Category: Who’s Killing Beavers Now?

Flavors of Stupid

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Who's Killing Beavers Now? January 14, 2012

So the director of public works assures me that they didn’t lower the pipe and that the pond will be the same height. Seeing that the filter is underwater I would be entirely uncomforted by this reassurance EXCEPT for that I had a profound realization at 3 am that changed my outlook entirely.

Bear with me here, but before they reinstalled the filter the pipe had been laying directly on the pond floor since the big washout in March. So all of spring and all of summer the pond was ‘controlled’ by a pipe placed at ground level. Although we saw Reed try and plug the pipe on the anniversary of mom’s death, it wasn’t until Dad came back in August that it stopped flowing.

Which means that even if they DID lower the pipe the pond won’t be any lower than last summer. Which is reassuring.

I went down this morning to check on the recovery expecting fierce rebuiding and maybe a red cross unit. I saw two beavers munching, a sleepy night heron, and no work done whatsoever. The tide was high so the secondary was mostly covered but you could still see the gash and nothing had been done to restore it. They clearly have their own pace at these things, even when we humans panic. Alright. We’ll sit tight.

Martinez has no monopoly here. Lots of stupid beaver news around the country and beyond this morning. Remember Upton, MA the city with the rare dragonfly that wanted to kill its beavers without ruining it’s special bugbog? Well they paid Mike Callahan to install a pipe to lower the pond, paid for the conservation commission former trapper to renew his license and kill two beavers and now are reporting that the pipe will keep the other beavers away. (Like Garlic?) Given the fact that I wrote the conservancy and the paper many many times that this was untrue, and the fact that they wrote me back so you know they read it, we will have to attribute this pretend conviction to willful ignorance and let Upton go with love.

Michael Callahan, of Beaver Solutions in Southampton, installed a pond-leveler which pumps water out of the bog while keeping beavers away.

A second bit of stupid comes from Scotland where there’s been rumors that they might just let the free beavers on the Tay stick around and do their thing. Paul Ramsay and friends did such a good job slowing down the massive beaver trapping that they might have escaped with only the zoo-death of Erica to show for it. Apparently the Scottish Game Keepers association is very alarmed at that idea and is ‘gamely’ offering to help do away with them.

One farmer in Angus is having to fell beaver lodges weekly on an adjacent burn to prevent large-scale flooding, with the animals regularly raising the water level by over a foot. “If I wasn’t having flood problems, I would be happy for the beavers to stay, but I don’t honestly see how we can carry on with it,” he said. “They have caused significant damage.”

Finally, a BEAVER-TRAPPING LOTTERY IN OHIO. (No I’m not kidding) Apparently they have so many compassionate humans that offer to protect their streams from beavers that they have to hold a lottery to decide who should be lucky enough to get to do it. Unbelievable. I have never felt closer to the Buckeye state than I do at this moment.

The city of Mansfield will hold a lottery card drawing for controlled beaver trapping at Clear Fork Reservoir. Two units will be available, a north unit and a south unit. Each successful trapper may have one assistant. Interested trappers may apply by mailing a 4 x 6 inch post card to Gary Foster, at 2678 Gass Road in Mansfield, 44904.

On a final note the website has been acting up lately and you probably encountered trouble loading pages. I’m told that it’s likely a ‘cache’ problem and have temporarily shuffled the home page down to holding only the last three posts to adjust for it. I spoke to our good old friend Scott Artis yesterday who is off bravely embarking on a new career in Bakersfield and he kindly said he’d look at it this weekend. Thanks Scott and let’s all keep our fingers crossed.

Too much information on this site. Apparently I talk to much. Who knew?

Moses Silva dropped this off this morning. Enjoy!

What Foreclosure Really Means?

heidi08 Beaver News, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Who's Killing Beavers Now? January 7, 2012

Yesterday’s Courant paper out of Connecticut sports this headline

Wethersfield Evicting Beavers From Beaver Brook

The town is evicting some beavers from Beaver Brook. In the last few weeks, a state-authorized “nuisance beaver” trapper has captured three adult beavers in the brook’s swamplands off Spring Street, Town Engineer Michael Turner said.

There may be more of the creatures to be trapped and removed, he said.It’s not clear how many beavers have been living in the section of the brook across from the town skating pond on Spring Street.

Let this be a warning to you in CT that when you receive your eviction or foreclosure notice, the nutmeg state may already have your ‘final destination’ in mind! Certainly that was the case for these ‘nuisance’ beavers which is what a city without problem-solving skills calls a problem.

Obviously Wethersfield, which is only an hour away from Beaver Solutions in MA and two hours away from Skip Lisle in VT, couldn’t possibly solve the beaver puzzle in any other way except by trapping. It’s not as if Connecticut has its own former trapper who is now a highly respected installer of flow devices himself (Skip Hilliker) or has citizens who care about the beavers and would take action on their behalf.

At a town council meeting Jan. 3, resident Barbara Ruhe spoke about the beavers, telling residents the creatures were “quite something to see.” She urged people to go see them and take children before the beavers are evicted or meet an untimely end because “we can’t live with them.”

You most certainly CAN live with them, Wethersfield. And you should. You are surrounded by solutions and we’d be happy to find you more. Aside from the needless repeat pouring of taxpayer dollars on a trapping fix that will need to be repeated again and again, there are very good reasons to live with beavers, including a raised water table, more fish, more birds and more wildlife – not to mention what will happen if you have a few volunteers lead fieldtrips down to the beaver dam.

I went looking through your town minutes for the painstakingly decision you made to solve a problem with action rather than with thought, but there wasn’t even a mention of it in this month’s meetings or the last. Apparently the proposal to kill some beavers might make public comment, but it doesn’t even require a motion to actuate.

I hope someone from Wethersfield watches this video. It might change things a bit

Beavers Go Rogue

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions, Creek Seekers Poetry Contest, Environmental, Who's Killing Beavers Now? January 6, 2012

Rogue beavers damaging trees, property on Lake Springfield

Goodness Gracious! ROGUE Beavers? You mean beavers doing something atypical to their species and threatening our very existence? What are they doing? Robbing grocery stores or threatening old women at ATM’s? Carjacking? How terrifying! What an awful threat! Thank goodness the paper was here to tell us about it. Let’s read more.

Beavers have taken up residence under boat docks and damaged or killed trees and shrubs along the shoreline.

Um, that’s it? Where’s the “Rogue” part? I mean don’t beavers normally take trees? Isn’t that like the bottom of the pyramid chart on their four food groups? I’ll keep reading. Maybe the Rogue knocking-over-convenience-stores part is down further in the article.

Mike Castleman knows firsthand. He lost a large shrub and two mature trees in a matter of days. The beavers stripped the bark from his trees to a height of about 3 feet off the ground.

“From what I understand, these trees are dead. This guy killed them,” Castleman said. “I got some pruning spray to seal them and chicken wire to protect them, but everyone who sees them says they are going to die.”

The beavers also reduced a 20-foot-high bush in his yard to a bundle of pointed sticks.

Pointed sticks! That can’t be good. Weapons maybe? Crude hand to hand tools for their eventual world domination? Or planning ahead for a great deal of vampire slaying? Either way, it’s never a good thing when your enemy starts the battle with a bit pile of sharpened sticks. Remember Lord of the Flies? Gasp. Were they sharpened at both ends?

This so rarely happens. Unless, of course, your enemy is a beaver.

Well I’m sure you know about that. I’m sure you studied what beavers TYPICALLY do before you made an effort to describe these particular beavers behavior as ROGUE.

Yep. Looks pretty typical to me, except the paper describes these trees as Shingle Oaks which aren’t beaver favorites by any means. I can only assume this means your lake has a dismal riparian border, no willow or aspen and hardly any vegetation to speak of. No wonder you’re so worried about the trees.

Well, the paper says some residents are wrapping trees and some are talking about trapping. Any other solutions on the table?

Removing beavers is only a temporary solution, according to “Missouri’s Beaver, a Guide to Management, Nuisance Prevention and Damage Control,” published by the Missouri Department of Conservation.

“Once a colony of beaver establishes its territory in a pond, lake or stream, it is virtually impossible to make it move somewhere else through the use of nonlethal techniques,” the manual says. “It is sometimes possible to enjoy beavers in the area while still preserving property.”

Virtually impossible! Better tell all those crazy beaver relocators that they are wasting their time! The sad thing is that Missouri PROBABLY gleaned this little “factoid” from the fact that when you move beavers out new ones move in. Which, by the way is what happens when you kill them too. Better to bear the beavers you have than fly to other’s you know not of.

In case you want a solution besides wire and tar and traps, read here about sand painting the trunk. You’ll be surprised how it helps tame “Rogue” beavers. Oh and get together with your neighbors and plant some willow so that the trees can coppice and regrow. Your bird population will thank you for it.

Castorum Ministrari

heidi08 Beavers, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Who's Killing Beavers Now? January 2, 2012

Did you ever have a dream college? Where, if you were blessed with millions more dollars and thirty more IQ points and an SAT score you couldn’t see thru if you held it up to the light, you would have pursued a dream education as a dream co-ed under dream professors doing dream research? Maybe it was Notre Dame or Oxford or MIT, or maybe you were lucky enough to live the dream (or escape it entirely). But mine was always Wellesley College in Massachusetts. A Liberal Arts school for women started in 1870. Hilary Clinton went there, and so did Madeleine Albright and Diane Sawyer. The motto of Wellesley is “Non Ministrari sed Ministrare” (Not to be ministered unto, but to minister). Apparently they are especially happy to minister unto beavers, which if I had gone to my dream college I would probably be more able to translate.

So you can imagine how I felt when Cheryl sent me this this.

Wellesley beavers killed off

By bbrown | Published: December 31, 2011

Pretty wild story in the Wellesley Local Town Pages (you have to kind of scroll around to locate the story) about the Wellesley Health Department, DPW and Natural Resources Commission joining forces with a business to kill off some beavers whose dam or dams caused flooding in neighborhoods near the Wellesley Recycling & Disposal Facility.

Beavers causing problems for a low-lying town! That almost never always happens. So a business or two complains to Public Works, and they take it up with the Conservation Commission because you need permission to kill beavers in MA. It’s not an emergency, and the commission determines there’s no threat to people or property, YET, but they decide to wait a few months and then call in an expert. Hopefully, they assume, it will be too late to fix in December. Now this famous college town is not completely blind to its position and following in the world and has the presence of mind to bring in someone that would offer other solutions than just trapping – maybe think about installing a flow device to control the problem humanely and keep the vegans happy.

Remember, this is MA so you can guess who they called. He dutifully examined the problem ten days before Christmas and advised the powers that be that the odds of fixing it humanely weren’t stellar. They could try an installation but the wetlands were very shallow, no pond could be tolerated and the beavers might just rebuild somewhere else. I was curious why the commission meeting minutes reported going to the Health Department, (which means permission to trap any way possible) before they brought in Mike. He says that although the article says Beaver Solutions did the trapping, that isn’t true. He gave them his feedback but didn’t know until he read the article that they hired someone else for that step.

My guess is the tossed the name “Solutions” around to make them sound slightly more humane than they were feeling. Fortunately the Executive Director of the town’s Natural Resources Conservation Commission said some astonishingly distracting things to the media to justify her decision.

Why do people say stupid things like “in my 14 years with the town this is the first instance of beavers causing a problem”? They just provoke me to start the new year with a morning’s research on the Google tempting me into using a compass pencil to identify all towns with beaver conflicts in the last 14 years within a 10 mile radius of Ms. Bowser’s front door. (How’s that for a name, btw?) You know, towns like Needham, Wayland and Natick, to name a few. I’m a busy woman, I don’t have time to waste wondering how it is that the town could have a “Beaver Street”, “Beaver Creek” and “Beaver Meadows” without any history of EVER having a problem with beavers?

Don’t tell me that there aren’t 100 strong and compassionate young women on the campus willing to steward the wetlands if the flow device failed. Or a host of environmental science instructors that could lead their class into learning how to install another while studying all the wildlife that appears because of the beaver dams. Don’t tell me there aren’t enough bleeding heart’s in those ivory halls to keep the beavers from flooding or eating begonias by painstakingly unclogging the drains or filters or pipes or whatever it takes. This is Wellesley for Chrissake!

It heartened me that that on my morning of research I found (count them) 63 references to this story in everything from real estate listings to local blogs. At least it will get attention. If I didn’t know better I’d assume that this is the grand lesson they teach at Wellesley.

Always do the right thing. Unless it’s hard.

Inconceivable!!!

heidi08 Beaver Anatomy, Beavers elsewhere, Educational, featured, Who's Killing Beavers Now? December 28, 2011

N.Y. man traps 70-pound beaver

How many surprisingly-heavy dead beavers does the media have to report on before we cease being surprised?

APALACHIN, N.Y., Dec. 27 (UPI) — A New York man says he got a surprise when he retrieved his animal trap from the Susquehanna River to find a record catch — a 70-pound beaver. Bryan Lockman of Apalachin said the monster beaver was in one of several traps he set last week.

“This was only the second day I’d ever gone trapping,” Lockman, 18, told the (Binghamton, N.Y.) Press Bulletin. “When I saw how big it was, wow, it was unbelievable.”

My goodness, such success on only your second day of killing! You must be very proud. Enjoy the champagne. In the meantime I would like to have a conversation with the Department of Natural Resources out your way.

The average adult beaver weighs 35 to 60 pounds, with most coming in at around 40 to 45 pounds, the state Department of Environmental Conservation said.

I’m just curious, but how exactly do you determine the average weight of an adult beaver? I mean, how would you know they were an adult in the first place? You obviously weren’t there when they were born. You probably aren’t testing their reproductive organs. Why wouldn’t you call a 35 lb beaver a yearling or a sub-adult?

Apparently people are very surprised that big animals are big. Who knew?

Oh, and guess whose parents are driving him to Martinez on his way to the Wild and Scenic Film festival where he will be the youngest filmmaker entered? He just had to see the home of the Martinez Beavers! Here’s his recent beta test for ipad and just in case you think this is easy a behind the scenes look at how he made it!