Did you get that? “Nothing Else can live in that habitat except beavers and cottonmouths,” I think we should call this the ‘ignorance lament’ and set it to fiddle music. Of course it is the 70’s so the hero makes a valiant effort to convince the baby booming animal lovers that he ‘s one of them by using a word like “Habitat”. Ahhh the beaver wastelands. All those ducks chased away and the fish impounded and separated from their families like prisoners in concentration camps. Not to mention the hacked stumps of trees where starving birds flap one wing weakly before dropping the rest of their feathers onto a cottonmouth, who I suppose must eat be a cannibal or eat beavers since nothing else lives there.
Get it? I guess lever and beaver rhyme in Haywood County. Catchy slogan. An they even have 8000 worth of conibear traps they will loan you, plus you get a 10 dollar tail bounty! What a vacation! Bring the kids! Well keep an eye on them around all those cottonmouths, but still….it’s fun for the whole family!
The article of course finds time to say that the beavers are breeding like rabbits and that they have girdled all the trees. I guess that means that the rabbits in tennessee only breed once a year and stay with their parents for two years. That’s quite a difference, and useful to know.
Never mind that countless research, over the last 50 years has shown that from the smallest microbes to the reptiles to the birds to the mammals to the salmonids beaver ponds are one of the most biological diverse places on the PLANET, rich with life – from the pond surface of the pond floor to the last inch of water to above the waterline to the air space 40 feet over head, beaver ponds make space for living things, and surprisingly, not just cottonmouths.
Maybe the state hasn’t changed much in 40 years.
