The New York Times Lead story in the Science Section was a series of NIMBY beaver tales. I like to think the Grey Lady slapped the Grey Owl soundly in the face yesterday and invited him into the parking lot for a bit of fist-to-cuffs. Apparently, 30 minutes away from Mike Callahan’s business in Massachusetts, (you know the one cryptically named “Beaver Solutions“) city engineers are beside themselves wondering what to do about the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad, beaver problem.
CONCORD, Mass. — The dozens of public works officials, municipal engineers, conservation agents and others who crowded into a meeting room here one recent morning needed help. Property in their towns was flooding, they said. Culverts were clogged. Septic tanks were being overwhelmed.“We have a huge problem,” said David Pavlik, an engineer for the town of Lexington, where dams built by beavers have sent water flooding into the town’s sanitary sewers. “We trapped them,” he said. “We breached their dam. Nothing works. We are looking for long-term solutions.”
Ahhh not just “Beaver solutions”…”Beaver Final Solutions”. Hmmm I wonder what that might be. Apparently near extermination wasn’t long termy enough. And I assume you wouldn’t suggest moving all the housing and roads into the desert. What else could possibly be a solution that works forever? How about a commitment to solve problems creatively when they arise, to restrict beavers from places you don’t want them to be, and a plan to manage their behavior so that you can tolerate them in other places? How about you stop blowing up dams and thinking its going to change their behavior?
It hasn’t changed YOURS, its unlikely to change THEIRS.
Around the nation, decades of environmental regulation, conservation efforts and changing land use have brought many species, like beavers, so far back from the brink that they are viewed as nuisances. As Stuart Pimm, a conservation ecologist at Duke University, put it, “We are finding they are inconvenient.”
Oh my God, No. Say it isn’t so. Not INCONVENIENT!!!!!!! The precious sacrament convenience of man is one of the seven golden benefits of walking upright, right after having our hands free and getting to have more sex than we have offspring. Don’t tell me its being threatened by the monogamous reproduction of an animal we nearly wiped off the planet 200 years ago. At long last beavers, have you no decency?
Today, Ms. Hajduk said, there are at least 30,000 beavers, all over the state.
Wow, that’s a lot. Maybe this whole environmental movement has gone too far. We obviously brought them back too much. How many did their used to be? 29,000? Oh wait, remember those historical trapping records that showed 60 to 80 beaver per mile of stream? I wonder how many miles of stream Massachusetts has. (Gosh the internet is useful. 4320 miles of stream in the commonwealth of Massachusetts.) Lets just multiply that by the low number of 60…how many beavers would we expect if we were back to that baseline? I mean if we had done an even adequate job of “bringing them back” 259,200. Let’s be generous and just round down to 200,000.
Uh oh. By the most conservative possible calculations, Massachusetts is short 170,000 beavers!
By 8 am yesterday morning I had received this article from three people. By nine I had written the author. And by ten had received an answer back. By 11, ten people had suggested I read it. The sad thing is that this slanderous bit of whining-from-people-who-should-know-better will have also been sent to every member of the city staff and council. Look, they’ll say! It’s in the NY Times! Beavers are harassing other cities not just ours! They’ll pat each other sympathetically on the back and say, I knew they weren’t worth a dam!
Never mind that the Ms Hajduk of the article will be presenting on beavers as PESTS at the next Urban Wildlife Conference in Massachusetts organized by John Hadidian of HSUS. John is a long time friend of the Martinez Beavers, and one speaker he just asked aboard is our own friend Mike Callahan who will be talking about flow devices, which we all know Fish & Game likes to say don’t work (except when they do). The conference is later this month and don’t you wish you could be there?
The article closes with mention of the good beavers can do in the habitat. Which is by far the best part, and the part the author anxiously pointed to when she wrote back.
As she and Dr. Griffin neared the pond, a group of wood ducks, alarmed by their approach, went squawking into the air. It was good to see them, Dr. Griffin said — they are among the species favored by hunters that the state is trying to encourage. She pointed to an osprey sitting on a dead tree. Ospreys were almost wiped out by DDT but are now back in Massachusetts, and this one was taking advantage of beaver-created habitat. Just then, a great blue heron glided to a landing in the pond, another guest of the beavers.
Impoundments like this one absorb water, especially in the spring, when streams swell with rain and snow runoff, Dr. Griffin said. And when the impoundment eventually silts up and the beavers move on, their dam will decay and the pond will drain, leaving unusually rich soil behind.
“These beaver meadows stand out like rich little oases,” Ms. Hajduk said.
Dr. Griffin said she and her colleagues emphasized these advantages in urging people to adopt “tolerance and coexistence as a first line of defense.”
Remember, no matter how much good they do, Massachusetts is still missing 170,000 beavers, so its a drop in the bucket.
