This headline made me smile and was even note worthy enough to be sent to me by Amy our chalk artist who is usually too busy in her own life to check in until May.

Report: More Americans Moving Away From Urban Areas For Rural Life Where They Have Escalating Feud With Beaver

CAMBRIDGE, MA—Suggesting the reversal of a longstanding historical trend towards urbanization, a report published Tuesday by researchers at Harvard University revealed that more Americans were moving away from cities to pursue a rural life where they have an escalating feud with a beaver.

“Our findings indicate there has been a 15% increase in Americans who trade the hustle and bustle of metropolitan life for an agrestic existence in which they dismantle a small beaver dam on their property, leading the determined rodent to seek retribution,” said the report’s lead author,

Just to be clear: if this was true they would all be living in Placer county because that sounds exactly like what happens every year in Rocklin or Lincoln.

Keith Rawlings, noting that rising rents and concerns about crime had driven even long-term city dwellers to purchase a secluded woodland home whose walls, cabinets, and tables would ultimately be gnawed into a series of elaborate booby traps by the vengeful beaver and his family. “More U.S. citizens are leaving behind the nightlife and cultural events of large urban centers, preferring to spend their disposable income on a faulty beaver-trapping kit, an eccentric exterminator who will end up poisoning himself, and a two-barrel shotgun they will use to destroy their remaining possessions in a desperate pursuit of the elusive semiaquatic mammal.

Oh I wish trapping beaver was even a LITTLE bit hard!

While many say they miss the convenience and variety of cities, they nonetheless prefer a country life in which they realize the beaver would make the perfect mascot for the big ad campaign they’ve been working on and ultimately learn to live in peace with the creature.” Rawlings added that, by contrast, a relatively negligible number of Americans were choosing to leave rural areas in pursuit of an urban life in which they befriend a wise-cracking pigeon.

That’s true. Beavers are way better than pigeons.