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Live Free AND Die

Isn’t that funny? A beaver walking around the road where everyone in Nashua goes to pick up their children from Dr. Norman Crisp school. Nashua is the second biggest town in the state and twice named ‘the best place to live in New Hampshire’ by Money magazine. The woman in this photo apparently saw a child ‘taunting’ the beaver and called 911 to get him taken care of. Of course 911 said ‘we don’t do beavers’ and the beaver was left to his own devices. Nearsighted, separated from his family, and far too low to be seen by even the most cautious driver, the brave beaver continued on his ill-fated journey. And the children and their parents continued to enjoy staring at him and taking photos and maybe there was even as a contest at the newspaper for the best headline. ‘Why did the beaver cross the road‘ was an obvious win, but ‘How is a beaver like a speed bump‘ came in a solid second.

Yes taunting is childish and not very nice, but you know what they say, ‘Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me and a couple impatient autos can run me over flatter than the proverbial pancake.”

So the inexplicable city of Nashua spent an entire day stopping and staring at the young beaver, taunting the beaver, snapping a million photos, shooting video and gossiping about it on the local rag, but not one citizen in the population of 86,000 people could actually, you know, DO ANYTHING about it all day, because six hours later there was this headline:

Visiting beaver dies after being struck by car

NASHUA – A beaver that was spotted on Arlington Street on Thursday and attracted a small crowd of onlookers never made it back to the water. The beaver was put down later Thursday because it had been struck by a car and suffered serious injuries, Nashua Police Sgt. William Dillon said Friday.

Beavers die. It happens all the time, and we both know it. But something about this story is even more upsetting than the usual heartless trapping tales where beavers are killed for their own good or for ours. Because these people obviously enjoyed this rare sighting, they thought it was cool enough to snap a photo or shoot some video with their iphone so they could show their co-workers or their neighbors. Maybe children excitedly told their dads about it at the dinner table or looked up beavers on wikipedia that night.People were interested in this beaver – but no one was interested enough to care.

I’ve been a psychologist long enough to understand Bystander Apathy is always shocking, but this story got under my skin in a way I didn’t expect. Maybe it got under your skin too. If it did you should add your comments to the article so Nashua learns what it was supposed to do for next time.

A Cautionary Tale…

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Who's Killing Beavers Now? March 28, 2012

Brace yourselves. This is a horrible story. I intensely dislike this story – no let’s be honest, I hate this story. Seems some private property along Orrington Rd. in Bangor Maine was owned by a man with a soft spot for beavers. So far so good. For all the reasons we talk about every day he let some beavers build a dam on his land and create some wetlands. When the city wanted him to get rid of them, he resisted. Of course he received the usual benefits of more birds, more fish and more wildlife. About 10 years ago there was a massive washout of the dam and the flooding caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage to nearby roads. The property owner was stiffly reprimanded by the city and he- to his credit- nobly responded by installing a flow device.

The flooding Friday night was in the same area that washed out on May 23, 2001, when a beaver dam failure washed out a half-mile stretch of Swetts Pond Road and created a gully at least 10 feet deep at the entrance of Cemetery Road.

A device called a “beaver deceiver,” which resembles a culvert, was installed after the last major flooding a decade ago, but has since failed, White said.

“It’s a culvert that we placed in the dam to control the level of the dam,” the town manager said. The device now “is completely visible and it’s completely jammed full of sticks,” which caused it to stop regulating the water levels, Stewart said.

Ugh. The first thing attentive readers will notice is that this device was not in fact a beaver deceiver, since it was a pipe designed to lower dam height. Okay naming issues happen all the time. Let’s keep reading. The pipe was found stuffed full of mud and sticks. Hmm. If it was stuffed full that must mean it had no protection? No roundfence to keep the beavers from plugging up the pipe?

So I wrote the reporter about the issue. She wrote back and said that the pipe HAD a filter at both ends and that over the years it had decayed enough to give the beavers access and eventually failed – meaning they plugged up the pipe, and the water backed up higher than the dam could hold with the spring thaw and the washout did the rest.

“When the beavers built the dam they created an environment for other wildlife to use” that falls under state and federal protections, Fire Chief Stewart said

Did I mention how much I hate this story? This is one of those rare situations where so many people did the right thing and it still turned out horribly. Mind you it would have been nice if the landowner checked the filter once in a while or paid a 16 year old to do it. Flow devices don’t require MUCH maintenance, but they don’t last forever and you will need to do an ‘eyeball check’ at least every year! Especially when you know the area is vulnerable to flash storms that can wipe the heck out of beaver dams and roads because it’s already happened! Of course now the land owner has given up the beaver defense and is hiring a trapper to come remove the little culprits ASAP.

Larry Pelletier told town selectman Monday night he’ll hire a trapper to remove the colony of beavers on Swetts Pond Road. He says the town will do everything it can make sure this doesn’t happen, again.

Never happen again – as in no beavers will be allowed near a road ever again and we won’t put our faith in some crazy beaver deceiver ever again. I hate hate hate this story but I suppose the part of it we should learn from is that just because a flow device was installed a decade ago doesn’t mean the beaver challenge is solved forEVER, and we still need to pay attention to conditions and be proactive.

We need good cheer after that. Check out Gary Bogue’s be-nice-to-beavers blog this morning for comfort!

Nothing Could Be Finer…

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Festival, Who's Killing Beavers Now? March 27, 2012

The beavers are on the warpath in North Carolina, kicking ass and taking names building dams and taking trees along the 70 mile stretch from Cary to Greensboro. This picture was snapped by someone enjoying Bond Park and sent to a columnist who wrote that the beavers were ‘being relocated’, which I’m sure you understand as well as I do. (You know like when your parents told you that puppy went to ‘live on the farm’.)

I did a little searching for the Beaver Man and found the number is linked to the home of a 77 year old man in Stantonsburg NC. No business listing but his (?) son is listed as the rifle safety coordinator for the North Carolina Trappers Association, so that’s nice. Gosh, I can’t tell you how surprised I am that someone with the name ‘beaver man‘ on his truck turns out to be a trapper!

Well apparently they have lots of feelings about beavers in NC because look at this clip from Greensboro where they are worried that beavers will ruin their water quality.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but are you saying that this town rips out beaver dams over and over, tipping mud and silt and debris into the water again and again and then worries about water quality? Apparently the terms ’cause’ and ‘effect’ are not well understood in the area. Dear, challenged Greensboro. Don’t you know that beaver dams are sometimes called the ‘earth’s kidneys‘ because their filtering actually improves water quality?

Well, the benefits of beavers bandwagon may not have reached North Carolina yet, but it certainly has been making the rounds. Yesterday I received a call from Guelph, Ontario about printing my letter to the editor, a call from Maine from someone who wanted to save some beavers in the city park and start their own beaver festival there, and an email from Kentucky where a certain young stopmotion filmmaker we are fond of spent an hour with a reporter walking through bulldozed beaver habitat and talking about their benefits to the ecosystem.

To paraphrase for our friends in North Carolina: the arc of restoration may be long but it bends towards beavers!

Compassion Fatigue in Kansas City

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Who's Killing Beavers Now? March 22, 2012

“Kind of like a wood pecker, pecks, pecks, pecks. It’s like just squeaking wood all night long,” said Shannon White, a Northland homeowner forced to live with a family of beavers just beyond her back yard.

Squeaking wood has chased this otherwise obviously very tolerant family around the bend. It’s not as if any problem that has bothered them for a year and a half would be worthy of a google search for solutions or anything! Squeak, squeak, squeak! They can hardly hear themselves think! How can they possibly cope?

I can’t tell you how many times we’re down at the dam and troubled by loud squeaking noises. (As in I can’t tell you how often because it has never happened.) (Because beavers don’t MAKE squeaking noises and the wood they chew or build with doesn’t make squeaking noises either). Often we hear chewing noises. Did you mean chewing noises? Do you think they’re saying ‘squeaking’ because of the compelling rat imagery? And if beavers are rodents and rats are rodents beavers must therefore squeak? I’m especially fond of the young naturalist’s comments that they’re burdened with ALL THESE FROGS because of the lousy dam. And more frogs mean more snakes! This is a new way to look at the biodiversity burden of beaver dams! And more mosquitoes which are obviously going to cause West Nile Virus! Oh no, I hope you don’t end up getting more fish and birds drawn to your quite little drainage ditch! That would be horrible!

And to think, before all these rodents moved in it was such a nice ditch!

Robust

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions, Educational, Who's Killing Beavers Now? March 13, 2012

If you ever had the odd [mis] fortune of being responsible for several children at once, you must have noticed that there was that *one* child who would always cause dramatic misdeeds and even when confronted at the very moment his hand was in the cookie jar or her fingers were on the kitten’s tail or actually removing money from your wallet (what the Catholics would call In flagrante delicto) and we would more generally describe as caught RED-HANDED said child would look at you with a mixture of innocence and indignation and say “What????“

Apparently this philosophy has figured heavily in the civic minds of St. Matthews, where they spent most of yesterday writing back folks that they

A) had been misunderstood and falsely accused
B) knew nothing at all about what happened
C) knew something about what happened but surely never harmed the beavers in any way
D) upon reflection may have ripped the dam but never flattened the lodge and
E) oh you mean flat area in the photo with the bulldozer tracks on it?

At no point did a responsible politician, with the sincerest interest in his community, step gallantly forward and say, yes I requested this thing be done for the good of our citizens. Or widows and orphans. Or whatever. It honestly made me think of this sketch, which when I saw it so many years ago I assumed was an exaggeration. I would encourage you to watch it again count how many times Palin’s character is willing to lie, obstruct, distract and generally excuse his behavior. I count 12 if you don’t include the possible effort to derail the complaint with a gender argument at the beginning.

Obviously, we can’t all respond like this grand master to an assorted-chocolate-box of bald-faced lies. Sometimes robustly delivered lies can take our breath and leave us sputtering in disbelief, looking around for a witness, or wondering if we possibly misunderstood. Obviously It’s going to require the spirit of John Cleese to get these folks at St. Matthews to fess up to what was probably a phone call to public works and a discrete request to ‘Bubba’ to take care of the problem, knowing full well what he would be likely do.

In the meantime your heart can be consoled by this remarkable tale of kindness to beavers, weirdly from the middle of beaver-killing Nova Scotia, where a family of beavers moved into the ditch behind a River John home and was apparently welcomed with open – er- apples!

The video actually makes me a little anxious, but their heart is clearly in the right place and the story could soften public attitudes in a very beaver phobic region….sooo…..