Elizabeth Lee wrote an article this weekend that was not quite advocacy, not quite pragmatism, not quite derision. She begins by talking about the flooded swamp in New York that the beavers used to maintain, allowing families to iceskate through the trees when it froze. She notes, almost incidentally, that even though it has no beavers anymore it still provides excellent birding.
In the Webb Royce Swamp in Essex there were beavers that kept the swamp flooded until the 1990s. Local families ice-skated among the trees that remained standing and the hummocks that bulged from under the snow. In recent years, the beavers moved out. Stories vary as to how and why. Now the swamp is dry except for rainfall. The birding is still excellent and the groundcover is habitat for a new mix of plants and animals.
She then goes on to talk about a very humane neighbor who was forced to shoot a beaver whose dam was flooding his property. He had apparently tried trapping but it was just ‘too big’. I guess this very ‘humane’ neighbor didn’t know that it was very unlikely that this monster-beaver was living alone, so even if Papa was shot the other beavers would still tend the dam. Elizabeth then rounds off the article with a hearty discussion of how much beaver pelts go for at auction and how the castoreum sells well also.
One gets the feeling, reading this article, that Elizabeth thinks beavers benefit the land once they leave it and that its useful to have places where they once were. Okay. I don’t disagree with that. But you know what else is useful? Having places where they are RIGHT NOW!!! I wrote her about the documented effect on bird and fish populations near beaver dams and I wrote her that any article that spends three paragraphs on the subject of trapping should devote at least a sentence to the benefit and technology of flow devices: the only long-term solution to beaver problems.
One thing her article taught me that I didn’t know? One of the buyers for castoreum is Phillip Morris, who uses it as a flavoring agent in cigarettes.
Perfect.
