Beauregard police jurors to consider beaver bounty
Beauregard Parish police jurors are looking at ways to put the parish’s busiest builders out of work. Police jurors say beavers are damming ditches and causing flooding problems in the parish.
Police jurors on Tuesday said complaints from residents have prompted discussion on starting a beaver bounty program. Police jurors took no action Tuesday on the issue, but said they plan for more discussion in coming weeks.
This isn’t the first time the panel has considered a bounty. In 2009, police jurors said beavers dams were causing issues at Bundick Lake and elsewhere in the parish.
First of all, and I believe I speak for everyone when I say this, what the heck is a “police juror”? It sounds like an absolutely terrible idea. Like a “Nazi dentist” or “Pyrotechnic Hairdresser”!
The Police Jury
The Police Jury system is a pattern for local governance that is unique to the state of Louisiana. Members of the Police Jury are elected by the voters of the parish, and the Jury functions as both the legislative and executive branch of government for the parish. Its members – Jurors – elect a President as their chairman. This President presides over the Police Jury and serves as head of the parish government.
Only two branches of government? I’m actually disappointed, you’d think they’d be able to sneak the judicial in there somewhere, too. Are they armed? (Don’t be silly, Heidi. It’s LOUISIANA, the janitors are armed.) Well apparently the alligators aren’t enough of a deterrent and they need to reward citizens for killing their beavers.
And second of all, is this really the best way you can think of to handle the problem? You know the Clemson Pond Leveler was invented in Georgia and that’s like two states away. My mother is from Louisiana so I know there are smart people in the Parish, just waiting for you to do better. In the meantime the Police Jury will look into creating Beaver Bounties to fix the problem and I will contemplate how much more quickly jurors could reach a unanimous decision if they were armed.
Managing golf course wildlife — including whitetail deer, beavers, muskrats and Canada geese — is a tall order. Here are some tips from a nuisance wildlife control operator who is also a golf course grounds employee.
PCT tackles the big FORE. You know what PCT stands for don’t you? I’ll give you a hint. The first word is “PEST”. Can you guess the second? And the third is just to make it sound like there’s some kind of science to their killing pastime. Pest Control Technology. You know where there based, fight?
Ohio.
Beaver. The largest North American rodent possesses one of the most prized fur coats and, as a result, is highly regulated by the DNR. As with deer, nuisance beaver can be trapped during the regular trapping seasons, which are also in the fall/winter. But they also can be trapped outside those seasons with an additional DNR-issued permit. Beaver damage is usually very obvious even to the untrained eye. Flooding the fairway from a plugged drainage culvert is just the tip of the iceberg because they can chew through trees — which can cause fallen trees and flooding. Beaver are nocturnal with the ability to raise the water level 6 to 7 feet from blocking a single water source. I have stood up to my shoulders in water on a 2-foot diameter culvert pipe trying to pull out debris to bring the water level down to a level conducive for setting traps. Beaver lodges and dams generally will not occur in isolated ponds in the middle of the course because they are too wide open.
There are several methods for getting rid of nuisance beaver. Please note that in almost all cases nuisance beaver will have to be destroyed either by the trapper or the trap itself because there is really no where they can be taken where they won’t cause the same problem (and they are by no means endangered).
The first is shooting but the window of opportunity on any given day is about a half hour since they are nocturnal and you may only see them for about a hour before sunset. Trapping is the best method for removal. The first and probably the most popular beaver trap is the 330 Conibear. These traps are lethal, designed to break the neck and vertebrae for a very quick ending and are placed in the water in the main runways where beaver can swim through them. As you can imagine, these traps also can be dangerous to the user so if you have no experience with them, let a professional trapper handle a nuisance beaver situation.
Foot hold traps also can be used but the newest beaver trap is a cable restraint, which is simply a loop of airline cable placed in runways similar to the Conibear and then anchored to a nearby tree. Both the foothold and cable restraint are live traps so the captured beaver will have to be dispatched with a firearm. Make sure then the traps are checked early enough to be able to use a firearm.
Behold the nuanced stewardship mindset of the golf course trapper. Who with his “untrained eyes” can kill a path for you to put across the green. He has so many lethal options to chose from! And not one of them is humane. No mention of flow devices although installation requires the same willingness to get wet and watch beaver behavior. Still, putting in a flow device has the gruesome drawback of actually FIXING the problem. Whereas trapping will need to be paid for again and again. They’re no fools.
Of course they chose trapping. They have boat payments and mouths to feed.
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And maybe I was too hard on Illinois yesterday. Check out this throwaway line from the activities at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum
“Animal Secrets” at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum is a new exhibit that attempts to bring children and nature together, with 5,000 square feet of Illinois animal habitats for kids to explore — indoors. The exhibit re-creates the natural environments of a stream, a cave, the woods and a meadow. So while the- children are building a beaver dam in the stream, parents gain ideas and messages they can apply in their daily lives, especially the idea that we all need to connect with nature more.
Building a beaver dam in the stream? How much fun would THAT be at a beaver festival?
Paul Lurie, a resident of Woodland Pond in his late 90s, enjoys the breathtaking view of the beaver pond from the scenic viewing platform. / Courtesy photo
NEW PALTZ — Residents at Woodland Pond, a senior living community, oversaw a project to create a scenic viewing platform by a small pond at the end of a nature trail behind the community. The committee that executed the project will host a dedication ceremony at 3 p.m. today as part of National Active Aging Week.
Now the article doesn’t mention the word beaver but look at the caption on the photo. That’s a beaver pond they’ll be enjoying and benches to stop along the way. That means the retirement community spent money to value beavers. And all these seniors will be enjoying turtles, frogs, herons, wood duck and the occasional otter or mink too. If I worked for this particular New York retirement community I’d definitely update the brochure. Of course I sent it to our friends at the 4 seasons beaver-killing central. Do you think they’ll be building an overlook to their destroyed beaver pond any time soon?
Ellis County landowners and land managers experiencing pond and pond dam damage resulting from beaver activities can sign up to receive trapping service from Wildlife Services, a part of the Texas A & M AgriLife Extension Service.
Nice. Texas A & M providing Wildlife Services to kill animals at your beck and call. I had to go look at the website to see the list of stewardship services they offer. This was a particularly vivid photo from pages.
The mission of the Animal Plant Health Inspection Service, Wildlife Services (WS) is to provide Federal leadership in managing conflicts with wildlife. WS recognizes that wildlife is an important public resource greatly valued by the American people. By its very nature, however, wildlife is a highly dynamic and mobile resource that can cause damage to agriculture and property, pose risks to human health and safety, and affect natural resources. WS conducts programs of research, technical assistance, and applied management to resolve problems that occur when human activity and wildlife conflict with one another.
Ugh. Traumatized yet? Two consolations. California Congressmen were spurred by Tom Knudson’s shocking articles into working to challenge the WS sadism club. And secondly, allow me to offer this antidote which is the very most comforting thing I have yet seen on the internet(s). The little girl woke up frightened from the fireworks. Dad is showing her how to offer herself musical distractions and reminding her that she is safe.
This morning, Texas has some more staggeringly bad news for you. Houston again. Bad even by their standards. Brace yourselves. But don’t worry. After we’re done talking about how enormously stupid this was, I promise I’ll give you some good beaver cheer.
For three years, a roadside drainage pond at Interstate 10 and Barker Cypress Road has been a surprising home to West Houston wildlife, supporting countless fish, birds and turtles — not to mention an alligator or two.
But thanks to a TxDOT maintenance crew, the unlikely sanctuary met its end Wednesday morning when a bulldozer leveled a dam made by a family of beavers. Water quickly drained from the pond, leaving the unsuspecting creatures to fend for themselves.
On a Thursday visit to the site, Drew Karedes from KHOU Channel 11 discovered thousands of fish rotting in the sun, labeling the now muddy patch a “graveyard for animals.” leaving the unsuspecting creatures to fend forthemselves.
“The beavers would walk right up to you,” Joe French, Ron Hoover general manager, explains. “You could pat them and everything. They didn’t have a care in the world. There are a lot of families that would come out here to spend family time.”
So the department of transportation didn’t like all that nature in their drainage channel and decided to kill everything in sight and rip out the dam. Remember this on CYPRESS RD and used to be connected to one of the last bayous in the state. But not any more. Now it is a rotting pile of dying fish. Which TxDOT has promised to come back and clean up.
(It took me nearly three hours to find the email of the man who was responsible for this decision yesterday. Apparently if you’re a state employee making 82,000 a year in taxpayer money and some monsterously bad decisions, you make sure people can’t send you email. He’s second from the right end in this picture.)
TxDOT breaks ground on Grand Parkway expansion Among the elected officials and members of the Texas Department of Transportation conducting a ceremonial groundbreaking Tuesday morning on the Segment E expansion of State Highway 99/Grand Parkway are, from the left, Lance LaCour, Joan Huffman, Ned Holmes, Bill Callegori, John Barton, Michael Alford and Mary Evans. The highway will connect Interstate 10 to U.S. Highway 290.
The comments by the motor home and marine business next door are fairly heartening. They obviously appreciated their natural neighbors. Even their beavers. I assume the footage of the original habitat was theirs? Another mysterious place where alligators and beavers lived side by side. Maybe the news channel had visited before? Either way, now its a mud puddle.
(Just remember that way back when the city of Martinez wanted our beavers dead they paid Dave Scola to go on National Television and call the creek that John Muir’s wife named Alhambra a “Drainage channel”. That very creek that Italian families had earned their living on for a hundred years was part of their flood culverts. I have since learned that the rule book for wantonly destroying wildlife in creeks says that first you should just try and get away with it, and if you unfortunately get stopped, defend your action by saying it was just a “drainage channel.” The media usually doesn’t question that.)
Okay Heidi, where’s that good news you promised?
Last night 20 cub scouts and parents from troop 254 in Fairfield came to Martinez for a beaver viewing. Their scout leader works at Shell and had met Jon at the beaver dam before. Then got my info from Cathy Ivers and arranged a beaver tour. We passed out tattoos and information, talked about the ‘beavers building a neighborhood’ and then saw two kits, a yearling and mom. They even got a chance to hear some whining. Several other people just joined in to see what we were looking at. What a nice group of kids!
Worth A Dam: saving beavers one boyscout at a time.
Do you remember that story, back in fourth of fifth grade, you heard at a sleepover with friends? Two of the friends you had known since 2nd grade but one girl was someone else’s friend, or neighbor, or cousin and she was rumored to have slightly more street cred on account of her parents were divorced, or her mother had died, or her brother was in jail. And when the last pizza had been eaten and all the lights were out and you were huddled in sleeping bags on the living room rug or the back yard, she started with that spooky story in that absolutely chilling and unforgettable voice:
And of course, even at 10, you knew the story was impossible and that ghosts weren’t real and that even if they were people don’t ever make arms out of solid gold, and you might have mumbled so all the way through at intervals but once Elvira leaped from the grave and shouted “YOU GOT IT!” and that terrifying story was over you couldn’t wait to think about who you were going to tell it to next. All the other kids must have too because pretty soon the story was all over school and was starting to get little adjustments, like the woman had been murdered for her golden arm, or it was actually a golden leg. It was a self-reproducing meme that was perpetuating itself like a virus through the primary grades. And even today, just saying the words has a kind of ring to it, and you can remember something of that chill. And it doesn’t matter whether its true, because its not that kind of story.
Which brings us naturally to the topic of beaver dams, water temperature and fish.
Richard Hartley, left, and Mark Brideau, right, both state fisheries biologists, electro-shock and catch fish in Barbers Hollow Brook in Oxford. The state biologists worked with Glenn Krevosky, center, of EBT Environmental Consultants Inc. (T&G Staff/RICK CINCLAIR)
Mr. Krevosky said Barber’s Hollow Brook is but one of several small headwater brooks in town where the positive effect of 46-degree groundwater in a stream has been compromised by beaver dams that dramatically raise stream temperature.
Todd A. Richards, biologist for the Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, agrees that beaver impoundments have an impact on cold-water fish resources, but adds it’s only one point that makes an already bad situation worse.
He said beaver may not have as much impact in hilly and mountainous terrain, but their impact on streams with minimal flow and minimal change in grade is considerable.
“Beavers have a place, and historically, beaver populations were kept in check by wolf, cougar and native Americans. Obviously that is no longer the case. We are losing trout fisheries in areas that previously were not impacted by beaver and that has to be taken into consideration in restoring cold-water fish resources,” he said.
I believe Eisenhower was president when Clyde the ranger stuck his thermometer in the top inch of pond water and observed beaver ponds are warmer than flowing streams. He published a paper on it and of course the paper said what everyone wanted to hear, (that beavers, not progress and concrete, were ruining our streams) and so it went into all those biology text books and field guides. Never mind that if you ask an experienced trout fisherman where he loves to frequent after lots of beer and persuasion he will eventually say the beaver dam. Folks are so used dull easy hatcheries with fish dumped out of the truck that they don’t remember their grandpa or believe their friend Billy anymore.
So the meme of beaver ponds raising temperatures and ruining things for fish perpetuates itself. Michael Pollock was very perplexed by this temperature canard because it ran against everything he saw and observed. He tracked down the origins of the temperature meme to the root of its roots and learned the truth about its single thermometer in the top inch of the pond- origins. He ran expensive experiments funded by the federal government with sensors all the way down the depths of the beaver pond and proved it was completely, entirely and in all other ways untrue.
Okay now, follow this closely. The right of the graph is the mouth of the stream, so the water comes out of the ground colder and gets steadily warmer as it passes to the sea. Except for that one patch on the middle where it says AREA OF PERSISTENT BEAVER DAM BUILDING. How can this be? The water you see in the stream is only part of the story. The majority of that water is underground, beneath the soil, where it never gets warmed by the sun. This colder water passes through the bank wall in a process called hyporheic exchange which cools the temperatures. The placement of a dam increases hyporheic flux by increasing the downward hydraulic gradient across the dam.
End result cooler temperatures in ponds and below beaver dams and happy fish.
This data has been published and discussed in scientific forums. It has been quoted and re-quoted in fish journals from Washington to Norway. It doesn’t matter. Biologists like Mr. Krevosky and Mr. Richards would rather stay up late telling each other scary tales of beavers ruining streams for fish like “Whoooo stole my golden arm???” Of course they invited the media who comes to the sleepover and very responsibly write down every bogus thing they say as if it were fact.
“Previously enterred woman seeks valuable false limb. News at 11:00“
I have zero patience with the fact that this story comes from the fisheries of Massachusetts of all places. It is obviously a brick in the consistent argument, ‘The stupid voters ruined our lives when they took away our traps and infested us with icky beavers! Better change the law right away”. This bad-penny persuasion shows up every few months, usually proceeding a new last-ditch effort to overturn the will of the voters some way or other. Mark your calendar because we’ll be talking about this again soon, I guarantee it.
Oh and if the name of Mr. Krevosky sounds familiar, it should. I wrote about him 4 years ago on this website for famously claiming that beaver dams were ruining Massachusetts by promoting Purple Loosestrife. Here’s a taste of that column, which was fun.
Enter Mr. Glenn E. Krevosky of EBT Environmental Consulting. He has a theory, and like all good theories, it blames the rodent. He says that beaver dams cause flooding, destroy native plants and then make space for Loosestrife to take over. If there were fewer dam beavers, (he has persuasively shouted to the media), we could rid ourselves of this purple menace once and for all. Of course I went immediately to research his copius studies proving this brilliant hypothesis, and saw that the sum total of all literature published in peer review journals on this theory is zero. No research whatsoever. Nada. Not that this has troubled the media, mind you. They are perfectly happy to write down what someone from a very environmental sounding company says. (Of course I couldn’t find EBT consulting either, so who knows what E.B.T. stands for? Everybody Blames Them?)
Some things never change. I still couldn’t find anything about EBT on the internet. Obviously the digital age, along with certain beaver-related scientific facts, continues to elude him.
Nice. 
