Breaking down beaver dams

Residents had been complaining about their lawns flooding in Skyline Meadows, which is directly beneath the hills of Skyline Drive, due to clutter in Gin Creek and beaver problems in a privately-owned wetland.

Beaver dams were threatening to flood the Skyline Meadows neighborhood until Wednesday when Harding University students broke through them during Bisons for Christ.

Now to be clear, the article doesn’t mean actual bisons. It means youth volunteers that team up during lent to do various jobs working hard. Because you know that old saying, “work like a – bison”. (?)

Beavers had dammed up a drainage ditch for all the water runoff for the right end of Skyline Meadows into Gin Creek, and had created around an acre of standing water that varied from an inch or two in depth to about 16 inches deep as of Wednesday. There are also multiple larger dams in that piece of Gin Creek itself, which is owned by Southwest Middle School.

“We’ll get those 4-5-inch rains and you see 2 inches flowing down the street,” Leroy Painter said of water draining into the nature preserve. “You can’t even see the street [for all the running water].”

“The No. 1 thing I can think of,” Leroy Painter said of problems with beavers, “is the mosquito problem [due to still water not running off], and the concern that eventually the water will have nowhere to go.”

You understand of course, BISON may be for christ, but obviously beavers are satanists. Bringing in mosquitoes and making baptismal ponds in everyone’s garden just wily-nily. They must be stopped by actions that require all hands on deck. Remember, it takes a village.

About 1,500 students were involved in 150 projects all over Searcy and White County, but it was men’s social club Gamma Sigma Phi that went as a group to work on clearing the beavers dams and wood buildup due both to beavers chewing trees off at the trunk and trees dying thanks to being in standing water all the time.

“That’s what it’s basically all about,” Gamma Sigma Phi member Matthew Morgan of Springfield, Mo., said of working on the project for Bisons for Christ, “to give back to the community and serve others.”

Nate Ham of Marion said the project was close to his heart because a friend of his lost his home in a flood two or three years ago when the flooding had gotten very serious in the West Memphis/Marion area.

“It’s not a good thing when houses get water to them,” Ham said. “His trailer almost floated away with the water.”

Well now, an article like this comes along once in a great while and you have to treat it like the precious message it is. You have to tuck the phrase “Bisons for Christ” into your arsenal and treat it with the full glory it deserves. I’m not greedy. I don’t expect it to get any better than this.

“Hopefully we’ll solve the problem before there is one,” Gamma Sigma Phi queen, Danielle O’Shields of Cabot said. (A queen is an honorary female member of a men’s social club.)

So these particular bisons for Christ have a QUEEN which gets to be an honorary member of their fraternity brotherhood. Letting a woman be in your special man-club. Golly, it just doesn’t get better than that. Except their’s a photo of the queen hauling refuge from the satanic dam. I gotta admit,

That’s a little better.

Searcy Parks and Recreation Director Mike Parsons said the beavers have been particularly bad this year, and it has been a struggle keeping them from causing damage in the areas where beavers go, which he said is primarily in the section of Gin Creek north of Berryhill Park and in the Searcy Soccer Complex.

“When they’re by Berryhill Park we normally just break up the dams and they go somewhere else,” Parsons said. “It’s a bit more difficult at the soccer complex. They build their dams and block our drainage pipes, causing lots of issues.”

Parsons said when the parks have a beaver problem, Searcy Parks and Recreation contacts the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission for a referral for a trapper who will legally catch and relocate the beavers.

“The problem we have with beavers is, unless you get rid of them, they keep coming back to the same general areas,” Parsons said.