1932-2009

Getting ready for winter

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental, Who's Killing Beavers Now? November 11, 2012

Several aspen trees were felled by beaver along the Blue River in Warriors Mark recently. Special to the Daily

Am I the only one that gets a kind of tingly feeling when a paper runs a photo like this? Colorado Summit Daily has a fairly nice glimpse this morning of beavers-getting-ready-for-winter.

Beavers are active this time of the year!

My friend Terese Keil, property manager for Trappers Villas, called me the other day to tell me a bunch of landscaping aspen had been chewed down literally overnight by beavers.

A call to Fish and Wildlife confirmed several reports of beaver activity in Summit County and loss of trees on properties. Apparently, they are busy building dams and lodges in preparation for winter. The advice was to protect the trees with wire mesh along the bottom of the trunks.

Beavers are prolific engineers and builders, and prefer to work mostly at night; their specially adapted incisor teeth and powerful lower jaw muscles allow them to chew down trees. Their teeth never stop growing, and their four front teeth are self-sharpening. They have been seen to work as a team to carry a large piece of timber.

The author Joanne Stolen is a retired microbiology professor from Rutgers – now turned artist and living in Breckenridge, CO. This is a mere 2.5 hour drive from Sherri Tippie so I’m going to imagine that if they aren’t friends already they soon will be. In the mean time I have been perusing the linocuts on her art website and noticing there wasn’t a beaver yet. I’m guessing she’ll be inspired to fix that oversight very soon!

There are typically two dens or rooms within a beaver lodge, one for drying off after exiting the water, and the second, a drier, inner chamber is where the beaver family actually lives. Special to the Daily

And remember this Wednesday I will be talking at the Rossmoor Nature Association about our beavers and their effect on our creek. You know you have friends there, so see if you can get an invitation. I’d love to see some familiar faces.

Oh and if you need provoking after a weekend that was just too relaxing go read this morning’s whimper from Mississippi where they are bemoaning the fact that the federal governement (which they mostly don’t believe in) is now only going to pay for half the cost of killing beavers with the USDA and isn’t that a shame? I mean its not like the state needs the water or the wooducks or the trout or the filtration. Obviously those beavers have to be killed because flow devices never work and Uncle Sam needs to do it!

Remind me why I pay taxes again.

Shooting the Gift Horse in the Mouth – er tail

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Who's Killing Beavers Now? July 28, 2012

The county board of administrators in DeSoto Mississippi are mighty worried and face a gnawing problem. Mind you – they’re not worried about the worst drought conditions the state has seen in any time during any growing season EVER. Or about the fact that this declared drought has been named a national disaster by the federal government making it eligible for FEMA. They’re not worried that besides DeSoto it affects 1000 counties and 26 states. Who’s counting? The elected officials at the top of Mississippi have more pressing things on their minds.

BEAVERS!

So just this week they sat down to discuss the problem and consider re-instituting the tail bounty that had been so popular in years past.

“There are people out there who’d like to do it,” DRCUA board member Barry Bridgforth said of collecting a fee for beaver tails. “We’re not trying to eradicate the beaver population but control it because they’re rampant in DeSoto County. If there’s a sizable body of water, they’re in there.“

See we’ll pay folks to kill beavers and at the same time take money from the federal government for drought conditions, because hand outs are only a problem when they go to THOSE people. What other choice do we possibly have?

Bridgforth pointed to a pond on the property of fellow board member Joe Frank Lauderdale: “He’s only got one tree left on his island in the pond. The beavers got rid of all his ornamentals.”

All the ornamentals! How much can one man suffer? He obviously has no choice. Certainly you can’t expect them to wrap the trees they want to protect with wire or paint them with sand. That would be barbaric! Much better to pay 10 dollars a tail and let folks kill themselves some pocket money. Times are tough. And beavers are cluttering up our creeks.You know the REALLY annoying thing they do in our creeks? They pile up all this mud and sticks and back up the water in these little stagnant ponds. They do it all over and all the time and in every stream they find! Sometimes they clutter up the creek with ponds so much we can hardly show the USDA officers how bad our drought is. We better get rid of them right away.

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I’ll tell you what. Maybe its a naming problem. Let’s not call them beavers let’s call then ‘water-savers’. See these little guys hunt down any remaining trickles you have left and hoard them into pools. They dig holes and build dams and pile mud and raise the water table so that you miserable wells have a little more water, and the hyporheic exchange through the banks cools your water temperatures so that a few of your remaining fish don’t get baked. And the deer drink from them and the turtles and frogs retreat to them, and waterbirds hang out on the banks so they have something to eat. And when this pondwater comes out on the other side of the dam its actually cleaner! Because the dam has filtered it! Oh and what price do these water-keepers charge to do this labor, live on sight, train the new workforce and make repairs onsight 24/7?

Nothing, They work for free.

But thanks to the county board of supervisors in DeSoto you can now get $10 a tail for killing them. Sweet.

Fancy that!

heidi08 Beavers February 24, 2012

The beaver didn’t come last night. Sam thought that he would. “The beaver can hear the sound of running water; they know when the dam is broken.”

Beaver are damming up the Prairie pond to increase their territory. Sam says if they can cause the water to spread then they can reach the trees while still under cover. The beaver have precious little to dam the pond with so they’ve squished up mud, like a child making mud patties, and made their own little dam.

The little dam didn’t seem a peril to me, but Sam explained the water would back up into the fields and possibly the cabin; the beaver would kill the nearby trees. Already there were trees with bark missing all around; he said the trees had been “ringed.”

And so, under the light of a full moon, Sam took a shovel and broke the dam, and water gushed forth.

Author Shannon Rule Bardwell is right at the cusp of enjoying beavers. You can tell she’s intrigued by their nocturnal creations and interested in their watery imagery. She doesn’t have any idea yet that beavers built the prairie or are good for the landscape or help the wildlife she probably enjoys watching but they catch her fancy. Like they did mine 5 years ago when I just idly watched them in our creek and thought they were “neat”. Like they did yours if you’re reading this. To catch something’s fancy is an archaic phrase and I’m not even sure where it comes from but I will tell you that when it happens it is a powerful thing. You should beware of anything that achieves it. Just look at my life 5 years later.

The beaver reminds me of C.S. Lewis’ “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” where the beaver family was the good guys, complete with kindly anthropomorphic characteristics. It’s hard then to think of vanquishing the beaver, but the dictionary describes the beaver in less charming terms: “A large aquatic rodent, having thick brown fur, webbed hind feet, a paddle-like, hairless tail and chisel-like front teeth adapted for gnawing bark and felling trees used to build dams.

Well, I wrote Ms. Bardwell about options because it is fairly clear her fancy might well make her the sight of the only known flow device on the prairie. Since she goes on to write about a friend of her husbands who wants to make a hat by hunting beaver I’m not impractically hopeful, but idle interests are funny things, and anything is possible!

Case in point:this primative video contains the footage I shot the very first time I ever saw a beaver. It was in January 2007 and I believe it was dad. I had just bought a new mac and wanted to make an iMovie but it was too hard for a woman of my skills at that time. Three months later I eventually managed this with the services of Mr. Gates. I eventually mastered iMovie and even hired someone to teach me Finalcut. All I’m saying is that fancy is a powerful thing.

Bounty

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Uncategorized, Who's Killing Beavers Now? March 12, 2011

Bounty is a highly evocative word, especially as we mark the steep descent to Thanksgiving and see the looming holidays rise in stark relief. It can mean richness, sufficiency, having more than one needs. It means there’s enough to share, enough to give away, enough to set some aside, enough to pace oneself. “Go ahead and take some, I’ve got plenty” or “That’s enough fish for one day, son, we can come back and catch more tomorrow”. Bounty means freely given or giving freely.

Bounty also has another meaning. As in “Bounty Hunter”. The state pays citizens for the death of an undesirable thing, ridding the commonwealth of a threat or a nuisance. Early days in the Wild West offered a bounty for criminals when the government was too young or too overwhelmed to catch lawbreakers themselves. Bounty hunters are pictured often as ruthless, loathsome, frightening characters. Usually their only alliance is to the dollar they seek and they left the niceties of society long ago. Every once in a while it is probably true to say that they are a little romanticized: a grizzled Clint Eastwood character relying on no one for help and handling the problem themselves for a fistful of dollars.

12.50 a tail, to be exact.

The bounty is $12.50 per tail individually wrapped in clear plastic and frozen until collection day. Landowners may trap the beavers themselves or use the services of a trapper. Bimonthly collection days will be scheduled beginning in January.

Remind me not to have a glass of iced tea when I visit friends in Alcorn, Mississippi. Their freezers will be stuffed with beaver tails until the collection days and god knows what else after that. Let’s just hope little Jimmy doesn’t mistake his popsicle. Apparently the bounty is a cheap way to get beaver problems to take care of themselves.

Last year’s demonstration program was considered a success with 126 landowners participating and 605 beavers eliminated on more than 9,200 acres

Now that’s a deal! A mere 7500 dollars to get rid of 602 beavers! That means landowners killed around 5 beavers each and made a cool 60 bucks for their effort. Heck that almost pays for the freezer space and the electric bill to keep it going! I guess it really isn’t very lucrative, but it takes care of a problem and it gets the kids outdoors. Maybe the families all gather around while Pa cuts off the tail. Wonder what they do with the rest of the beaver? I guess I probably shouldn’t ask.

I read an article this weekend on the troublesome beavers of Saskatchewan, Canada, where adoption of a beaver bounty was narrowly rejected. The agriculture minister was bemoaning the population rise and saying that this was unfortunately because “No one was trapping anymore”. (There are apparently three websites for trappers associations in Saskatchewan, but maybe that doesn’t matter.)

“If fur prices were a little higher it’d solve our problem on the coyote side and the beaver side,” Bjornerud said. “They’re not worth much right now and that’s our biggest problem.”

Ah, no, Mr. Bjornerud. I really don’t think that’s your biggest problem. I would rate your lack of imagination, your knee-jerk problem-solving skills and your failure to think humanely as three bigger problems that spring immediately to mind. Not to mention the complete ecological blind spot your vision is shadowed by when you fail to think about the trickle down effect all that beaver killing will have on your entire region. Well, why bother thinking ahead and planning for solutions that will take care of your farmlands and your watershed? You can always blame it on the rodent.

I can think of only one fitting response to these tail-paying plans.