Sometimes we get the faintest whiff of beaver benefits and actual solutions from sources you’d never expect. I think I’m a little like a mother who knows that her middle child isn’t the brightest bulb in the box and so reacts with extra praise when he gets the simple problems right. We want to encourage them, right?

Discover Nature and Evidence of Beavers in Your Area

This is the Missouri chapter of public radio, not an area usually known for progressive beaver solutions. So this quote at the end got my attention:

Beavers play a valuable role by damming backed up silt-laden waters and subsequently forming many of the fertile valley floors in the wooded areas of our continent. Beaver dams stabilize stream flow, slow down run-off, and create ponds which influence fish, muskrats, minks and waterfowl.

However, some landowners wish to protect certain trees from potential damage from beaver cutting. This can be done by enclosing the target trees with wire netting up to a height of three feet.

It must be the season. This article from North Carolina actually focuses on the benefits of joining BAMP (their beaver-killing club), but look at what it also finds time to include;

Rodent causes problems for farmers, residents and roadways

Beaver aren’t all bad. In fact, they can be responsible for some very diverse ecosystems. A 2015 PBS article titled, “Leave it to Beavers,” explains beaver dams as “Earth’s Kidneys.”

“Beaver dams and the ponds they produce act as filters, generating cleaner water downstream.”

One pond observed in Greene County, known as good duck hunting grounds, has a beaver family to thank. The dam extends several hundred feet across the mouth of a swamp creating a large, shallow home to waterfowl.

You heard it here, folks. Beavers aren’t ALL bad! Spoken like the most educated ecological mind in the entire state. Over the years I’ve become accustomed to the annual justification for BMAP printed in local papers. Usually they say something about how bad beavers are and what a cost-saving deal it is for the unlucky counties that are suckered into it.

Seeing the need for the management for the ever-increasing damage caused by the growing beaver population, State Legislative action created the North Carolina Beaver Management Assistance Program in 1992.

BMAP is a cost share program to aid landowners having problems with beaver damage. As of 2016, the cost share is a $4,000 per county contribution for annual membership.

The BMAP cooperative endeavor also receives funding from the NC Wildlife Resources Commission, NC DOT, USDA Wildlife Services and others.

Participation in BMAP is a county-by-county decision. Locally, Lenoir and Greene County participate, Jones County does not.

The total $21,800 set aside in Lenoir County for control and management (between BMAP membership and specialist) is an investment that pays dividends. Per the BMAP 2015 annual report, from June 2015-June 2016, beaver control prevented the loss of, or damage to, $262,140 in resources, including over $140,000 to roads and bridges alone. Efforts resolved beaver damage problems at 28 sites in the county, 13 were private landowners and 15 were Department of Transportation sites.

Of course, the more you use BMAP the more you NEED BMAP because of things like population rebound and short term solutions. Its a racket. Guess how much money BMAP spends on flow devices and solutions that will last longer than a season? I’ll give you a it, it’s a ROUND number.

One thing that confuses me in the article is this:

Also in the budget are funds to support a percentage of a Wildlife Beaver Specialist.

What percentage of the guy did you get? The part that goes over the fence last? Because I’d ask for my money back.

Hey, speaking of actual beaver specialists, and beaver benefits, NOAA just released its offical Oregon coast Coho Recovery plan. Which mentions beaver lots of times (by my count 227 times). Lots like this:

It even had time for the honorable mention of our noble friends in South Umpqua.

If you want to grind your teeth in envy that California is so remarkably backward that we just can’t have nice things, go read the report. It’s beaver-licious, and someday we might be too!

Landowners complain about too many beavers

“I’m tasked with catching every beaver, not just one or two beavers,” Williamson said. “I have to catch every beaver at the place and warranty it for three months. You’re looking at the difference between a $300 job, versus the same job outside a BMAP county might be $800 or $1,000.”

Just 300 miles away from the beaver-appreciation article I talked about yesterday and whose author was thrilled to learn about flow devices and wrote me back several times, at the other end of the Blue Ridge Mountains the Kanuga conference center in Hendersonville just can’t kill them quickly enough.

“They’re just terrible,” said Jerry Moore, who has maintained the WNC Air Museum Airport, also known as Johnson Field, for 25 years. “They back the water up to the runway. They’ll raise it up a couple of feet. Last week, I dug (a beaver dam) out of the field and it dropped the water down 18 inches. They’ll be back, but it helps for a while.”

Moore said beaver-related flooding and tree damage near the airport reached its zenith about “six or seven years ago,” when a state trapper removed 50 beavers from the area. “It was just infested with them,” he said.

Infested! Beaver lice! The article is basically constructed around convincing the cities that don’t participate in BMAP to cough up their contribution. BMAP stands for “Beaver Management Assistance Program” but since its run by Wildlife Services at APHIS the acronym should really be “Bureaucrats Make Assassination Possible”. Killing is all they mostly do, except sometimes when they install pretend flow devices that don’t work.

Mitigating beaver damage doesn’t always involve trapping them or breaking up their dams, Williamson said. When beavers at Kanuga Conferences started flooding a lake loop trail — as well as threatening the habitat of endangered species in a nearby bog — he worked with Kanuga staff to design and install two pond levelers to lower water levels in the 1-acre bog.

Kanuga was home to roughly 20 to 30 beavers in 2007, said Environmental Projects Manager Clint DeWitt. He said the Episcopal Church-affiliated retreat didn’t want to eliminate the web-footed animals, only the damage they were wreaking on the bog habitat and the Daisy Lake Trail.

Relocating beavers is not an option, Williamson said, since that would just shift the nuisance to other areas and perhaps spread disease. He added beavers are highly territorial and would, if transplanted into a new area, likely die from fights with resident beavers or trying to cross roads on their way back home.

Before resorting to trapping, Williamson said he tries to use pond levelers, exclusion devices such as hardwire cloth around the base of trees and other non-lethal techniques. But with a constant stream of beavers coming up from the French Broad River, trapping is often necessary to control populations.

So even though beavers are so dangerously territorial that they would kill a stranger for moving in, there is such a steady stream of beavers on the move that new ones will just come to fill the space the corpse left behind and trapping is necessary to control the problem. I’m reminded of a certain Hermann Moll “zombie beaver map” from the 1700’s.

Well obviously North Carolina has a ways to go before achieving any real beaver management. And maybe something to learn about sociopathy as well. Check out the trapper’s colorful analogy at the end of the article.

“If I were trying to trap you, I would put traps at your front door, at the foot of your bed, at the light switch and at the toilet,” he said.

Well, it worked on his wife, anyway.