We’ve had nothing but niceties for a while, but this morning we’re going to have to address some amazing beaver ignorance, delivered (of course) by a trapper and carefully quoted as fact by (unsurprisingly) an unquestioning reporter named Paul Hampton of the Mississippi Sun Herald. Get you beaver BS detectors ready.
Watch your pets in South Mississippi and don’t feed the coyotes
BILOXI — It probably would be a bigger surprise if there were no coyotes in Biloxi, wildlife officials say. Police animal control officials have yet to confirm reports of coyotes that can climb an 8-foot-tall fence but the animals have been spreading across the Southeast for decades.
“I can promise you there are coyotes in Biloxi,” said Troy Arguelles, a trapper who lives there.
Arguelles said he’d be glad to take coyotes off a worried homeowner’s hands but the only trapping he’s heard of lately is a family of beaver who were taken from a retention pond the animals invaded at a subdivision off Popp’s Ferry Road.
“That won’t alleviate the problem,” he said of the beavers’ capture. “It’ll just fix it for the time being.”
Beavers leave a scent and it won’t be long before a new family follows the scent to the pond and starts a little subdivision of their own, he said.
First of all, Troy, you are right about the scent. Beavers DO leave scent mounds to mark their territory. But surprisingly enough, they aren’t calling cards. It’s a keep out sign. So when beavers leave a scent around their homes they’re actually saying “Job filled: Need Not Apply.” Which means you’re mistaken. And the reporter should have thought to look it up and see if it was true. I can understand the confusion. Trappers use castoreum to catch beavers, so I guess it looks like they’re coming TOWARDS the scent. But they’re actually coming to fight whoever left that scent and kick them off their pond.
Not to start a commune.
But even if you were right, (I mean let’s pretend we’re in an alternate universe and a trapper from Mississippi understood things better than a beaver blogger from California), even by your own argument wouldn’t that make trapping pointless? If you are hired to kill some beavers and they left their perfume invitations all over, wouldn’t it mean that anyone who hired you would just be paying to switch beavers? Not getting rid of them?
Take your time, Troy. We can wait for your answer. I’m certainly not calling you stupid or anything. For all I know you might be the most brilliant man in Mississippi, I’m just curious.
Sheesh.
Thank you Robin of Napa for pointing out that the Beavers in Devon made this week’s Earthweek: A Diary of the Planet!
Beavers even made it to the popular British magazine “Bird Watch”. 
Which seals their publicity arc. Now if we could only get them on the cover of “Today’s Angler” we’d be in business. I don’t see why it couldn’t happen.
Stranger things have been known to occur.
