I got a letter yesterday at the office from Wildlife Services in MA. As you may remember, right around the time that Tom Knudson at the Sacramento Bee was writing about what a dangerous, wasteful, rogue arm of government the USDA had become, the Bay State was looking at some of there more gristly and dangerous solutions and thinking that “why can’t we do that?”
I wrote back with more than the usual cautions and caveats, as well as a pretty clear reading of history. Apparently I was persuasive enough to get a response from the governor’s secretary and a smattering of reporters. Yesterday I was politely reminded that the wilddeath services of Massachusetts had carefully listened to everyone’s concerns but decided to do what they damned well wanted anyway.
The study is referred as a FONSI ‘finding of no significant impact’. That is – impact to humans. I assuming there would be a significant impact to the beavers themselves, because otherwise what’s the point?
Your Sept. 19 story, Southborough Board Of Health OKs Beaver Trapping, missed one important point. Most conflicts between humans and beavers can be solved non-lethally; trapping is usually not necessary.
If they continue to pursue trapping, Southborough officials will soon learn the hard way that it’s impossible to permanently solve problems with beavers by killing them; more beavers will return, plug culverts and rebuild dams repeatedly if the habitat suits them. Fortunately, it is possible to out-smart beavers by using water flow devices, which maintain enough water to allow territorial beavers to remain but keep the level low enough to avoid conflicts. The devices protect culverts from being blocked by beavers and/or create permanent leaks in the dams that beavers cannot repair, and therefore control the water level, maintaining it at whatever depth has been set by the placement of the device. Unlike trapping, flow devices are long-term solutions — they have a 98-99 percent success rate and can last as long as a decade; they’re also cost-effective, humane and environmentally-friendly.
Trapping has never controlled the beaver population and it is, at best, a temporary, local solution. There are more than 800 properly installed and maintained water flow devices, designed for each location’s topography and water flow, working successfully all over Massachusetts to resolve beaver flooding conflicts. Southborough should join the communities across the Commonwealth that are using non-lethal solutions to address beaver-related conflicts whenever possible.
Linda Huebner
Deputy Director, Advocacy
Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
Boston, Mass. Nicely done Linda! Pointed, clear and passionate! I love to see a letter in defense of beavers that I didn’t write! I connected with Linda through Mike Callahan of beaver solutions. They have worked together for many years and if you watch the testimonial section of his DVD she is the last commenter. It occurs to me that I’m not sure why beavers get such a resounding defense from the SPCA in Massachusetts and so little outcry everywhere else, but I’m guessing it has to do with the 1996 trapping law. I honestly wish I saw 50 letters like this a year from every state. Still, I may have to take issue with this one sentence, “If they continue to pursue trapping, Southborough officials will soon learn the hard way”. Since the town did the very same thing last year and probably the year before that, I very much doubt that its reasonable to assume they will learn anything from this experience whatsoever.
Beavers and humans, the two most common creatures known for transforming the natural environment, have co-existed for thousands of years.
Sometimes the modern world of man clashes with the wild world of beavers. Their dams can flood out roads, septic systems, basements and wells. A beaver dam recently put parts of a Saugus golf course underwater.
At the same time, Beavers create valuable habitat for birds, fish and invertebrates.
Thus beginsJennie’s 4 page article about beavers on the Ipswich River in Massachusetts. Although it mentions population growth due to lack of wolves (!) it waits all the way until page four to discuss the 1996 changes in trapping laws. That’s got to be a first for Massachusetts which is usually so busy complaining about the law I have sometimes argued can only say the words “Beavers” and “Voters” in the same breath. It even says that although trapping is sometimes necessary, it is never the answer.
Jim MacDougall, naturalist for the Ipswich River Watershed Association and Topsfield resident, said beavers, along with all wildlife, are necessary, regardless of how big of a menace they can be.
“Every element of an ecosystem is essential,” MacDougall said. “Some species are more influential on the existence of others and beavers fall into that category. When I have to deal with their activity affecting roads and wells, they are a nuisance, but a necessary nuisance if I want quality in my life.”
Jim! You are a watershed hero and a true kindred spirit! I looked him up on the Ipswich River Watershed Association and read that he is a scientists who maintains a firm advising businesses on how to leave a cleaner water footprint. Be still my heart! A beaver fan that teaches others and delivers excellent quotes to the press! Uh, Jim…Ever think of starting a beaver festival in MA?
Obviously there are a lot of beaver believers in the area, because even the [often questionably named] conservation commissions seem to be aware of better choices than trapping.
Aside from tolerance, residents who are experiencing issues with beavers can erect exclosures —popularly called beaver deceivers — to deter the animal from building dams.
A beaver deceiver is a wire cage-like construction that prevents the beavers from damming up brook, stream or river.
Other measures such as lethal removal via trapping, removal or breaching of dams and installation of water level control devices require proper licensing and permitting.
“Our general policy is to discourage dam breaching because it doesn’t work,” he said. “They come back.”
Upon hearing the sound of water escaping, beavers tend to jump into action to promptly rebuild the dam, sometimes overnight. Standley said the best way to deal with flooding caused by beavers is to construct exclosures.
“We encourage properly installed beaver deceivers,” Standley said. The use of beaver deceivers has become a popular method for both controlling water levels and allowing beavers to remain in the area.
Okay there’s a serious naming challenge in this article – a true taximonial terror. A rose by any other name, right? As near as I can discern when they say “BEAVER DECEIVER” they mean pipe through a dam that tricks the beavers into not building it higher (Flexible leveler or Castor Master) (what we have in Martinez) and when they say EXCLOSURES they mean actual Beaver Deceivers or Culvert protective fences. Like this
Admittedly, the folks along the Ipswich River need some vocabulary lessons, but this is a pretty thorough look at beavers and their role in habitat creation and I will be both the first and the last to complain. The article does talk to a trapper who uses what he calls ‘box traps’ to live trap the beavers before killing them. I want to ask does this mean cumbersome Bavarian traps? Or did he meant to say ‘suitcase’ instead of box and is actually referring to Hancock traps? Or maybe he catches them like this? →
I don’t know. I’m afraid some of the language in this article kind of reminds me of this scene from Blazing Saddles:
—-but, grading on the good old Massachusetts MIT curve, this is an EXCELLENT beaver article all in all! It outlines the solutions and the reasons to employ them. Go read the whole thing, and see for yourself.
Massachusetts has felt very badly ever since those pesky voters in ’96 took away their right to use certain kind of traps and selfishly demanded that beavers be humanely killed. Now we are treated with alarming regularity to civic hand-wringing about this woeful and crippling legislation and the ensuing beaver population explosion. Of course since they changed the laws they can statistically prove that people get permits to kill beavers LESS OFTEN since the passage of said laws,
but that doesn’t necessarily mean there beavers get KILLED any less often or that there are more beavers because of this fact.You do know that people don’t always get permits, right?
No one can be bothered to count the beaver population or even to compare the number of complaints to a neighboring state without similar trapping restrictions. Instead they spend their mournful afternoons at the State house looking for legislative friends and finally Mr. Bergquist and those trap-happy folks in the bay state have hit upon a solution.
If state laws are too restrictive, bring in the feds!
So Massachusetts has adeal with Wildlife Services on the table to take care of “LARGE RODENT DAMAGE”. The plan is online here and is open for public comment until the end of June. I will be wading through its lavishly overwritten and information-obscuring pages this weekend. It is absolutely stunning to me that even after the horror of Thomas Knudson’s reporting on WS in the Sacramento Bee, which ran in McClatchy papers across the nation, describing the alarming numbers of ‘accidental’ otter kills in beaver traps, the shocking rate of house pets killed by mistake, and the reports of WS employees being told to remove and bury dog and cat collars and never tell the owners—-even after two congressmen are calling for a bipartisan investigation of the agency, Massachusetts looked closely at their blood-thirsty, species-indifferent killing fields and thought, now THAT’s just what we need around here! Wildlife Services!
The money quote so far
Conibear traps are allowed for controlling beaver and muskrat to protect human health and safety. However, the MDFW acknowledges that this restriction does not apply to WS activities on federal lands (see Appendix E; W. MacCallum, MDFW pers. comm. 2010).
The Cedar Glen Golf Course of Massachusetts is in dire straights. A crisis of epic proportions faces their rolling greens and plaid pants. No one in the entire state or in the vast caverns of the Boston Globe or the local University can possibly offer them a shred of real advice. Yesterday the unthinkable happened and the golf course had to turn visitors away.
But a freshly constructed dam – a 25-foot-wide mound of stripped branches and bark – had turned swaths of pristine greenway into swampland.
The course was so waterlogged Thursday by beavers’ handiwork that Burton Page, who runs the business, was forced to close down for the day, estimating $10,000 in lost revenue.
Oh no! Not a beaver dam in a stream by a golf course in Massachusetts! Next thing you’ll tell me is that this would NEVER have happened if it wasn’t for those awful trapping rules that turned Bay State into beaver slums!
Laws to protect the animals have prevented the golf course’s managers from taking any action against their new tenants, who are blocking a section of the Saugus River, which runs through the grounds. Page is hoping for a compromise – keep the dam intact and divert the river to drain the course of standing water – but the Saugus Board of Health denied a request for an emergency permit to alter the water flow around the dam.
Let me get this straight. You asked for permission to divert the water around the dam so that the stream wouldn’t flood. Um, what would prevent the beavers from building a dam in THAT stream next? Well, I’m sure they had a fantastic idea for that too, because just look at their ingenious back-up plan.
In the short term, maintenance staff have put out wooden pallets to help golfers traipse from one hole to the next. But it’s a less-than-perfect fix. On Thursday, the water level was so high that the pallets floated away.
Oh man, you mean you got those kind of mean wooden pallets that float? Of all the rotten luck! What will you do now? Apparently the golf course was denied license to kill because health and human safety isn’t at stake. (And it happens to be May so orphaning a bunch of beavers isn’t usually great for public relations.) If only there were some dire consequences you could flog to get those stick-in-the-mud commissioners moving!
Ellsworth said he is also concerned that the standing water will cause an influx of mosquitoes that could carry disease and “I know [beavers] help the ecosystem and stuff,’’ Ellsworth said. “But when they start affecting homes and businesses, that’s another problem.’’
Really Mr. Ellsworth? Do you really know that beavers help the ecosystem and ‘stuff’? I’d be fascinated to hear you summarize some of the key examples of the way beaver improve the landscape and increase biodiversity. Since you already know about it we can just be quiet and let you review. I won’t interrupt. Come to think of it, do you know what doesn’t increase biodiversity at all? Golf Courses.
Scott Jackson, who teaches in the department of environmental conservation at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and specializes in beavers, said the animals were almost entirely wiped out of Massachusetts centuries ago because of excessive trapping and deforestation.
Slowly, colonies have moved back east from New York, but they only reached Eastern Massachusetts in the past 15 to 20 years, Jackson said.“I grew up in Massachusetts, and we never talked about beavers or saw them,’’ Jackson said. “All this has happened fairly quickly
At last a real expert! Okay, so now we brought in a beaver expert from Massachusetts and he can finally set things straight. Obviously he knows all about flow devices right? And how to solve flooding problems without ruining streams, right? And he knows about Beaver Solutions right? And he and Mike Callahan probably get together every month for a beer to chat about beaver management right? And Mike comes sometimes to lecture his class on long term solutions right?
Jackson explained that if a property owner with a beaver problem does not qualify for an emergency permit from a board of health, he or she can request a permit from the Conservation Commission, but that process requires a public hearing and could take weeks.Even then, there are concerns about reestablishing water flow too quickly; another property downstream can experience inadvertent flooding.
Sigh. See I told you. Rare prehistoric giant beavers in Massachusetts are the only possible explanation.
Admittedly, the folks along the Ipswich River need some vocabulary lessons, but this is a pretty thorough look at beavers and their role in habitat creation and I will be both the first and the last to complain. The article does talk to a trapper who uses what he calls ‘box traps’ to live trap the beavers before killing them. I want to ask does this mean cumbersome Bavarian traps? Or did he meant to say ‘suitcase’ instead of box and is actually referring to Hancock traps? Or maybe he catches them like this? →
