Even though there seems to be a beaver benefits renaissance in the Bay Area of sorts at the moment, there are still plenty of places where they aren’t welcome.Regarded as a pesky nuisance to be pushed gotten rid of whenever possible, beavers are woefully misunderstood in much of the country. My in box is literally flooded every morning with stories why trapping is necessary. No one seems to mind that this is kit season and they’ll be leaving behind lots of orphans, either. Take Alabama for instance.

Madison County Commission District 3 taking steps to fix a beaver problem

This sentence strikes me as particularly problematic. But maybe I’m being too literal.

That’s why at Wednesday’s commission meeting district three partnered with the USDA to have them come in and dismantle the dams, and eradicate and relocate the beavers.

I’m curious. Do you think the eradicate them first? And then relocate the bodies? Or the other way around?

On to Michigan where beavers are blamed for flooding as well.

Busy beavers causing flood of problems

“We have to pay for the trappers to go out there, set up costs, and then so much per beaver per trap,” he said. There’s also a cost for work crews and specialized equipment.

I’m really not sure why a county has to ‘pay’ for beaver trapping for every landowner? They aren’t require to pay for termites or mice in your house? And they don’t think they have to pay for health insurance? I would love to know what shred of municipal doctrine from the middle ages explains why a governing body is responsible for a beaver on your land? Call it morbid curiosity.

Things get a little better as we head toward Illinois, where Donald Hey has been preaching the beaver gospel for 25 years or more.

Dam Animals

The dry spell we’re experiencing this spring may have an upside: it will limit run-ins between man and beaver.

Beavers made Chicago. Beaver skins were the reason Chicago became a trading center. Until the 1970s, when antifur consciousness soared and area trapping stopped, beaver dams were just a rural problem. Since then, the populations have grown and moved down the I & I Canal, the Chicago River, and the Des Plaines River. They’ve been spotted downtown on the north branch of the Chicago River near Wolf Point, farther north near the Green Dolphin Street nightclub at Ashland and Webster, and near Ping Tom Park in Chinatown.

What’s the problem? Beavers eat bark, and prefer some tree species over others, including those $400 aspens suburbanites like to plant. Their dams plug up culverts and cause floods. And they’re often blamed for the dispersal of the intestinal parasite Giardia lamblia, which causes nausea and diarrhea in humans. Some call it beaver fever, but deer, muskrats, dogs and cats, and even humans can carry the parasite.

This article makes me apprehensive but not entirely uncomfortable. Maybe we have to make allowances because its Illinois? I’m just happy the ever try ANYTHING else except trapping.

In the suburbs, the problem’s more widespread and the solutions more varied. In Lake County, most of the beavers live along the creeks feeding the Des Plaines River. It’s up to Jim Anderson, natural resource manager for the Lake County Forest Preserve, to solve beaver problems on the county’s 24,000 forest preserve acres. Anderson says they tend to leave the animals in place unless the dams cause flooding on adjacent roads or private property–for instance, at the Wadsworth Savanna site this past week, a beaver that’s been clogging culverts for two years elicited a complaint from a neighbor whose backyard was flooding. “We’ll have to go out and take a look at it,” Anderson says.

To alleviate flooding, Anderson and his crew often run pipes through the dams to try to lower the upstream water levels. Or they tear out the dam altogether and see if the beavers relocate on their own. A couple times in the last two years Anderson has tried hiring licensed private trappers to move beavers to other areas in Lake County, but one of the beavers died. Anderson says the transfer stresses the animals out, and besides, there aren’t many places to take them where they don’t just cause problems for someone else.

Erickson says he’s never had a beaver die in 30 years of planned live trapping. “They’re very hardy animals,” he says. “That trapper just doesn’t know what he’s doing.” Erickson’s preferred no-kill method is a galvanized-cable snare that catches the beaver behind its front legs. Once caught, the beavers can surface safely and leave or enter the water as needed, and Erickson says they’re in fair shape when he returns to remove them, which can be up to 12 hours later.

Anderson says killing beavers, or “removing them from the natural world,” as he puts it, is a last resort in Lake County; when it comes to that, again, a licensed trapper is called in. Anderson says he believes the captured animals are shot in the head with a .22, but he doesn’t know for sure. Another method involves trapping them underwater, where they die of carbon dioxide narcosis. (Beavers have valves in their noses that keep water out and prevent them from simply drowning.)

Let’s hear a little from the biggest beaver advocate the state has to offer, shall we?”

Donald Hey, one of the project’s heads, is a great admirer of the beaver–he credits it, in no modest terms, for the entire North American drainage system. Glaciers carved deep cuts in the earth, he explains; then prehistoric beavers slowed the raging rivers with dams. The rivers widened, occasionally flooding and moving silt and effluvia over the banks to make rich meadowlands.

In 1985, with support from environmental groups, Chicago corporations, and the state and federal governments, Hey and others acquired 550 acres from the Lake County Forest Preserve and turned a series of gravel pits off Highway 41 into a patchwork of ponds, marshes and wetlands. The beavers came, of their own accord, from the Des Plaines River. In 1992, Hey helped start the not-for-profit Wetlands Initiative, which now administers 17 other restoration sites in the Illinois River watershed as well.

Hey, an affable 63-year-old Missouri native who got his doctorate in hydrology from Northwestern, says giant Pleistocene-epoch beavers (Castoroides ohioensis) as big as black bears roamed the Great Lakes about 10,000 years ago. By the time of Columbus, according to paleontological and archaeological estimates, there were more than 400 million modern beavers (Castor canadensis) on the North American landscape. Hey walks me past a site at the Wadsworth project where in the mid-90s remains of 8,500-year-old trees with gnaw marks were found by University of Illinois and Illinois State Museum archaeologists.

Donald was the keynote speaker at the very first state of the beaver conference I attended. More than this, he was an expert witness in the Riverside appellate beaver case argued by our friend Mitch Wagner. He has been trying to explain why beavers are useful for his damaged state as long as anyone can remember. This article suggests he’s getting a little traction.

So, to summarize: Beavers shaped the land we live on. We hunted them to near extinction for commerce. Then we protected their fur and allowed the populations to grow. Now we’re moving them or killing them because they’re encroaching on our habitat, which used to be theirs.

“I think all the bird watchers should be put in a cage, not the beavers,” says Erickson. “What have the birds done for us?”

Um, I really didn’t say that. Honestly. And I won’t of course next week. But my my my what a way to end an article!

Rusty Cohn in Napa is getting impatient for the new kits to make themselves known. But I’m guessing he has a week of waiting ahead or more. Meanwhile he’s visiting the pond most nights and getting great photos to satisfy our beaver-watching craving. Just look.