FAIRBANKS, Alaska (AP) — A beaver walked into an Alaska hardware store on Friday, but couldn’t find anything for his lodge. The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reports the beaver triggered the automatic doors and walked into Lowe’s about 7 a.m. Friday.
Employees trapped the beaver with a cardboard box in the plumbing department. A state wildlife biologist was called. Ton Hollis says he’s used to wake-up calls about “a bear in town or an ornery moose or something, but this was a little different.”
Hollis released the beaver into the Tanana River, far enough from town where it won’t be a nuisance. Lowe’s assistant manager Adam Vanhoveln says the beaver didn’t cause too much of a commotion, and it didn’t reach the lumber department.
Hahaha! “Didn’t reach the lumber department!” that’s pretty funny. Thanks Rusty for sending this cute use of our name to my attention. Knowing what its like to shop the echoing caverns of Lowes, I’m going to guess he couldn’t FIND the lumber department. Or anyone to show it to him for that matter.
It’s late for dispersers. But probably not in Alaska. This little guy was just doing what beavers do when the reach a certain age. Exploring to find their own turf. Hopefully the Tanana River will be a better bet than aisle nine.
Important photo though, because if you look you can just barely make out top teeth. I can’t stress enough how rare that is. All the cartoons with those huge top teeth are funny but wrong. Once upon a time I thought this was funny but wrong. But now I realize its closer to the truth than modern images get today.
Beavers may be great architects, but perhaps they aren’t the best with directions. Bellevue police helped one such beaver Monday evening after it found its way into the Chick-fil-A parking lot, and had difficulty making its way back home.
“The beaver somehow got himself on the sidewalk in front of the entrance to Chick-fil-A and there was lot of traffic there,” said Amanda Jensen with the Bellevue Police Department.
“He seemed disoriented,” she said. “They were just concerned about him getting hit.” The other concern was the line of cars waiting to enter the fast food restaurant. Bellevue’s new Chick-fil-A location has become renowned for causing heavy traffic as patrons drive through.
Being a good neighbor, a Bellevue police officer gave the little guy a ride home, or at least to the front door of the nearby pond where he has taken up residence.
“The officers used a dog catching pole and wrangled him into the car,” Jensen said. “And they brought him to a pond area where it is known that beavers are.”
After hopping in, a short ride, and hopping back out, it was dam-sweet-dam for the clever rodent.
There’s nothing more embarrassing than being brought home in a police car after your first night out. But it could have been much worse. He could have hit by a car, mauled by a dog or remained at Chic-fil-A.
/a>New promo thanks to Sarah Koenisberg who was kind enough to update her last one. Hopefully it will run on the Martinez channel soon. Feel free to pass it on!
The beavers were spotted Wednesday morning in a parking lot near Mohawk Street and California Avenue. One Eyewitness News viewer captured a photo of the furry visitors. In November, beavers were spotted in the northwest near the Riverwalk. The beavers then had done damage to area trees.
Bakersfield parks director Dianne Hoover said Wednesday’s beaver sighting was the first since November. “All told in the last three to four years, they’ve damaged about 40 trees,” said Hoover. She said each tree costs between $100 and $500 to replace.
No beaver story from Bakersfield will every be cheerful, but you should watch the news report just for the anchor. He’s adorable! Oh and seeing Diane Hoover in person helps me understand why she hasn’t been able to learn anything from my emails over the years – her heart is two sizes too small.
No word yet on whether any city official or media representative will ever learn a single thing about beaver DISPERSAL. Or when they’ll stop being confused by the same exact thing occurring at the same exact time over and over again all along the west coast. It’s kinda sweet that these two yearlings start out their journey in tandem. Do you think they’ll split up eventually? Like when a friend comes with you in hide and seek and you shoo them away to find their own spot? Check out their advanced nylon netting system to protect those 500 dollar trees. Bakersfield trees must be made of gold – or possibly crack?
They nearly were hunted to extinction, only to be brought back from the precipice.Today, beavers are hunted once again, typically by trappers who captured and killed more than 9,000 a year ago.It’s just not often you see one during the day, and so amenable to posing for photographs while munching on small twigs and limbs.
Not just once, but twice, after it was discovered a camera setting was askew and a fast return to the beaver’s site was in order.That’s when a passerby said the lone beaver was one of a group of three he had spotted in the area near the boat ramp at Webster Reservoir. It was the smallest of the three, he said.
It wasn’t in a hurry to go anywhere, providing a good look at all it had to offer. It rarely even paused from stripping away the bark on the limbs from a series of trees that recently had been felled by the beaver and its family.
Beavers are the largest rodent in North America, typically weighing somewhere between 40 and 60 pounds.They nearly were hunted out of existence in quest for the animal’s dense fur, used to make the felt hats fashionable at the time in Europe.
The beaver ideally is suited for water. Its webbed hind feet are ideal for swimming, and it can close off its ears and nose underwater. It has a membrane on its eyes, allowing it to see while swimming underwater.
Beavers typically are nocturnal, making the daytime sighting unusual.
Uh-oh. It’s dispersal ignorance season again! Brace yourselves for three months of bewildered articles when beavers are spotted wandering on the road. I must have written an editor in every state about the entirely predictable phenomena now. I have tried and tried again to explain it’s occurrennce and at this time I can only conclude beaver behavior is cloaked in a shroud of willful human ignorance.
Just remember this is Kansas and I’m thinking we’re lucky the entire article isn’t about the price for pelts.
A beaver had been spotted in the man-made water channel in Hinge Park on Friday and MacKinnon was curious to confirm the flat-tailed rodent had indeed moved in.
For 20 minutes, MacKinnon watched the beaver — he estimates it is about two years old — as it swam the length of the small wetland and sauntered up on the bank. The animal doesn’t seem to have built a lodge yet, and appeared fairly comfortable with its exposure to humans, said MacKinnon, author of the best-selling 100 Mile Diet and a self-described amateur naturalist.
Unusual as it may seem, the Olympic Village beaver is part of a trend, said Robyn Worcester, conservations program manager at the Stanley Park Ecology Society. “They’re turning up pretty regularly right now,” she said.
This lovely article has some of the very BEST descriptions of beaver dispersal that I’ve ever seen in the paper. In fact, I’m starting to think that Vancouver is giving Washington a run for its money as having the highest beaver-IQ in the Northern Hemisphere….if not the world. Just look at the description from Robyn Worcester of the Stanley Park Ecology Society:
This time of year many young beavers are settling in city parks along the waterfront after leaving the ponds they grew up in to find their own habitat. Eventually they find their way to the Fraser River, which spits them into English Bay or Burrard Inlet, Worcester said.
“They have to find their way to the nearest fresh water body. Generally they’ll hit Jericho and they’ll hit Stanley Park … and now they’ll go so far as the Olympic Village.”
Honestly, I can’t tell you how many articles I’ve read where folks were stunned that beavers were milling around in the spring, showing up uninvited, while reporters and ecologists seemed to scratch their heads and fail to understand why they were on the move. Infestation? Illegal Migration? Bachelors gone wild? The mystery of beaver dispersal apparently confounds most of the known world, even though it happens every year. It also happens to be the source of one of my very most beloved photos of all time.
But apparently the ‘mystery’ is no mystery to Vancouver. Not only do they understand beaver behavior and dispersal, they apparently know the routes they’re likely to use to get there! Hats off to Robyn and the great reporter on this article. Although I sent them emails to update their understanding of this:
beavers are often in a hurry to get out of salt water because it makes them ill.
Obviously the occasion called for a little Greg Hood and ‘salty seaside ponds‘.
even some beaver researchers, are unaware that beaver can be found in estuarine tidal marshes when the salinity is less than 10 parts per thousand (seawater is typically 30-35 ppt, while freshwater is less than 0.5 ppt).
As well a liberal showing of this video at their next staff meeting!
When I drove back out to Mission to look at the property I started seeing culvert fences in all the ditches. Apparently the city now has 9 flow devices in that they’ve been building themselves.
