The very first computer we ever owned was so expensive we had to take out a car loan. The year was somewhere around 1989 and because I was working on a dissertation we paid an enormous amount of money to add on 20 MB. (Yes, megabytes). It had a floppy disk drive and a CD-Rom drive. When you turned it on the screen greeted you with this welcome C:\>. We were so nervous setting it up that we didn’t use it at all for the first few weeks. Years of laptops and PC’s later, I have never spent so much for a computer since. Still, for a woman who was using whole bottles of white-out in an afternoon it was an amazing invention that allowed me to change what I was editing without type writer ribbon.

Just a year later we could have bought the whole thing with three times as much memory for a third as much money.

I mention this because the Clemson Pond leveler was state of the art once too. It was a monumental achievement that changed the way we thought forever, and we can’t possibly go backwards to a time when solving beaver problems wasn’t at least theoretically possible. It was invented by Dr. Greg Yarrow at Clemson University in South Carolina, around the same time as we purchased that computer. It remains the most widely recognized tool for beaver management, at least in name. It was as important to the later development of the beaver deceiver and the flexible leveler as my first computer was to the ones that followed it.

And, not surprisingly, it works about as well.

So you can imagine my mixed feelings when I saw this:

Busy as beavers

Members of the Student Conservation Association install a “Beaver Deceiver” at the Willie Wildlife Marsh in the town of Johnstown on Thursday. The construction aims to quiet the water flow, which reduces beaver activity. Beaver dams have caused flooding damage to the marsh. (Photo by Bill Trojan/The Leader-Herald)

The crew will clean out the clogged pipe and install a “beaver deceiver” – a device developed by Clemson University in the early 1990s that’s used to dissuade beavers from blocking currents. It makes the flow of water harder for the animals to detect, counteracting their instinct to dam up any moving water near their lodges.

Willie Marsh was set aside in the 60s to make a haven for wood ducks. It was built with a long ramp across the marsh and a duck blind for photographers.

Beaver may have raised the water level but I don’t think the fact that the park slid into disrepair had much to do with them.

(Everyone knows they mostly drink imported.)

Barbara Conner is the retired teacher who wrote about and shared photos from the group’s Willie Marsh visit in a Sept. 5 post on her blog. There is so much about this story that I want to admire. I love the idea of repairing damaged wetlands. I love getting kids involved. I love bloggers getting written about in the daily news.

But Willie Marsh is about 25 miles away from the sanctuary of Beavers:Wetlands and Wildlife. That’s like Mecca or MIT for beaver information. The idea that the DEC couldn’t think of any better solution than having children install a Clemson is baffling. Do they also beat their uniforms on rocks to wash them and ride mules to the office?

The Department of Environmental Conservation is a busy bureau and doesn’t have a lot of time for park or beaver management. Bill Ackerman is a reporter for the Leader-Herald who got interested in this story and must have scared the living daylights out of them when he printed Barbara’s photos. He did a great job in tracking down the story too. One of the driving forces behind the Marsh retired and moved away and surprsingly no one much has cared about the area until it found its way into the news.

Dick Spinks, who retired from DEC in 1992, said he and Jack and Jim Harnish of Gloversville did most of the work on the marsh site, with some help from other DEC employees based in Northville. Spinks said he personally built and installed the nesting boxes that have served so many birds over the years at Willie Marsh. Until he retired, he live-trapped beavers at the marsh and released them farther north, but that work hasn’t been done in years.

Never mind for the moment that live-trapping and relocating beavers is ILLEGAL in New York state. Let’s focus instead on the fact that someone who cared about this park retired, and some of the other folk who cared about this park died. Now the DEC has delegated it to the ‘circular file’. This is a place that no one in the current DEC cares about and no one wants to care about and (beavers or no beavers) no one would have cared about if the press hadn’t shamed them in the first place. So their solution is to have children install something they know full well won’t work and offer a gleaming promise that “Once it works we’ll fix the trails.”

Which of course will never happen so they can get back to the hard work of ignoring the park soon. The whole thing makes me mad enough to write a letter. To the reporter. To the DEC. To Beavers:Wetlands and Wildlife. To the retired teacher who took these photos. To the teacher of the students environmental alliance.

That will do for starters. Did I leave any one out?

IN THE WAY — Fishermen recently put their boat in the water at Delta Lake State Park boat launch with a beaver house obstructing their operations. State Department of Enviornmental Conservation officials said when this happens, residents need to call the DEC to get a special permit to either destroy the structure or the beaver which made a home in that location. (Sentinel photo by John Clifford)

Oh the humanity! Poor fishermen have their carbon producing motor vehicles inconvenienced when trying to launch and load! What is that selfish beaver thinking? Doesn’t he know that the Lake Delta, which is in a NY State Park, is there for people not wildlife? I suppose he’s hoping to feed his family all during the freeze season. The nerve!

DELTA LAKE — Leave it to beaver.

Since last month, New York state’s official animal has been making a home at the Lake Delta boat launch, getting in the way of recreationists trying to launch or dock their vessels.

Who you going to call when beavers become a nuisance? The state Department of Environmental Conservation. DEC Spokesman Stephen Litwhiler said the DEC got a call from Park Manager Laura Tully last month reporting the beaver structure, which was proper protocol.

“In a situation like at Lake Delta, the beaver is just plain in the way,” Litwhiler said. “But if they’re on the lake shore, people may have ornamental trees they want to protect from becoming beaver food. It’s not an issue off in the middle of the woods, but it is an issue on someone’s property.”

First of all, if there’s that nice a lodge in the lake we’re not talking about one beaver. We’re talking about a family and since its winter the female is probably pregnant and expecting more kits in the spring. And if you destroy their home you expose them to all kinds of dangers. You’re from the Department of Environmental Conservation for goodness sake. Don’t you know anything useful about beaver management in New York?

To keep beavers at bay, for instance if a dam or lodge were to be constructed on some farmland, then the farmer is advised to lower the water level on their property to help solve the problem, Litwhiler said. If local residents feel they need to protect their sacred birch trees, then they should wrap them with either wire or hardware cloth, he said.

That’s it, Stephen? “Lower your water level to discourage beavers” says the DEC! Does the NYPD also tell people to throw away their valuables to discourage burglary? You must be a smart man, and the state of New York must know that killing beavers impacts wetlands which impacts wildlife, which is why beavers have a nanospan of protection. I assume you know that LOWERING THE WATER LEVEL does that too, right? Delta lake is a 45 minute drive from Beavers: Wildlife and Wetlands. You must have heard of flow devices right?

Well I wrote Sharon and gave her all the appropriate contact info so I’m hopeful that these Delta lake beavers have a sporting chance anyway. In the meantime, the city of Seattle is on the phone Martinez, and they’d like their weather back.

When that I was and a little tiny boy,

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

A foolish thing was but a toy,

For the rain it raineth every day.

Twelfth Night