Ever notice how the word “stagnant” is never applied to lakes or reservoirs? Or that deep fishing hole where you know you’ll catch the best German brown? Stagnant is reserved for things we dislike and it’s tossed around when folks want some new reasons to kill beavers. Stagnant is defined by Merriam-Webster as ” Having no current or flow and often having an unpleasant smell as a consequence”. ( I’m thinking its from the latin root “Staeg” meaning “blame the rodent” but I could be wrong.)
Never mind that beaver dams are actually referred to as LEAKY WEIRS that filter water as it passes through their woven surfaces. In fact if you go research any paper about how to BUILD a leaky weir for the purpose of filtering chemicals or fertilizer it will refer you to the BEAVER DAM as an example! But the good mayor of St. Charles says beaver dams are stagnant and stinky so it must be true. Right?
A series of beaver dams in southern Arkansas has lead to some smelly problems for the small Arkansas County town of St. Charles.“Beavers are building dams in one of the water ways that comes across the city limits and backing things up,” Mayor Robert Patrick said. “When a beaver backs things up for miles, it starts to smell and backs into people’s yards and everything else you could name.”
While there’s no damage yet, he said it is still a minor irritation. Patrick said the beaver dams have mainly backed stagnant water onto residents’ properties which smell and have mosquito problems. It will also creates the potential to flood a city road if it rains.
“That’s what makes it a little dicey when they build,” Patrick said.
Smell and mosquito problems! Say no more. Let’s kill those trouble-making beavers! We can’t have beavers stinking up our creeks and bringing in west nile virus can we? Mayor Patrick probably wishes there was something written about this so that folks could be sufficiently alarmed. How about this?
Beavers and the Environment: This of course leads to natural questions about mosquito larvae, which are known to accumulate in still pools. However, beaver ponds have been shown to actually reduce mosquito population . There are nearly 3000 known species of mosquito but beaver ponds tend to shift composition of larvae – making conditions less desirable for some and ideal for others. All mosquitoes are not created equal, some are much more damaging to human populations. For example, one of the species most associated with West Nile Virus and yellow-fever (Aedes) cannot survive in the permanent water of a beaver pond. Continued involvement by Mosquito Abatement can monitor conditions and help control negative species.
Summary for the Beaver Subcommittee by Heidi Perryman
-Dietland Muller-Swarze (2003). The Beaver: Natural History of a Wetlands Engineer. Cornell University Press. -Baker, B. W., and E. P. Hill. 2003. Beaver (Castor canadensis). Pages 288-310 in G. A. Feldhamer, B. C. Thompson, and J. A. Chapman, editors. Wild Mammals of North America: Biology, Management,and Conservation. Second Edition. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.Oh. Gosh. Well now that you put it that way beavers don’t sound so bad. How does St. Charles usually manage them? Being so close to the state that invented the Clemson Pond Leveler and started us all thinking in a new way they must have some pretty advanced tools. Let’s see what they are?
The Arkansas County Beaver Control Program provides $21,360 to pay $20 each for 1,068 beaver tails. The county provides $11,360 of this fund while the Arkansas County Conservation District donated $10,000. Property owners pay an additional $5 per beaver tail and provide a written statement that the beaver was trapped on their property within Arkansas County.
Wow.
Just. Wow.
That’s some pretty remarkably cruel and short sighted problem solving. Anything like that ever happen in St. Charles before? How about what’s sometimes considered the biggest lynching in the history of America? A series of assaults in 1904 resulted in 13 deaths in a span of a few days.
I guess given its “colorful past” we should be grateful that St. Charles only pays for cut tails.
