There’s a veritable glut of beaver complaints this morning. You’d think people had never seen spring before. Starting with this sodden complaint from Amherst Massachusetts.

Flooding headaches in Amherst: Homeowners on one street struggle to reach their front doors

AMHERST — Back from the supermarket with four bags of groceries, Joyce Silverstone was confronted by a pond in the middle of her street, and a dilemma: should she drive through the deep water to get home, or would it be wise to park the vehicle on pavement and make multiple trips, on foot, to her 35 Pomeroy Court residence?

The water issues are a continuing frustration for the nine residents whose homes are on Pomeroy Court, a dead-end street off Pomeroy Lane that has long been susceptible to flooding and extended periods of standing water.

Almost annually, either the town has trapped beavers and removed beaver dams, or the power company Eversource has monitored the nearby land for beaver activity, said Department of Public Works Superintendent Guilford Mooring.

“The issue is to try to make sure the beavers are managed,” Mooring said. Town officials are well aware of the problems on Pomeroy Court. “During wet weather it floods,” said Town Manager Paul Bockelman. “It’s a super inconvenience for people who live there, and clearly it’s a problem.”

That’s right. We tried this solution OVER and OVER again and the problem keeps coming back. So obviously we just need to try it more. Trap more beavers! More often! Never mind trying something new that would actually solve the problem, like hiring Mike Callahan to install a flow device and control pond height. We want to do the same thing again, again. Because it’s quantity not quality that matters. Sheesh.

On to the smartest folk ever in Memphis Tennessee where a ‘single beaver’ that causes concern is going to be relocated.

Midtown beaver to be relocated

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — The city of Memphis says it has no choice but to remove the beaver currently taking up residence in Midtown. The animal was recently spotted at Central and Barksdale, and officials are worried he might cause street flooding and damage to property.

Some folks in Midtown told WREG they think the beaver needs to be left alone, but city leaders promised to be careful relocating it. They said it may even move on its own once they remove its dam.

“Normally we just try and capture the beaver. We have to determine with the state what the regulations are with relocating beavers, or what the options are. It’s something we have to look into,” said Robert Knecht with Memphis Public Works.

On the first hand it’s kinda sweet that their first instinct isn’t to bring in the trapper. Aw. On the second hand I’m not really thrilled about ‘bubba’ stuffing a beaver into a potato sack and dumping him over county lines. I mean if you really did this ‘all the time’ why on earth would you have to look up the regulations for the state? Wouldn’t they be the same as the last time you did it? Never mind that relocating a single beaver is tantamount to a death sentence, or that it’s not going to end well for our hero. Or that there likely isn’t just one beaver, and your breaking apart a family which you will end up killing later.

Honestly, there were three more similar stories this morning that I don’t have the patience to write about. Moral of the story is “People freak out about beavers in April”. And February. They just get worried about all that water. Here’s something delightfully juvenile to take your mind off it. An article entirely of beaver jokes. Some of them aren’t even dirty.

Heh, Beavers

Q: What does a beaver do when it wants to surf the Internet?
A: It LOGS on!

Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Beaver.
Beaver who?

Bea-Ver-y quiet, I’m playing hide and seek.

One of the hidden tools of saving beavers took me a while to understand. It used to be that I would rankle every time the infamous beaver pun was repeated, and bristle at the endless comments at the news stories. (In case you didn’t speak english in 7th grade or have never visited this planet before, I will clarify that I am referring to the fact that the word ‘beaver’ in slang usage is a reference for vagina) (Not sure about the history of that and would love to trace it back to the fur trappers or farther but that’s a post for another day.) So remarks about saving the beaver, helping the beaver, or leaving the beaver in a mural produce an echo-snigger far and wee.

My heart softened a little to this outrage when I was asked to help the John Muir Association take distinguished actor Lee Stetson around the beaver habitat one night. He was doing the conservation awards the next night and was staying in town. Lee is the actor who played John Muir in Ken Burns important national park’s documentary, and many many other places for the best part of 25 years. He is as spry as the real thing but he must be pushing 70. We trotted back and forth along the creeks looking for our quarry and saw a raccoon swimming but never what we sought. In the end we called it a night and went back home without a sighting.

The next night was the awards, and Lee’s impersonation of Muir was so dramatic and inspiring I cried through most of it. Afterwards I thanked him for his talent and for helping Muir come to life. He hugged me and said that he had a great time the night before, but that “his wife had been very upset to learn that he had been out all night chasing beaver”,

Ba-dum-dum.

For the first time, cosidering the source, that remark made me smile, and I said, “I guess no matter how grown up you get that joke is still irresistable, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” he laughed stroking his beard with pleasure. “Yes, it is.”

Beavers are serious business, and worth saving and worth fighting for for all the wildlife and watershed reasons we discuss every day, but let’s face it: People laugh at beaver jokes. They just DO. The truth is that Martinez beaver story would never have gotten the press it did if it weren’t for the titilation factor – the story just sounds funny. And in this particular case, forcing an artist to remove a beaver because it doesn’t belong next to the famous Marilyn-Monroe-seducing Joe Dimaggio cracks people up. They aren’t laughing in Chicago because Martinez spent money on sheetpile it didn’t need, or because the people rose up and made the city listen – they’re laughing because our director of public works is basically saying “i don’t hate beaver – I’m as straight as the next man.”

This morning there was a long discussion on the SNOPES messages board, of all places, about this very topic, but I’m pretty sure this radio program out of Chicago enjoys it the most.

Would it be a terrible thing if the powers that be in Martinez were made more cautious by the likelihood of ridicule for the any decision they made about the beavers before they committed it to paper? I don’t think so. At this rate thinking twice might improve their results twofold. I’m reminded of the immortal words of Mahatma Ghandi

“First they Ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”