We haven’t seen our wayWard™ street beavers since the last week of September. Jon has been down faithfully in the evenings and we have looked all over in the mornings from Green street to the corp yard. I was starting to feel like they had left us and getting a little sad.
Then I got an email yesterday from “Leslie” who wondered how to discourage beavers from chewing her trees. I get these kind of queries all the time from the web site so I thought nothing of it. I wrote back about how to wrap them and asked her as an afterthought what part of the country she was in just in case I had a local contact that could help her more.
MARTINEZ, she answered.
Turns out she lives around the junior high where our AWOL beavers have been hanging out for the last week. Jon went to check out the damage. The beavers had taken two rough barked willow trees from the bank near her house. Meanwhile I scrambled to contact the maintenance crew there and get something out to the neighbors about protecting trees.
Here is what I sent out as post cards yesterday.
beaver-advice
Our two beavers were there last night and this morning again. Our friendly beaver-spotter volunteer can watch them from her deck. While we’re happy they’re still around we aren’t exactly thrilled about the odds of getting every single resident in the area excited about having beavers, and there is really nothing we can do to make them move down stream where its safer. She said they took the trees 5 days ago which would have been during the heavy rain when it must have been easy for them to swim up far.
Lets hope the next big rain doesn’t leave them at Arch street!
In the mean time I assume this means they didn’t have offspring because I can’t imagine they’d go exploring with kits. I’ve racked my brain to think how to get them down here and can’t think of anything yet. I guess they might try building a dam up there because the walls are so narrow and steep it will seem easy, but the first big rain will blow it out because there’s just too much water pressure up there. And that might eventually convince them its a bad idea.
That’s about all we have in our favor at the moment.
In the meantime if you have any friends or contacts in the area please give them a heads up and we’ll cross our fingers. And I’ll keep trying to make friends with the Junior High.
Really nice beaver reporting from Vermont Public Radio, the home state of Skip Lisle. You really should find time to listen.
