“It’s a beaver. Or it might be an otter. I can’t quite tell,” Boone says.
Is there a more fitting quote to capture the scrupulous care involved in beaver trapping? I sure never saw one. Here’s some more beaver ignorance from Illinois, which has never seen a furbearer it couldn’t shoot.
At war with the beavers
LODA — Wearing rubber boots and armed with a hand-held cultivator tool, Jon Boone ventures out into a heavily forested area just south of the township road that the locals call the Loda Slab. The 63-year-old, tall, gray-bearded man leads the way through 6-foot-high prairie grass, using his tool to create a path for a trailing reporter.
“When you come out here, this is not a hike through a park,” Boone warns. “This is what Illinois looks like at its best.”
“There he is!” Boone says, pointing to an animal that had just popped its head out of the 4-foot-deep water in front of him, part of the meandering Spring Creek.
“It’s a beaver. Or it might be an otter. I can’t quite tell,” Boone says.
He makes regular visits to the spot in Spring Creek just west of Loda where the large dam is located. He usually visits first during the daytime, using hand tools like cultivators, rakes or picks to break up a few spots in the dam to create a flow of rushing water. As long as his nuisance permit is valid, he then returns to the scene that night, armed with a shotgun, ready to shoot any beavers he sees.
“The sound of the rushing water makes them want to fix the dam,” Boone says. “Sometimes, I’ve been out here for hours and never seen a thing. Those are the boring nights. The last time I was out here, the only thing I saw was a shooting star, and I sat here for an hour or two.”
In the past three months, Boone shot two beavers, and three more were trapped. But the beavers — which could number more than 10, he says — remain, and so does the big dam, along with another smaller dam just downstream.
Beavers, otters, toddlers… who really can tell the difference? What I see – I shoot and just to be on the careful side I only shoot if its in the water or on the dam. (Or within striking distance.) I’m a responsible man you know. A trustee. They write articles about me.
Boone says he recently tried to buy some dynamite to blow up the beaver dams, but an area store refused to sell it to him. He said there is a person in the area who is licensed to use dynamite, and it remains a possibility that the village could use that person’s services, but Boone says “we probably will never do that.”
Who knew that dynamite regulations were stronger than those for assault rifles? We’ll ,he’s at least getting solid advice from the very top;
“The conservation guy (at the Illinois Department of Natural Resources) goes, ‘You know, as much as they’ve spent paying you to come out here and do this, you should hire a professional trapper,'” Boone recalls. “I said, ‘Well, first of all, they’re not paying me anything, because I’m a trustee.'”
Aww you men you kill furbearers for nothing in your spare time? That’s mighty white of you, really. Loved this quote
“I have an inane [sic] sense of direction,” says Boone, whose great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was the brother of Daniel Boone, an American pioneer, explorer, woodsman and frontiersman. “I never get lost.
“I get confused a lot, but I always find my way back.”
Is this reporter really really stupid or really really smart? “INANE” means silly or stupid. The noble trustee was really trying to say “INNATE” to convey that his unique ancestral heritage gave him this ability. Now did the man get it wrong and Will the reporter didn’t know the difference so just wrote it down? Or did Will just mistype or auto-correct his way into trouble? Or (and this makes me the happiest to think of) did Will hear the mistake, and just think that it was a fitting description for this old loon and leave it in?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Yesterday we finished the 150th and last pendant necklace. They are all lovingly tucked into individual bags and arranged by ‘letter’ to be ready for the beaver festival. Jon wanted to know how all this kind of thing got done when we were both working?
I made the Gessner otter for our friends at ROEP and mildly asked when the ‘otter festival’ is coming? They said they might plan something for their 5th year, and Cindy Margulis on facebook suggested that they could get the Oakland Zoo TO HOST IT for them.
That seems fair. Martinez can slog away while they descend to earth on a fluffy cloud. Because otters live a charmed life. It’s true.
