It’s Sunday,our beavers are safe for the moment, the silent auction items are all delivered and paid for, and Jon made corn ravioli’s last night. I think we should celebrate with an only good news sunday, don’t you? Let’s start with a lovely letter to the editor from Minnesota.
READER LETTER: Killing beavers is not the only answer
I was dismayed to read the article in the July 1 Leader regarding the beavers in a local pond.
A family of beavers built a dam that caused the water level of the pond to rise. The response of Hutchinson city employees was to set traps to kill the beavers.
I immediately called Wildwoods Wildlife Rehabilitation in Duluth to find out if there were other options for this situation. I was told that it is an established practice to live-trap beavers and re-home them, and there is a Minnesota organization that advocates for beavers and wetland restoration called The Beaver Project: Living in Harmony with Nature’s Eco-Engineers. It offers “innovative, cost-effective, and humane strategies and services to persons and communities to help protect and maintain property, roadways, and shorelines from beaver activities.”
I contacted the organization and they are seeking a beaver family for a particular lake right now. From them, I learned about a device called a beaver pond leveler developed at Clemson University in 1992. Instructions to construct the device are posted on the Minnesota DNR website or it can be purchased from the Minnesota non-profit, MINNCOR Industries. It took me 10 minutes on a Saturday to speak to these people and get this information.
I have spoken with the mayor of Hutchinson and he supports an investigation into an alternative solution and I left a message for John Paulson, the city’s environmentalist. I would be happy to coordinate a project to install a pond leveler or relocate these beavers. If these animals have already been needlessly killed, I hope I can educate the city of Hutchinson and others that killing beavers is not the only answer.
Ahh nicely said Dennis! I think things got a little muddled with the idea of the ‘pond leveler’ being invented by Clemson but never mind, you got the gist. There’s a way to solve this and good reasons to try. So it’s worth a shot, Minnesota would be a fine place to save beavers!
The second story comes from Wisconsin and isn’t really about beavers, but the headline made me smile very broadly.
Leftist Woodchucks #Resist Paul Ryan by Eating His Car
Activists have been making the private lives of Trump allies as difficult as possible lately, protesting at their houses, ruining their meals, and berating them in their hometowns. And it looks like the guerrilla faction of the #Resistance just welcomed some unlikely compatriots to their cause: woodchucks.
A family of the bushy-tailed, chisel-toothed mammals sabotaged Paul Ryan’s Chevy Suburban recently, chewing through the wiring and leaving his SUV totaled, NPR reports. During a Q&A Thursday at the Economic Club in Washington, DC, the House Speaker explained that his car had mysteriously died after he’d left it parked at his mom’s house in Wisconsin through the winter. When a mechanic put it up on a lift to see what was wrong, he said, “they realized that a family of woodchucks lived in the underbody of my Suburban.”
Sure, the woodchucks—also known as groundhogs, whistle-pigs, or land-beavers—might’ve just been looking for a dry, protective shelter where they could ride out the brutal Wisconsin cold. Or maybe, like the anti-Trump dogs who came before them, they were looking to stick it to the Republicans the best way their animal selves knew how.
Welcome to the Resistance.
HA! It was fun to stumble across this interview in my daily beaver search. It’s honestly amazing speaker Ryan can find time to comment on this tragedy, since he’s usually so busy taking away health care or eyeing granny’s social security! Well here’s wishing him lots of time to ponder whistle-pigs in the future.
Finally I think you deserve to see something of Rusty Cohn’s wonderful Saturday morning with the beavers. He was lucky enough to watch some animated hard work at the beaver dam near the fire-fighter’s museum. You’re going to like these. Click on the thumbnail to see it larger, and thanks Rusty!
