Remember our old Bakersfield friends? They had a beaver killing bruhaha just about three months after ours last year. Beavers were ruthlessly attacking trees on their city bike path and they got a warrant for their destruction. Residents complained and they said they would relocate. I wrote the editor of the paper and talked about the value of keeping beavers, and also gave scary hints of the Kern County lawsuit. The editor thought this was worth responding to in a column, and eventually the beaver issue appeared to settle down.
Officials and local media have been spotting one local beaver at the Park at Riverwalk in recent months. That beaver was blamed by city officials for damaging park trees. The trees were since wrapped with orange mesh to deter the beaver from wanting to munch on costly park trees.
Did you catch that? The City of Bakersfield with a population of 300,000 and a median income of 40,000 decided to protect its valuable trees with orange mesh. Are you familiar with this product? You buy it in the hardware store in the caution tape aisle. It’s right below the “stay back crime scene” party streamers. I have to wonder, were they thinking that beavers would be repelled by the plastic? Or by the “give ’em a break” orange?
Anyway the local news is reporting that the beavers left their home. Remember when the thoughtful Contra Costa Times quoted Mary Tappel as saying the “beavers were moving on”? Nine months ago? Beaver watchers everywhere, take heart, because sometimes (I know this will come as a shock) the media is mistaken. Apparently beaver behavior can be very ellusive to reporters, who fail to actually look in the right places and the right times to view it.
Our friend Nick is still keeping an eye on the scene. While the media says there’s one adult in the area, that seems pretty unlikely. Beavers are social animals. If you see an adult he almost always has family, and if he doesn’t have family he’s probably not an adult. Check out the video by Melody Saberon of two kits trying to catch a ride on a larger back. Turn the audio up, because that’s some lovely frog chorus.[youtube:http://youtube.com/watch?v=9Hdt6b3XyMk&eurl]
I think identifying those frogs might be the secret way to save those beavers.
