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The beavers are on the warpath in North Carolina, kicking ass and taking names building dams and taking trees along the 70 mile stretch from Cary to Greensboro. This picture was snapped by someone enjoying Bond Park and sent to a columnist who wrote that the beavers were ‘being relocated’, which I’m sure you understand as well as I do. (You know like when your parents told you that puppy went to ‘live on the farm’.)

I did a little searching for the Beaver Man and found the number is linked to the home of a 77 year old man in Stantonsburg NC. No business listing but his (?) son is listed as the rifle safety coordinator for the North Carolina Trappers Association, so that’s nice. Gosh, I can’t tell you how surprised I am that someone with the name ‘beaver man‘ on his truck turns out to be a trapper!

Well apparently they have lots of feelings about beavers in NC because look at this clip from Greensboro where they are worried that beavers will ruin their water quality.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but are you saying that this town rips out beaver dams over and over, tipping mud and silt and debris into the water again and again and then worries about water quality? Apparently the terms ’cause’ and ‘effect’ are not well understood in the area. Dear, challenged Greensboro. Don’t you know that beaver dams are sometimes called the ‘earth’s kidneys‘ because their filtering actually improves water quality?

Well, the benefits of beavers bandwagon may not have reached North Carolina yet, but it certainly has been making the rounds. Yesterday I received a call from Guelph, Ontario about printing my letter to the editor, a call from Maine from someone who wanted to save some beavers in the city park and start their own beaver festival there, and an email from Kentucky where a certain young stopmotion filmmaker we are fond of spent an hour with a reporter walking through bulldozed beaver habitat and talking about their benefits to the ecosystem.

To paraphrase for our friends in North Carolina: the arc of restoration may be long but it bends towards beavers!

Guess whose in the news this morning for ripping out a dam and wrapping trees with chicken wire? Good old North Carolina, the city of Greensboro to be precise. Seems those darn beavers keep taking city trees and building in an area where the banks are susceptible to erosion. (um are there banks that aren’t?) The city brought in their back hoe and are threatening to use their boy-toys again if the beavers dare rebuild.

Insert chalk outline here:

Beavers have chewed through several tree trunks by Latham Park and near the Elm Street bridge (H. Scott Hoffmann / News & Record)

Municipal workers spent part of Tuesday removing the beavers’ dam from North Buffalo Creek with the backhoe. And they wrapped the park’s most vulnerable trees nearby in protective wire mesh to discourage the workaholic critters from rebuilding in the same spot, just north of Moses Cone Hospital not far from an Audubon Society natural area.

Not far from the Audubon Society nature area? Oh dear! You better get rid of those beavers right away or they’ll start encouraging wood duck and night heron and you know how Audubon hates that. Next thing you know all that coppiced new growth from the trees they took will be producing nesting habitat for thrushes and finches, and nothing makes an Audubon member more irritated than having too many bird species to look up in their Sibleys.

The beavers will either take the hint and skedaddle or they will try to rebuild the dam just east of North Elm Street, a spot where their appetite for trees has been a problem. City administrators also fear the beaver dam’s potential for triggering erosion, which would further pollute a stream Greensboro officials are trying to revive.

Really, they’ve been trying so hard to restore that stream? Gosh, that’s awful. Watershed restoration is such a key civic responsibility. Too bad there wasn’t some team of ecological aquatic engineers that could take on that job, restore the banks, raise the watertable, improve water quality bring fish and wildlife while simultaneously trapping silt and buildup. It’s a big job, it would be great if they could live on site too, and do repairs constantly. Still, Greenboro’s not made of money. They obviously just spent their last dime on overtime for the men, gas for the backhoe and chicken wire to wrap those trees. Where would they ever find a team like that to work for free?

“If the beavers can’t find anything to eat, they will likely move on,” said biologist David Mizejewski, whose Animal Planet series included an episode on beavers.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

STOP THE PRESSES.

Animal Planet? As in Animals on this planet? Okay, you do know, Mr. Biologist from Animal Planet, the episode on beavers featured Skip Lisle installing a flow device in Canada, right? I don’t mean to startle you but these devices work in America too. You could chose the ideal height your eroding bank should be at, invest a day’s work for Skip to come down and train y’all how to do it, and then have the beavers keep restoring that creek for you? Just want to make sure you’re aware of your options, here.

Vermont, where Lisle lives, is 15 hours away. Mike Callahan of Beaver Solutions in Massachusetts, is 11 hours away. Both could solve this problem easily for you, and both are headed towards the frozen winter in their area and won’t have much to do for a while. Didn’t North Carolina get Stimulus money for beaver management? Why not take 5000 of those dollars and pay to have an expert solve your problem so that several better experts can restore your creeks?

Best part of the article:

If the beavers rebuild their dam near Latham Park, the city will remove it again, Phlegar said. He hopes for the best, but he’s also prepared for the possibility that the beavers will leave the park only to set up housekeeping in an equally inappropriate area somewhere else. What are the odds that might happen? “That’s the $6 million question,” he said.

Let’s see, what are the odds of beavers sticking around someplace they call home even though people do enormously annoying things that interfere with their food supply and dams, and the beavers just determinedly rebuilding? Martinez? Any Comments?