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!

Today’s beaver business takes us from the latte strewn streets of Seattle to the briney lobster traps of Maine. We are coast to coast here at all-beavers-all-the-time. Check out this delightful up “aren’t we noble” update from Seattle’s publicly owned power company. Apparently in addition to providing electricity City Light also purchases and preserves wetlands to protect salmon AND BEAVER!

With this acquisition, the Endangered Species Act Early Action Land Program is now responsible for over 2,712 acres to date, protecting fish habitats (mostly for Chinook salmon, but also protecting beavers, bull trout, steelhead and other species) and from pollution and destruction.

Take a moment to remember the trouble we had keeping LADWP from helicoptoring in to scrape out all the beavers in the Owens Valley and imagine what it would be like to have a power company bragging about saving beavers! The mind reels.

As we pass over the united states at a great speed I will just stop briefly over Minnesota to say that the reporter of the Humongous beaver article wrote me a kindly letter yesterday, ( which was surprising since I am fairly sure I was not trying to be kind). I thanked him and wrote back that there are precious few beaver advocates out his way and if he ever wanted to join the club we’d save him a seat.

Okay now onto Maine, where they celebrated the end of leftover turkey with the charming old trapper who never did it for the money and just wanted to be out in nature. Remember him?

Maine Meets Martinez Beavers

It is unfortunate that Maine doesn’t know any other way to teach its children about nature; how to make them responsible and manage wildlife, other than by trapping. Since beavers create wetlands, augment fish and bird populations and increase wildlife, allowing these animals to maintain their habitat would improve the region’s game count rather than deplete it.

For the record, there are plenty of old-time trappers who have learned new tricks about humane wildlife management, and who make a better living solving problems than killing them.

Heidi Perryman, Ph.D., president and founder, Worth A Dam, Martinez, Calif.