quickly enough.

“They’re just terrible,” said Jerry Moore, who has maintained the WNC Air Museum Airport, also known as Johnson Field, for 25 years. “They back the water up to the runway. They’ll raise it up a couple of feet. Last week, I dug (a beaver dam) out of the field and it dropped the water down 18 inches. They’ll be back, but it helps for a while.”

 Moore said beaver-related flooding and tree damage near the airport reached its zenith about “six or seven years ago,” when a state trapper removed 50 beavers from the area. “It was just infested with them,” he said.

Infested! Beaver lice!  The article is basically constructed around convincing the cities that don’t participate in BMAP to cough up their contribution. BMAP stands for “Beaver Management Assistance Program” but since its run by Wildlife Services at APHIS the acronym should really be “Bureaucrats Make Assassination Possible”. Killing is all they mostly do, except sometimes when they install pretend flow devices that don’t work.

 Mitigating beaver damage doesn’t always involve trapping them or breaking up their dams, Williamson said.  When beavers at Kanuga Conferences started flooding a lake loop trail — as well as threatening the habitat of endangered species in a nearby bog — he worked with Kanuga staff to design and install two pond levelers to lower water levels in the 1-acre bog.

 Kanuga was home to roughly 20 to 30 beavers in 2007, said Environmental Projects Manager Clint DeWitt. He said the Episcopal Church-affiliated retreat didn’t want to eliminate the web-footed animals, only the damage they were wreaking on the bog habitat and the Daisy Lake Trail.

 Relocating beavers is not an option, Williamson said, since that would just shift the nuisance to other areas and perhaps spread disease. He added beavers are highly territorial and would, if transplanted into a new area, likely die from fights with resident beavers or trying to cross roads on their way back home.

Before resorting to trapping, Williamson said he tries to use pond levelers, exclusion devices such as hardwire cloth around the base of trees and other non-lethal techniques. But with a constant stream of beavers coming up from the French Broad River, trapping is often necessary to control populations.

So even though beavers are so dangerously territorial that they would kill a stranger for moving in, there is such a steady stream of beavers on the move that new ones will just come to fill the space the corpse left behind and trapping is necessary to control the problem.  I’m reminded of a certain Hermann Moll “zombie beaver map” from the 1700’s.

Well obviously North Carolina has a ways to go before achieving any real beaver management. And maybe something to learn about sociopathy as well. Check out the trapper’s colorful analogy at the end of the article.

“If I were trying to trap you, I would put traps at your front door, at the foot of your bed, at the light switch and at the toilet,” he said. 

Well, it worked on his wife, anyway.