In Putney, the challenge of living with beavers
PUTNEY — The town is trying to strike an appropriate balance with the beavers that live up in the Wilson Wetlands. Cory Cheever, a biologist with the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, was in Putney Tuesday to help members of the Putney Conservation Commission control beaver activity in the wetlands.
I got so excited about this article. A Fish and Wildlife Biologist installing a flow device instead of killing beavers! And in Vermont no less! So obviously they could hop up the road 24 minutes to Grafton and make sure Skip Lisle approves of their work, right? Maybe even get some help from the master on this! But if I was expecting the transfer or sharing of any knowledge I was sorely mistaken.
Cheever installed a series of his own dams — which looked a little like wire fencing placed in the water — in the culverts under Sand Hill Road to keep the beavers out while allowing them to live in the wetlands.
“This is a dam, from the beaver’s point of view this is a dam, but it is faulty, from a beaver’s point of view,” Kerrey said Tuesday while standing over one of the culverts. “It’s faulty because it has five holes in it, also known as culverts, so they are busy plugging those holes up.”
The Department of Fish and Wildlife has installed similar baffles all over the state.
That’s right, because BAFFLES are sooo much better than those other things that Skip or Mike install. So we had to start from scratch and re-invent the wheel to make it roll. Last year when we read about Mr. Cheever I wrote Skip and Mike to see if they had ever met, connected or exchanged a single email. I’m so innocent I was surprised when the answer came back “No.”
Well, maybe Fish and Wildlife is trying to avoid paying royalties to Skip by calling their design a baffle? Or maybe they genuinely just don’t know any better and didn’t open my copious emails the last time. In the vast scheme of things it doesn’t matter if Mr. Cheever makes up a different design or calls it a “beaver faker” as long as it works, right? I can’t get too upset about this article because look at this.
Kerrey says that when the water level dropped the Conservation Commission saw the need to bring the beavers back to dam up the flow. As challenging as the beavers are to live with, Kerrey said, it was still easier than bringing in a human specialist.
The beavers were able to bring the water level back up, but now they are damming up the culverts with their sticks.
“We would have had to figure out how to do that ourselves. We would have had to hire some engineer to figure out how to reestablish a wetland,” Kerry said. “Beavers already know how to do that. So we just decided we would wait for them. And we waited a little over year and the habitat for them is good so they showed up and they fixed everything, but they’re going a little overboard now.”
Is Fish and Wildlife paying for this? Or is it strictly something Cory convinces property owners to pay for in their spare time? I will write him again and see if we can’t possibly bring Mohamed to the mountain.
And speaking of experts I heard from Mike Callahan yesterday that he is on his way to Washington to film the salmon passing easily through his new adapted flow devices there. It seems that his auto cameras don’t pick up the passage which mostly happens at night, but Mike’s been assured the design works like a charm so he is going to spend some nights on sight with a camera at the ready!
He needs the footage of course for March when he’s coming to the Salmonid Restoration Federation along with all the OTHER beaver people!
