momduck

Remember the city in Maine with the ‘pretend beaver deceiver’? Well a beaver friend writes this morning that he called to talk about a more realistic installation and was told by the deputy director of public works that the beavers were already dead. Turns out there’s a trapper on staff so killing them was a ‘free solution‘. No fancy humane interventions needed, we have everything under control.

How sad and stupid and utterly disappointing. Lets hope they got all of them, and that there aren’t some kits shivering in the lodge and slowly starving to death.

Moving right along through the Kubler-Ross stages of beaver grief lets get to anger. Free solution? Maybe. But if it was such a great free idea why didn’t you employ it earlier? The T junction of pipe was useless but not free. Moving it to the other side of the culvert was useless, but not free. Ramming the culvert with a telephone poll was useless but not free. Bringing out the back hoes time after time was useless and not free. All those hours of public works time, when they weren’t filling pot holes or cleaning drains, were paid for with taxpayer dollars and were useless but not free.

If you had a free solution all along, lurking in your back pocket, why didn’t you use it earlier? Say the moment you started to realize there was a problem?

Oh wait, I know why.

You needed cover for your enormously unpopular decision to kill the beavers. Social cover. Ass cover. The ‘we’ve tried everything’ cover. The paper gave you help in this and dutifully printed your painstaking solutions without ever reporting how patently inane they were. You were given a public opportunity to show your citizens you tried and tried and couldn’t solve these problems humanely. You made a public argument that you had no choice, and no one contested it. You had to kill them.

It’s this deception, this dedicated deceit of public opinion, that angers me even more than the actual trapping. You extirpated the public trust and made a mockery of civic involvement. You snared the good will of Lewiston and crushed it in your conibear traps. You used your residents against each other to push public opinion get exactly where you wanted it all along and your local paper faithfully carried water for you. Sure, some beavers died in the process, valuable wetlands were destroyed and countless species will suffer as a result, but that is hardly the real story. Lewiston used kabuki theatre and taxpayer dollars to pretend to solve a problem humanely they had no intention of solving at all.

Take this as a lesson, Lewiston homeowners and taxpayers. The next time your city tells you they are trying to ‘solve’ a problem – traffic congestion, sewers, crossing guards, school funding. Remember that in the back of their minds they may hide the real solution, and all their flailing efforts in the meantime are just trying to drive public opinion in its direction. The city of Martinez has learned with painful clarity that lying about beavers is just the beginning.

Maybe some letters from the public will remind them that ‘free solutions‘ aren’t always free.

Edward A. Barrett
City Administrator
E-Mail: ebarrett@lewistonmaine.gov

Megan Bates
Deputy Director
Public Works Department
(207) 513-3003 Ext. 3440
E-Mail: mbates@ci.lewiston.me.us
(207) 513-3000 Ext. 3200

You know how some restaurants constantly refill your pepsi or lemonade, or you watch an old movie and clown after clown gets out of the tiny car? Well that’s how beaver-problem-in-the-news stories are. Whenever I scratch my head about what to write about in the morning, I can always find five new regions where beavers are mysteriously flooding roads, city staff is valiantly ripping up dams only to be completely surprised that the beavers are rebuilding anyway, and irritable men are talking about trapping, bemoaning the dwindling price of fur. The articles usually contain more than one alarming sounding threat, a statement about population boom without any corresponding proof, at least one blatant falsehood, and a truly rankling pun.

Go ahead. See for your self. Google the terms Beaver+Flooding+Trapping and see what you get in news stories.

This morning it’s a pair of piece s written by Bonnie Washuk for the Sun Journal about Lewiston, Maine.

LEWISTON — Maurice Morin watched Tuesday as Lewiston Public Works crews cleaned out a culvert on the Stetson Road — again. Beavers did what beavers do, built a dam. But their dam has trapped water and at times flooded the road. Despite strong hints for them to leave, like running a telephone pole through their dam, the beavers have stayed and kept rebuilding. During heavy rains, the plugged culvert has flooded the road, forcing the city to close it.

The beavers have to go, said Morin, who lives on the Stetson Road.

Did you catch that? Public Works played “storming the castle” and ran the dam through with a telephone pole like a battering ram. That must have taken some planning and a number of employees. Must have been a lot of fun. I bet it worked really, really well.

Crews have repeatedly come out “with a boat, a backhoe, trucks, foremen, workmen. Every time these people open it up, it’s costing us a lot of money. It’s ridiculous. The state should do something to let us take the beavers out,” Morin said. “A beaver is just a big rat with a flat tail.”

Boat party at Lewiston Public Works and everyone’s invited! Your right Mr. Morin, its a great waste of public funds. I know something better they could do than rip stuff out. And it doesn’t involve trapping. True it’s probaby not as much fun as boats and backhoes but it actually works and will be a Long-term solution to your culvert problem. Trapping would need to be repeated every year.Interesting comment about beavers being rats. You sound like a complex, thoughtful, nature-appreciating property owner. Come to think of it are you sure your name is spelled correctly? I think its possible the paper got a vowel wrong. (Guess which one?)

Jon Elie, operations manager for Lewiston Public Works highway division, said the culvert is cleared for now, but the beaver problem isn’t settled. Elie estimates the city has spent $3,000 to $4,000 in the last three years at the same location trying to clear dams out of the culvert. This year alone crews have been to the site three times. This week “we tried to do the best job we could. Winter’s coming,” Elie said.

Remember that scene from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where they are being pursued by a bunch of experts and finally realizing what an extraordinary team of lawmen has been pulled together to take them down and Paul Newman says, agreeably,

“If they’d just pay me all the money they’re spending to make me stop robbing them, I’d stop robbing them!”

3500 dollars would more than pay for a beaver deceiver. You could put Skip up at a nice hotel and buy him breakfast. You could call the papers and the evening news and use the whole event to bring Lewiston a little humane publicity. Maybe involve some school children to come out and monitor the beaver pond and the changes that occur before winter. You could become a trend setter and send your crew out to Leeds to explain how it all works.

Several years ago the city put in a “beaver deceiver,” a series of pipes that stick out of the culvert. The goal is to confuse the beavers and discourage them from rebuilding. The deceiver often takes water in without the trickling noise. The sound of water furthers the beaver’s drive; when they hear water, they seem to react with “here’s where I’ve got to plug it up,’” Elie said. The deceiver worked for a while, but the beavers got smart and damned the culvert from the other side. “They went through the outlet of the pipe and clogged it,” Elie said. This week crews took out the beaver deceiver, cleaned it out, put it back in and installed a grate on the other side of the culvert. But the grate is not ideal. Vegetation clogs up the grate quite fast, Elie said. “It’s a difficult thing to maintain.” After all the work, “there still is a family of beavers living there,” probably five or six, Elie said.

Thank goodness the responsible journalists at the Sun Journal took the time to photograph the “series of pipes”. Hold on while I clean off the keyboard. That was a coffee spitter. Let’s be clear. This is a BEAVER DECEIVER in much the same way that when I stick up my thumb, point my index finger and say ‘bang’ my hands is a GUN. This is more like a “crazy-animal- lover deceiver” so that the city can say it tried humane methods and that didn’t work. A beaver deceiver is trapezoidal fencing installed at a culvert. It works by allowing the beavers to dam but forcing them to move farther and farther away from the water source. I was actually starting to get worried until I saw this photo, and realized they had never, ever, even for the smallest fraction of a moment tried to solve this problem humanely. I can’t believe that your ‘T pipe invention” actually worked on and off for three years. Nice job boys. Sometimes it takes actual research or a phone call to solve problems. I hear using (Teh) Google can help too.

I can’t imagine what all this ripping and ramming is doing to the water quality. Well no matter. You can always blame it on the beavers. I can see that this article is ass-covering in every way. The poor beleagered town of Lewiston has tried to save the beavers by using humane methods. They have applied countless man hours and heavy equipment. There’s a soggy, defenseless and fairly angry property owner involved complaining to the media. What else can they do? The only solution is the final solution.

Okay Lewiston, before you kll the ‘rats’ and justify it as if you had no choice, read this pamphlet on actual beaver deceivers. Call Skip Lisle (802) 376-3324 and find out what went wrong. I promise you’ll get better press from doing this right than from crushing the beavers to death before winter sets in.