Meanwhile in New York folks haven’t updated their attitudes about beavers or learned these new-fangled ideas on wrapping trees. They are sure that the only way to keep beavers from eating the trees at their scrubby little ‘park and ride’ is to bring in this gentleman,

Officials to trap beavers in Monroe Park.

MONROE – The beavers have been very busy, indeed, in the woods and pond at Mombasha Park. Between the trees that surround the pond are stump after stump after stump, each about 18 inches high and sheared at a 45 degree angle, as though by a hatchet.

Each is testimony to the nocturnal gnawing of beavers, who have been mowing down poplars and birches to fulfill their three missions: food, home and dam. Industrious and strong, these buck-toothed rodents weigh as much as a pit bull or a small goat, and can drag fallen timber through woods or paddle it across water to their lodges.

A natural marvel, yes. But also an occasional and persistent nuisance for humans.

One concern for Monroe Supervisor Tony Cardone about the tree clearing at Mombasha Park was the sharpened stumps scattered through the woods – a potential safety hazard, he said, for people who wander off the walking trail that wends through the park.

But he also feared that the systematic removal of trees from the berm behind the park’s ball field ultimately would undermine the berm and the field itself.

The Monroe Town Board voted last week to enlist the services of licensed outdoorsman David Corrado, who had offered to trap some of Mombasha’s Park’s beavers at no charge to manage a growing population and limit the tree toll.

He is expected to set lethal traps near the active beaver lodge soon, in the midst of New York’s beaver trapping season and while the park is closed for the winter.

Corrado, on a recent walk through the park with Cardone and a reporter, pointed with a ruler to the many scattered stumps, inconspicuous at first but then obvious when your eyes drop to knee level

Do you detect a tone in that last paragraph?  Pointing beaver chews out with a ruler is a carefully written observation. I get the distinct feeling that this reporter thinks Corrado is a pratt. Don’t you?

Or maybe that’s just me. For the life of me I cannot understand why the city of Monroe, just 150 miles from Beavers:Wetlands and Wildlife can’t figure out how to put wire around a tree or pick up a paint brush. But what do I know?

Mostly I’m just busy thinking about the beaver festival. I was playing around with this idea yesterday for a new shirt, What do you think?