Let’s spent the very last day of August visiting some old friends shall we? The official part of summer – the summer that never came – is over, And we are beginning to feel the first stirrings of fall in the air. Lets have some nostalgia for people and places past, shall we?
Monkton finds a humane beaver solution: Deception
MONKTON — On a warm sunny Friday afternoon last month, Theresa Payea, dressed in waders, stood atop a well-established beaver dam in Monkton Pond (also known as Cedar Lake). Payea was there, along with a few other members of the newly re-established Cedar Lake Association, to help bring a decades-long battle with beavers to a peaceful, humane conclusion.
“I’ve lived here 28 years, but I’ve never seen the dam so close up,” she said. “You don’t realize how much trouble beavers are capable of.”
Payea and her neighbors got an up-close and personal view of that trouble last fall, after the beavers in Monkton Pond had outwitted an old baffle cage installed by the Vermont Department of Fish & Wildlife to maintain water levels. Beavers clogged up the hole and the water began to rise.
Hmm Monkton is about 2 hours away from Grafton in Vermont. I bet I can guess who they got to help them. Can you?
Down in the water, a few yards away, beaver expert Skip Lisle of Grafton was busy assembling a custom-made system that he invented to keep the water flowing, regardless of damming activity.
He calls it the “Beaver Deceiver.”
Over the past 25 years Skip Lisle has installed more than a thousand Beaver Deceivers all over the country, and around the world.
“Beavers do very little deductive reasoning,” Lisle told the Independent in a phone interview. “That’s the starting point. Most people assume animals think like people, but beavers are not capable of stepping back and taking a look at the big picture.”
A robust Beaver Deceiver system requires two things, Lisle said: a large, long pipe and a sophisticated filter.
Lucky for you Skip was on hand when the deceiver installed by Fish and Wildlife failed. I’m not at all surprised. They just refuse to learn from the source that’s right under their noses. Thank Goodness Skip was near by to correct their mistakes.
“We’re now experiencing the very real effects of climate change, and beavers do a wonderfulQ job of mitigating climate change, so it’s money well spent.”
Hurray for Skip! And hurray for solutions that keep the beavers around doing what they do next! Meanwhile in Colorado Sherri Tippie just got together a band of friends and relocated some beavers that were in harms way. So happy to hear she is recovered from her fall and doing what she does best!
I guess our friend Eric Robinson from San Diego and B.R.A.V.O. has been working with Sherri to get her back on the ground running. He sent these photos along with the summary “we have recently built a successful team around Tippie to support her efforts to rescue and restore beaver in the Denver area.”
You know those beavers are the luckiest this side of the Canadian border. Just listen to her croon to them.[wonderplugin_video videotype=”mp4″ mp4=”https://www.martinezbeavers.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Video-Aug-2020-First-family.mov” webm=”” poster=”” lightbox=0 lightboxsize=1 lightboxwidth=960 lightboxheight=540 autoopen=0 autoopendelay=0 autoclose=0 lightboxtitle=”” lightboxgroup=”” lightboxshownavigation=0 showimage=”” lightboxoptions=”” videowidth=600 videoheight=400 keepaspectratio=1 autoplay=0 loop=0 videocss=”position:relative;display:block;background-color:#000;overflow:hidden;max-width:100%;margin:0 auto;” playbutton=”https://www.martinezbeavers.org/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/wonderplugin-video-embed/engine/playvideo-64-64-0.png”]
