Over the years, the wildlife spotted in my North Greece backyard, bordered on one side by a wide and winding creek, reads like a field guide.
Without question, though, the creatures that most intrigue me and I only rarely see are the industrious beavers that gnaw on the trees lining the creek banks.
Am I the only one who was lulled by this friendly little headline into thinking this was a nice appreciation article about watching what beavers do in your own backyard? I feel so betrayed by his ultimately murderous tone, but I should have been immediately alerted by the use of this photo which shows to beavers on a manmade dam in the Smithsonian enclosure. (Of course it would have to be manmade. You can’t let these animals go mucking around with it themselves).
The DEC website dubs them “nature’s wetland engineers.” That’s because their propensity to dam small streams creates ponds and habitat that benefit a wide variety of wildlife species. Beavers fell trees to get at the succulent leaves and branches in the canopy. A lodge in the middle of a pond of their making also protects them from predators. Next to man, nothing alters a landscape like a busy beaver.
On the flip side, beaver activity can kill a good trout stream if water temperatures rise too much, vast tracts of forest can be killed by tree roots being submerged in water, and roads and farmland can be washed out by flooding caused by beaver dams.
On the flipside the reporter of this story is woefully uninformed and has never heard of hyporheic exchange that cools water temperatures in beaver dams and has no awareness of the obligate nestors or great blue herons that are grateful for those flooded trees. Beavers are destructive and ‘icky’ and you can guess the only way they can be effectively controlled.
To keep the beaver population stable, approximately 15,000 to 18,000 animals need to be harvested each year, Smith said.
Trapping season in Region 8 starts Monday and runs until Feb. 15. There are no daily bag limits. The Adirondacks and Catskill regions have even more liberal trapping seasons for beaver. A special trapping license is required.
The Genesee Valley Trappers, Assoc., whose lodge is located at 4462 County Road 32, Canandaigua, conducts fur auctions on the third Sunday of every December, January, February and March. The first is scheduled for Dec. 15. Check in starts at 6:30 a.m
“The fur market overall is doing well but the one thing lagging is beaver,” Smith said. “If you’re going to put the effort in, it’s not beaver at the moment. You can catch muskrat at $10 to $12 apiece and it’s a lot easier than putting up a big beaver pelt to fetch $25.”
Contact the Genesee Valley Trappers Association at (585) 229-4759 or email geneseevalleytrappers@yahoo.com.
Let’s thank our lucky stars that’s it’s not more profitable to trap beavers, because God knows what happened the last time that was true. One of the only arrows in our quiver is cost savings over time, which we can poke property owners and mayors with again and again. Still drama queen stories like Martinez don’t help matters any. What was the last number or city hurled at the press to explain how much our ‘beavers’ cost them? I remember looking at the itemized costs when I was on the subcommittee and we paid 13,000 to fly Skip from Vermont and install the flow device. There was also 5000 in overtime listed for all the police officers at the beaver meeting. (No, I’m not kidding). Not to mention all the staff overtime hours for uselessly putting in the cable and measuring how deep the water was. I believe the total was hundreds of thousands by the time that second layer of sheetpile was hammered in.
Taking care of beavers is a fixed expense, but controlling fears about beavers it appears is infinite.
