We went down to see our actual beavers last night. But there was a clamor of noise you can’t imagine and we just observed sneaky furtive dives as the beavers kept mostly out of view. There were helicopters and police cars on every corner, and we even watched one cop walk down to the creek to check upstream. Apparently a handcuffed black woman had escaped when they were trying to transport her to the detention facility and they were sparing NO expense to get her back. For a while the sky was humming with copters and there was a squad car on every corner down town. By 8:45 they had called off the search because of the ‘nonviolent nature of her crimes’.
And it was dark and not as much fun to use their toys looking for her.
The whole thing made me think of this article and what considerable lengths men will go to justify using a new toy they want to play with – even if it doesn’t work at all.
Beavers Not So Eager To Rebuild Dam After Biologist’s Trick
He replaced a culvert with a bridge, but that just led the beavers to put in a new dam above the crossing.
Enter Scott Harris.
He’s one of WDFW’s private lands biologists, a man on a mission to help property owners in coastal counties deal with deer, elk, bears, beavers and other critters that get in their gardens, treat their berries as buffet lines and fence with their fencing.
Mostly it involves encouraging the critters to go elsewhere through various and often inventive means.
Harris had an interesting idea for beating the beavers giving the forester fits, and it didn’t involve setting up one of those metal beaver deceiver contraptions. He got ahold of something a lot cheaper — the coat of a fellow furbearer.
Once the forest manager got the permits to take out the latest dam and had removed it, Harris strung up strips of bear hide where the blockage had been, as well as underneath the bridge.
The idea is that the smell of the predator discourages the roly poly rodents from returning. Harris says it’s an old trick in the nonlethal toolbox of timber companies and a federal agency that deals with wildlife damage issues. But while it’s been used around culverts, apparently it hasn’t been tried under bridges before, he says.
“It is not 100 percent effective. There are some fearless beavers out there,” Harris says.
Every other time this particular dam had been destroyed, the beavers had begun reconstruction within a day, finishing the job within three, WDFW reported.
So, is the hide helping? It’s going on three weeks now and Mother Nature’s engineers haven’t reported back to work, Harris told me late last week
So rather than use the tool that is proven to work, this particular WDFW officer got some strips of bear hid (GEE I WONDER HOW) and hung them up to scare off the beavers. I’m sure he always wanted that fireplace rug anyway.
The truly stunning part of this article is that this happened in WASHINGTON STATE where there are more smart beaver folk gathered in one place than there are combined anywhere else in the world. The state that was first to have a beaver deceiver website in Kings County back in 2006.
I’m just soo curious how this is going to work, aren’t you? My money is on the beavers using that bear hide to plug dam holes within the week.
