Because the beaver isn't just an animal; it's an ecosystem!

Category: Who’s Killing Beavers Now?


Beavers have been making their presence known at Longfellow Pond in Wellesley. Town park officials have placed wire mesh around surviving trees to try to save them from the animals’ teeth.

Wellesley on Alert as Beavers Return to Town

Guess which famous college town killed beavers in January of this year (after appearing to consider a flow device from Beaver Solutions) and needs to kill some MORE beavers now? That’s right, it houses the Alma Mater of Hilary Clinton, Madeleine Albright and Diane Sawyer. Earlier this year they said that no ponding whatsoever could be tolerated and had the beavers trapped and killed. Now, because they got rid of the old beavers, they’re worried that some new ones moved in.

It looks like Wellesley’s beavers are back, and town officials have their fingers crossed that the animals are not planning to stay. “We’re holding our breath that hopefully, we don’t have a new family moving in,” said Janet Bowser, Director of the town’s Natural Resources Commission.

Last year, she said, beavers built two dams in Fuller Brook, bordering Needham and the town’s Recycling and Disposal Facility. Their dams caused flooding, and the town had to have the beavers trapped and euthanized. It was the first time in the 15 years she has worked for the town, said Bowser, that beavers have caused problems – and officials were hoping that it was a one-time issue.

But Wellesley is a pretty nice town, so who can blame the beavers, really?

I don’t think its a nice town. I think it’s an infuriating town. I think that in the entire city there isn’t a janitor with an IQ less than 115 and they STILL won’t listen to reason. I think they know as much about beavers and ecology and problem solving as Winston Churchill knew about doilies. Just look at the quote from the head of their Natural Resources Commission.

Right now, said Bowser, the town is just keeping an eye out.“Once you have them in an area, they do come back to mate,” she said.

Come back to mate? Like Buffalo? Or Tule Elk? Apparently the head of the Conservation Commission in Wellesly thinks that beavers are herd animals. I would be more patient with her misinformation if I hadn’t personally written to Pamela 11 months ago and explained everything she needed to know. I could probably be more understanding if she hadn’t told the paper back then that she had never seen beaver problems in 14 years, (when a cursory google search showed that they were happening all around her).

Never mind. Just because the town is surrounded by great minds and peopled by professors and houses a prestigious ecology department, it doesn’t mean they have a clue. In the words of Dorothy Parker, “you can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.


Kevin Ellis has been keeping an eye on beaver activity during his daily walks in and around the Welland Recreational Canal.

Dam beavers!

The training officer with Welland Fire and Emergency Services takes almost daily walks along the waterway on Canal Bank St. during his lunch break, and recently he began noticing distinctive markings on area trees. After inspecting several trunks, both large and small, along the water, it became apparent to Ellis that Welland is now home to a colony of beavers.

Several attempts have since been made to remove the lodge and makeshift dam that has been backing up water, but the beavers are persistent in rebuilding their home, Bering said.

“They’re pretty industrious.”

Beavers have made their presence known in Niagara more prominently over the past five to eight years, said land management director Darcy Baker of Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority.

“They’re really expanding their territory,” he said, with sightings coming in from Niagara-on-the-Lake to Fort Erie.

Dam removal can be tricky, he said, as beavers are tenacious and will work to repair their damaged dams, whether patching or rebuilding entirely.  Dam removal should be done in consultation with the Ministry of Natural Resources, Baker said, to ensure it’s done properly.

You might remember the amount of angst and outcry caused when nearby St Catherines sought to remove some beavers a while back. Now Welland wants in on the beaver-killing action. Don’t worry though because the article gives helpful comments like “Discourage beavers on your property by removing trees and brush.

It’s that time of year again, when every day gives a smorgasbord choice of beaver-killing stories. You can literally search on the Google and find complaints from PEI to Arizona and everywhere in between. Sometimes it wearies me, especially when I’m sent an email thread between CDFG and Caltrans about the Weaver Creek beavers being extirpated on the Klamath because their dams were causing problems for Coho.

Honestly, have we learned NOTHING?



Scott Rall’s column about the lost art of trapping in The Worthington Daily Globe is the latest in a never-ending homage to people who make a living killing things for money – well, not for money because, of course, according to the article “No one does it for the money anymore“. Mr. Rall  goes on to nobly blur the boundaries between the concept of being connected to the natural world and being in the service of folks who are inconvenienced by it. Nice.

“Randy checks his traps each and every day. This is a huge commitment. You never get a day off and there are very few people you can call on to cover the trap line for you…Nobody that traps is in it for the money. A good week of trapping will cover the cost of fuel to run the trap lines that week….Trapping to Randy is truly a calling — much like restoring habitat is a calling to me. You do it for the history and nostalgia and to keep tradition and an American way of life alive. After a few hours I got the feeling that trapping is a connection to the land that can only be achieved by participating in the predator-prey relationship.”

The mind reels. The jaw drops. The fingers type. Where to begin?

Shall I begin with the comment that folks nowadays don’t have enough commitment to do something every day anymore? (Ahem.) With the notion that trapping connects you to history and nostalgia? (Killing Indians and keeping slaves was an American way of life once. Should we consider it noble now to keep that tradition?) The disservice to the term “calling” by using it in this way? (Mother Theresa had a calling. Martin Luther King had a calling. John Muir had a “calling”.)Randy has about as much of a calling as Dexter,  the Artful Dodger, or Thenardier.

But I think the clearly onanistically derived fantasy about participating in the “predator-prey relationship” is as rich as anything you are likely to read in this lifetime. I don’t know if Mr. Rall longs to be on Randy’s dinner menu or if he has just been immersed too deeply in his daughter’s copy of The Hunger Games but there is no excuse for a grown man getting paid for that level of hyperbole.

Rather than be outraged at the language, the cruelty or the glorification of this excuse for laziness, or even without commenting on the ironic failure to realize that the best way to protect habitat might be not to kill the animal that creates it, I will just say that Mr. Rall is unoriginal. Five columnists in the past three months have written a better articles praising trapping then you. This is old news. Here’s a description of one of my favorites.

Most bitterly ironic sentence from the entire article deifying beaver killing?

“With so little water left around the area due to drought, the prime spots for setting traps are dramatically reduced. I would guess 90 percent of what is normally wet is now bone dry.”



Photo taken from a trappers forum where they were discussing great ways to kill beavers.



It seems that everywhere else in America (and probably Canada too) it’s beaver killing season. Reports from New York, and Illinois and South Carolina bemoan the dastardly fiends and praise the heroic johnny-come-deadly beaver trapper who saved the town by snagging the culprits. So much so that this is the cover photo in this mornings Lincoln Courier.

Click for Image if you are that kind of person.

LINCOLN —

For residents who live in the Brainard Branch area in Lincoln they can breathe collective relief sighs in regards to the problems they have with beavers.

Lincoln Streets and Alley superintendent Tracy Jackson said his department has continued to tear down many of the dams the animals make and has been battling this since the early spring.

Jackson said he is grateful to the efforts of Troy Hanger, of Lincoln, for his tenacity in wanting to rid the area of this problem.

Hanger, a licensed trapper, says the 62-pound beaver was not an easy catch.

“He avoided me for two weeks. I would put three or four beaver casters out to attract them by scent and I would see the trees chewed but he wouldn’t go near the trap,” said Hanger who started this project on Nov. 5, the first day of the trapping season.

Articles like this make me very discouraged that we will ever get to a more intelligent place in beaver policy. On mornings like today when there are so many stories of carnage that I get to pick and choose between varieties of beaver stupid I worry that it is hopeless and it will never get better. The beaver moon was named because its a good time to remember to kill beavers, and that’s true for everywhere in America.

Except Martinez.

A group of beaver supporters gathered on the bridge near the Amtrak station in Martinez on Wednesday to celebrate the Beaver Moon Credit David Mills

Perhaps it was because it was the night of the Beaver Moon. Whatever it was, two of Martinez’s beavers made an appearance at sundown Wednesday while a dozen onlookers watched. The crowd had gathered on the bridge near the city’s Amtrak station downtown at 5 p.m. under the November full moon known as the Beaver Moon or Frost Moon. About 5:15 p.m., the first beaver swam out from its den along the banks of Alhambra Creek. He disappeared, but a few minutes later another beaver came out, swam near one of the colony’s dams, grabbed a vine and brought it back to the den. The event, organized by the community group Worth A Dam, was designed as a celebration of the beaver community in town.

Worth A Dam. Changing the world one beaver at a time.


There’s wonderful and terrible news in the beaver world this morning and I don’t want you to miss any of it. Let’s get the dirty work outta the way before we settle down to enjoy ourselves. Brace yourselves, these are the first two lines of the article:

GREENVILLE, S.C. —

A notice was recently sent to tenants living at Hampton Forest Apartment warning if they heard gunshots not to call the police.  The complex is fighting to keep its property safe from a colony of beavers.

Got that? If you hear gunshots, screaming and breaking pottery coming from the living room don’t call the police. I’m just fixing a marital problem. Okay, then. I’m glad the Hampton Forest Apartment has tried Every Other possible solution for resolving this conflict. I mean first destroying their homes and dams, then hiring a trapper and only now when all other murderous options have been employed turning to the fearless sharpshooter.

What’s this thought? At the very end of the article?

Two non-deadly tools for reducing beaver damage without removing the animal is a water control device. It helps maintain the flow of water. Another option is using wire barriers to protection against gnawing.

Remember, here at beaver central we’re grading on a curve and this is South Carolina so the fact that this sentence made it into the article is sorta amazing.

____________________________________________________

Now because it’s that time of year and you’ve all been very good, check out this Recovery Plan for the Central Coast Coho put forth by our good friends at NOAA (and you can bet the California part was heavily influenced by this year’s winner of the Golden Pipe Award, Brock Dolman!)

Restoration- Habitat Complexity

3.1.1. Recovery Action: Improve habitat complexity

3.1.1.7. Action Step: Utilize non-lethal methods to manage beaver depredation issues (e.g. flooding, crop damage) within the range of CCC salmonids such as flow devices, fencing, and beaver re-location and enhance habitat complexity.

3.1.1.8. Action Step: Where non-lethal methods prove unfeasible to resolve depredation issues, relocate beaver populations to remote CCC coho streams where habitat enhancement is needed and resource conflict is low.

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