I’ve been on the beaver beat so long I already have the perfect graphics for these reports. I guess there really IS nothing new under the sun.
Busy beaver believed to be behind brief blaze by Benson Lake
Corbett firefighters were surprised Thursday night to find the arsonist behind a small blaze near Multnomah Falls: a beaver. A camp host at Wahkeena Falls Park near the Historic Columbia River Highway called the fire department around 10 p.m. to report a fire near Benson Lake, a half-mile west of Multnomah Falls. The fire was less than two acres.
Firefighters quickly put out the flames and determined “early on” that the fire began when a tree knocked down a power line. Firefighters were mopping up the fire when they found the tree had been chewed up. The suspect beaver was nowhere to be found at the scene, said Rick Wunsch, assistant Corbett fire chief.
“He must have got out of there real quick,” Wunsch said Friday.
Isn’t that just like a beaver to EAT and RUN.
Could you maybe dedicate an inch of this column to ALL the fires the beaver has averted by making the terrain lush and green and maintaining water for the area with his dams? Of course not. There’s never time for that. There’s only time for another round of “blame the rodent”, we never get tired of that.
It’s not like the media never says nice things about beavers though. Every few years they go out of their way to remember when we threw them out of airplanes in Idaho. Oh look, now it’s in National Geographic.
Why beavers were parachuted into the Idaho wilderness 73 years ago
The Fish and Game Department recognized the animals’ value as important ecosystem engineers. Beavers establish and maintain wetlands, improve water quality, reduce erosion, and create habitat for game, fish, waterfowl, and plants. They also help stabilize the water supply for humans. Rather than exterminate them, the department decided to move them—all 76 of them.
To relocate beavers, trappers would capture them, load them into a truck, and deliver them to a conservation officer. After an overnight stay, the animals would be loaded onto another truck, then hauled to the end of the road nearest the site selected for translocation. Next, the boxed-up beavers would be strapped onto horses or mules for the last leg of their journey.
Intolerant of the sun’s heat, the beavers needed to be constantly cooled and watered; they were often so stressed they refused to eat. “Older individuals often become dangerously belligerent,” Heter noted in his article. “Rough trips on pack animals are very hard on them. Horses and mules become spooky and quarrelsome when loaded with a struggling,
Yayaya, We know the story. Why is it no one wants to write nice things about beavers unless they get to throw them out of an airplane first? Lucy Sherriff is the author of this article and she is wayyy to beaver informed to waste on a beaver hurling snack. I wrote and told her so and she was as fond of my thoughts as you might imagine.
Idaho’s Department of Fish and Game considered the beaver project a success. Each drop cost taxpayers just seven dollars per beaver, and backpackers, ranchers, and forest rangers returned most of the parachutes for reuse. Within months of their arrival, the beavers were completing dams and on track to establish colonies.
Asked if the project would ever be repeated, Roger Phillips, a department spokesperson, says it could but likely wouldn’t: “We still use aircraft extensively in the backcountry, but helicopters are [now] the preferred aircraft for this type of work and would not require parachuting.”
There are also new ways to prevent beaver dams from causing floods, PETA’s Bell says, so that the animals wouldn’t need to be relocated as often in the first place. “Today, efforts to control beaver populations include flood-preventing pipe devices called ‘beaver bafflers’ that allow water to flow and beavers to call a body of water their home,” she says. “We’ve come some way since the 1940s.”
You can build a lot of flow devices for 7000 dollars a beaver. Sheesh. And why on earth would you mask PETA??? Why not the beaver institute?
Lucy kindly informed me it wasn’t up to her.
The nice thing about running this story yet again is that it gives me a full blown excuse to post this once more.
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