You know how some restaurants constantly refill your pepsi or lemonade, or you watch an old movie and clown after clown gets out of the tiny car? Well that’s how beaver-problem-in-the-news stories are. Whenever I scratch my head about what to write about in the morning, I can always find five new regions where beavers are mysteriously flooding roads, city staff is valiantly ripping up dams only to be completely surprised that the beavers are rebuilding anyway, and irritable men are talking about trapping, bemoaning the dwindling price of fur. The articles usually contain more than one alarming sounding threat, a statement about population boom without any corresponding proof, at least one blatant falsehood, and a truly rankling pun.
Go ahead. See for your self. Google the terms Beaver+Flooding+Trapping and see what you get in news stories.
This morning it’s a pair of pieces written by Bonnie Washuk for the Sun Journal about Lewiston, Maine.
LEWISTON — Maurice Morin watched Tuesday as Lewiston Public Works crews cleaned out a culvert on the Stetson Road — again. Beavers did what beavers do, built a dam. But their dam has trapped water and at times flooded the road. Despite strong hints for them to leave, like running a telephone pole through their dam, the beavers have stayed and kept rebuilding. During heavy rains, the plugged culvert has flooded the road, forcing the city to close it.
The beavers have to go, said Morin, who lives on the Stetson Road.
Did you catch that? Public Works played “storming the castle” and ran the dam through with a telephone pole like a battering ram. That must have taken some planning and a number of employees. Must have been a lot of fun. I bet it worked really, really well.
Crews have repeatedly come out “with a boat, a backhoe, trucks, foremen, workmen. Every time these people open it up, it’s costing us a lot of money. It’s ridiculous. The state should do something to let us take the beavers out,” Morin said. “A beaver is just a big rat with a flat tail.”
Boat party at Lewiston Public Works and everyone’s invited! Your right Mr. Morin, its a great waste of public funds. I know something better they could do than rip stuff out. And it doesn’t involve trapping. True it’s probaby not as much fun as boats and backhoes but it actually works and will be a Long-term solution to your culvert problem. Trapping would need to be repeated every year.Interesting comment about beavers being rats. You sound like a complex, thoughtful, nature-appreciating property owner. Come to think of it are you sure your name is spelled correctly? I think its possible the paper got a vowel wrong. (Guess which one?)
Jon Elie, operations manager for Lewiston Public Works highway division, said the culvert is cleared for now, but the beaver problem isn’t settled. Elie estimates the city has spent $3,000 to $4,000 in the last three years at the same location trying to clear dams out of the culvert. This year alone crews have been to the site three times. This week “we tried to do the best job we could. Winter’s coming,” Elie said.
Remember that scene from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where they are being pursued by a bunch of experts and finally realizing what an extraordinary team of lawmen has been pulled together to take them down and Paul Newman says, agreeably,
“If they’d just pay me all the money they’re spending to make me stop robbing them, I’d stop robbing them!”
3500 dollars would more than pay for a beaver deceiver. You could put Skip up at a nice hotel and buy him breakfast. You could call the papers and the evening news and use the whole event to bring Lewiston a little humane publicity. Maybe involve some school children to come out and monitor the beaver pond and the changes that occur before winter. You could become a trend setter and send your crew out to Leeds to explain how it all works.
Several years ago the city put in a “beaver deceiver,” a series of pipes that stick out of the culvert. The goal is to confuse the beavers and discourage them from rebuilding. The deceiver often takes water in without the trickling noise. The sound of water furthers the beaver’s drive; when they hear water, they seem to react with “here’s where I’ve got to plug it up,’” Elie said. The deceiver worked for a while, but the beavers got smart and damned the culvert from the other side. “They went through the outlet of the pipe and clogged it,” Elie said. This week crews took out the beaver deceiver, cleaned it out, put it back in and installed a grate on the other side of the culvert. But the grate is not ideal. Vegetation clogs up the grate quite fast, Elie said. “It’s a difficult thing to maintain.” After all the work, “there still is a family of beavers living there,” probably five or six, Elie said.
Thank goodness the responsible journalists at the Sun Journal took the time to photograph the “series of pipes”. Hold on while I clean off the keyboard. That was a coffee spitter. Let’s be clear. This is a BEAVER DECEIVER in much the same way that when I stick up my thumb, point my index finger and say ‘bang’ my hands is a GUN. This is more like a “crazy-animal- lover deceiver” so that the city can say it tried humane methods and that didn’t work. A beaver deceiver is trapezoidal fencing installed at a culvert. It works by allowing the beavers to dam but forcing them to move farther and farther away from the water source. I was actually starting to get worried until I saw this photo, and realized they had never, ever, even for the smallest fraction of a moment tried to solve this problem humanely. I can’t believe that your ‘T pipe invention” actually worked on and off for three years. Nice job boys. Sometimes it takes actual research or a phone call to solve problems. I hear using (Teh) Google can help too.
I can’t imagine what all this ripping and ramming is doing to the water quality. Well no matter. You can always blame it on the beavers. I can see that this article is ass-covering in every way. The poor beleagered town of Lewiston has tried to save the beavers by using humane methods. They have applied countless man hours and heavy equipment. There’s a soggy, defenseless and fairly angry property owner involved complaining to the media. What else can they do? The only solution is the final solution.
Okay Lewiston, before you kll the ‘rats’ and justify it as if you had no choice, read this pamphlet on actual beaver deceivers. Call Skip Lisle (802) 376-3324 and find out what went wrong. I promise you’ll get better press from doing this right than from crushing the beavers to death before winter sets in.
