It’s the end of the year and folks are looking over their shoulders to sum up accomplishments and see what’s left to do on the list for 2020. I spent yesterday wading through our history for an end of the year post about beavers and Worth A Dam and am not at all surprised to see others doing it too.

Busy year for Nature Conservancy of Canada in the Red Deer region

Another productive year is in the books for the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC), which undertook several projects in the central Alberta region in 2019.

Team members put a bow on the calendar in Red Deer this month selling blue spruce trees uprooted from a property near Pine Lake. The species is not native, and therefore is unhealthy to have growing near the native white spruce.

“This summer, beavers established their lodge on a wetland along our south boundary causing undesirable flooding on our neighbour’s property,” Schlemko recalls. “We worked together with the help of Cows & Fish to come up with a solution to co-exist with the beavers, who are known as ‘ecosystem engineers.’”

Well that sounds great! Cows and Fish is very good at this and I can’t see anything going wrong with that decision.

Except this.

Words kind of fail me here. Wow Mike and Skip always make this work seem so hard. What were there no shopping carts available?

The team installed two exclusion fences, with further work needed to manage how many trees the beavers cut down, as they are along two boundary fence-lines which keep cattle in.

.I really hate that some rancher agreed to try coexisting with beaver and this is what he got. You can bet he’s not going to try again. I’m not going to say anything. Let’s just let the beavers tell them how well this pile of grating protects their culverts. I’m sure they can get the message across nicely.

Here’s hoping the photographer snapped the wrong image and this isn’t the exclusion fence they helped the rancher build