Every now and then you run into the story of some patient farmer who doesn’t want to kill his beavers and spends his free hours scraping away the problems they cause. Maybe they have small children on the farm, or were involved in a wildlife hand-rearing project somewhere in their lives, or they just admire anything that works harder than them. Whatever the reason, its a lovely thing to stumble upon, especially when so many beaver stories end badly.
Meet Kristen Iden of South Carolina:
Our farm is blessed with a LOT of water. We have water on three sides of the property, and are basically a penisula into a small lake. We have a medium sized stream that runs around the back and curls around one side, a black water pond which spills into the “big water”. Perfect habitat for water loving creatures: herons, turtles, otters, egrets (Egrets? – I’ve had a few!) snakes, and the hero of this blog, at least one beaver.
Most local animal control and even state wildlife people consider beavers nuisances. In South Carolina, the preferred method of getting rid of a nuisance beaver is to kill it in a drown trap. Obviously, for an animal lovers like me and Joe, that is not an option. The beaver is just doing his job of making his home liveable. I met an orphan baby beaver, a kit, once. He was just as adorable and cute as any puppy or kitten and just as well behaved.
Ahhh Kristen, we are very very fond of you and your patience with beavers. Remember that it was North Carolina where stimulus money was going to blow up their dams and kill them. Reading your careful response makes me rethink the whole frustration.
As my brother and father know who have helped unblock and clean up after him, we have a very busy beaver(s). Unless the temperature dips below 30, or the water is flooding over our spillway, we wake up 5 days out of 7 with Mr. Beaver blocking our spillway overnight. So every day, Joe (or more normally me) goes down and fishes out all the crap he has piled in there the night before. I am utterly amazed at the size of some of the logs (think small telephone poles) that end up blocking our spillway, and the engineering that goes into the construction of his (or her) dam.
Goodness gracious, your brother and father help unblock the spillway? Are there more like you at home? I mean MANY more? Here’s my favorite part:
So low and behold, I was just cursing the beaver again when I caught a show on Animal Planet called “Leave it to the Real Beavers”. It introduced me to the Beaver Deceiver, a way to keep beavers from damming culverts using cedar posts and fencing. (See the Beaver Deceiver here: http://www.beaversww.org/solutions.html). So now my problem is to adapt the deceiver to a spillway, not a culvert.
The program features Skip, some lovely beaver photography, and a pesky waitress in Canada who forced her city to do the right thing by organizing public response. Its a great tale, and we showed the video at our First Night event. She goes on to say she wrote Fish and Wildlife for more information (ahhh you poor innocent soul. I don’t know about South Carolina but here Fish & Game would just shake their heads and say ignorantly, “those things never work”.) So I sent her blog to Skip and asked him to get in touch with her.
Beaver Kindness should always be rewarded.
