Do you remember back in high school when the smartest kid in your class who everyone envied did that amazingly stupid thing that got talked about for weeks and still surprises you? Sometimes beautiful things come from unlikely places. And sometimes folks who should know better obviously don’t.
Take this recent report from Orondo, Washington, for instance. When I read this I practically got out the atlas and tape measure to make sure this was actually inside the state I frequently credit for having the highest beaver IQ in the country. I was stunned, though maybe I shouldn’t have been. I believe it was Hamlet who said “virtue cannot so innoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it.”
Beavers believed to have survived lodge fire
ORONDO — Fire officials say they think a fire in a beaver dam at Daroga State Park was human-caused. “There were no other sources of ignition in the area,” said Jim Oatey, chief of Douglas County Fire District 4 at Orondo. He said he thinks fire crews stopped the fire before it reached the beavers inside.
That’s right. There was a fire inside the DAM and they are hoping they put it out before the animals burned. Scouring this article where words are used like lego pieces (interchangeably), I see that the fire was actually in the lodge on the bank of the Columbia and not in the dam. Maybe the firemen knew the difference and the readers knew the difference and only the reporter is confused. I’m reasonably sure that even sleepy beavers slipped down their escape hatch and got to safety before anything happened. You have to wonder if someone lit it on purpose. Ugh. Two things to dislike about Washington.
Tonight is the “Official Permission for the Festival” at the Parks, Recreation, Marina and Cultural Commission where the city has their last chance to prevent it from happening. In the beginning when the festival was just starting out we were raked over the bureaucratic coals, but last year we were practically greeted as liberators, fingers crossed. Here’s the new family tree I worked on this weekend to show off our new additions.
What I hope will be the last word on the Belarus man-eating beaver story comes from Dietland Muller-Swarze (author of Beaver: The Natural History of a Wetlands Engineer) and reported by Beavers: Wetlands and Wildlife in their upcoming summer newsletter.
“Really, the beaver did not “kill the man; it just defended itself,” states Dr. Muller-Schwarze. “In such a Perfect Storm, the man could have just as well suffered fatal injury from a dog, a snapping turtle, or for that matter, by barbed wire. Does barbed wire ‘kill a person’? The key is, you just don’t handle a wild (or even domestic) animal in that manner. You are asking for trouble. Especially in the wild, far from medical help, you don’t take unnecessary risks.”
You can read the rest of his letter and subscribe to their newsletter here.
