There are signs that a city has learned a thing or two about beavers. It’s lovely when people living on a major waterway don’t act surprised and overwhelmed every time a beaver shows up. Windsor is just across the water from Detroit in that part of canada that looks like it should be part of Michigan. Plus the article is headlined with a fairly respectable pun, which almost never happens where beavers are concerned.
City trees steel themselves against urban beavers
No sooner does a national wildlife symbol attempt another comeback in the built-up wilds of urban Windsor than city hall takes action, ramping up efforts to make their busy lives all the more challenging.
Trees being targeted by beavers along a stretch of the Grand Marais drain between Howard Avenue and Walker Road had their trunks recently clad in a strong steel mesh designed to foil the giant rodent’s powerful incisors.
My my my. Would you look at that. A tree wrapped in the appropriate wire in the appropriate way and to the appropriate height. That almost never happens. You’d be surprised how much that almost never happens.
“Safety is No. 1,” city naturalist Karen Cedar said of the main purpose behind cladding city trees in protective trunk coverings. It’s designed to reduce the danger posed to humans by some of the larger trees in the process of being brought down by beavers.
The metal “utility fencing” wrapped around the trunks of some of the larger trees along the drain’s banks “are meant to prevent the beavers from giving those trees a go,” Cedar said. Timber harvesting by beavers next to a multi-use recreational trail used by the public poses a hazard to those human users, she said.
The mind reels. The jaw drops. People actually thinking ahead and doing their job? I sure hope its contagious.
Beavers topple trees for food and to build their homes, usually related to dam-building. Cedar said city workers recently removed one such dam in the Grand Marais drain, but a second dam development is currently underway.
“These drains are never going to be a place where beavers build dams,” said Cedar. Beavers are hard-wired to build dams, but those city drains exist to collect and carry flood waters out of Windsor’s built-up areas.
Well, good luck with that. Hey maybe if you installed a flow device you wouldn’t have to rip out the dams every couple months, but I’m sure you know best. At least you know something.
Making some trees off-limits to the world’s second-largest rodent, or taking down dams that prevent water from flowing freely, won’t do serious harm to Windsor’s beavers, the city’s naturalist insists.
“They’ll be fine,” said Cedar.
Beavers are adaptable, she said, and will simply move on. Much of the beaver chewing and gnawing currently going on around the city is the work of juveniles “playing, practicing and testing out their skills,” she said. And the trees coming down tend to be quicker growing varieties like poplar, aspen and cottonwoods.
I don’t share your assurance that beavers will move on if you make some trees off limits, but good for you for thinking long term about this issue. Wrapping trees is good news for beavers. Whenever it happens it means someone has A) faced the reality of beavers and B) decided they can’t kill them all fast enough.
Oh and congratulations to Oliver Richter who is the official people’s choice photographer of the year for capturing this lovely moment.
One of the age-old arguments against beavers is that their dams block salmon passage. And even for the rare folks who begrudgingly admit that coho can jump and make it over most dams most of the time they still argue that “chum” do NOT jump and won’t possibly make it over unless the dam is notched or broken. In fact fish experts have persuasively argued that if chum run into an obstacle they will just stop swimming entirely.
This was the impetus that inspired the New Mexico Beaver Summit that Defenders cohosted with WildEarth Guardians, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, New Mexico Environment Department and other partners in October. Originally, planned as an in-person event with field trips to tour habitat restoration sites, translocations and coexistence tools in action, the pandemic forced the summit to go virtual.
