Sometimes, as the only beaver-reviewer in the nation, hemisphere, or possibly world, I am confused by stories about cities managing beaver problems in one way or another. Sometimes it is clear that they are doing a willfully misinformed job and blaming nature for man’s mistakes. Sometimes their stories stir the heartstrings and inspire you with their pragmatic compassion.
But sometimes, I’m torn, frozen mid-sentence between ‘hurray’ and ‘WTF’ with jaw dropping confusion about whether to describe the event as a gallant but woefully misinformed try, or a deliberate effort to fail on a visibly massive scale on purpose so that folks stop talking about flow devices once and for all.
Once, a million years ago, when I worked at daycare we needed new sand for the play structure in the backyard. Since we were poor as church mice we had the delivery truck drop the sand in the parking lot and employed the 45 children with buckets and shovels to haul it in the back. The cheerful work scene that followed could have had a ‘snow white and the seven dwarfs’ sound track – that is until we noticed young Dylan.
He wasn’t carrying a bucket or a pot like the other children, (marching like mickey with two pails in the sorcerer’s apprentice,) but rather an alarmingly small plastic teacup barely full of sand.
“Dylan! Have you been carrying sand in that cup the whole time?” (We exclaimed and he soberly nodded) “How many trips have you made with that?”
“Seventeen.”
Which is exactly how I felt when I saw this picture of them re-installing the flow device in Grand Tetons National Park in Wyoming.
Mind you it wasn’t that Doran (Wyoming) wasn’t trying. Dylan made seventeen trips to the parking lot with the other children. And Wyoming tried to use a flow device instead of killing beavers. So hurray for effort. But I know that in addition to my email (which contained a link to Sherri Tippie’s book and Mike Callahan’s DVD), Sharon Brown of Beavers: Wetlands & Wildlife personally contacted them as did Mike Callahan of beaver solutions. Maybe folks in Wyoming don’t much cotton to advice from city dwellers in blue states such as California, New York or Massachusetts. As you can see from this photo the re-installation of this flow device required at least six men, a double tube of thirty foot piping and a crane.
They did install a fence around the pipe this time, which is good. But check out how small that mesh is on the wire and tell me again why the beavers won’t use it as a basis for ‘mud lathe and plaster’ treatment?
Oh and the article also says “beavers have been known to raise pipes to render flow devices ineffective”, to which even I, (who irrationally believe beavers are brilliant and wonderful in every possible way), would have to say ‘WTF’ and question the notion that beaver physical knowledge extends to the principal of osmosis inside of a curving opaque PVC pipe. Is it possible that high flow moved the pipes in those instances where it actually happened? Pipes do float and that’s why Mike and Skip tie concrete blocks and drill holes along the bottom. If you listened to experts you’d know that.
She says signs will be put up at the beaver pond to explain how this system works. “We’re trying to find that nice balance to protect the park road but also protect the beavers, our number one priority.
Have I become too cynical for this work? Do I suffer from credulity fatigue? If beavers are really your number one priority and you really, really want this installation to work, why aren’t you using proven tools that have worked for 20 years? Why would you install at 2 inch mesh filter? It can’t be that you were trying to save money by using what you had on hand because obviously the six men and the crane cost a pretty penny. How on earth do you get such massive media attention for what is basically a many-thousand dollar example of a man refusing to pull the car over and ask for directions?
Hrmph.
Now here is something AMAZING from our friend in New Hampshire to rinse with.
