I’m sure you played musical chairs as a child. It was as ubiquitous as dodgeball and no one escaped its wrath. You march around an increasingly shrinking circle of chairs while some horrifically cheerful music blares in the background and when the music STOPS you grab a seat, Except there’s always one less chair than there are children.
Who ever doesn’t get a seat is ‘out’. That unhappy child takes a chair and leaves the game and the torture continues with its hardened ring of increasingly wary children. Until there are two left. WIth one chair between them. And the ‘ring’ they march has two sides: one where victory is possible and one where it is not. If the controller of the music has any sense of fairness at all they close their eyes so that they don’t see who is where.
Well, Idaho apparently likes to play a similar game with beavers. Only the last ones that can’t find a pond are killed. And they play it over and over. Doesn’t that sound fun?
Beaver squad: Fish and Game relocates pesky city beavers to backcountry fixer-upper habitats
Beavers are generally hardworking, industrious and helpful critters when they’re in the right location. But when they set up shop in the wrong location — say in the city — it can be disastrous.
Take the Target department store parking lot in Idaho Falls for example.
The fury aquatic rodents have been known to saunter across the store parking lot and chew down ornamental trees in the parking lot medians. Oddly, beavers show up regularly at the nearby waterway next to the store attracted by plenty to eat, ready-made dens and water. Each year, beavers have to be escorted out of town.
So rather than help Target use the fencing sold by the garden department to wrap its special trees, they bring in a retired expert from Idaho fish and game to save the day.
In a million years you will never guess what his name is,.
Their point man is retired volunteer Roy Leavitt, 79. Leavitt, always on the go, enjoys keeping up with busy beavers. “Capturing the problem beavers has been my job for the last three years,” Leavitt said.
LEAVITT moves BEAVERS. The comedy rights itself,
James Brower, Fish and Game regional communications manager, said the – relocates 15 to 20 beavers each year. In 2019, 16 beavers were relocated. In 2018, 18 were evicted.
Leavitt said there are two beavers living in the waterway next to Target right now that “I’ll need to get to this spring.”
Fish and Game says there are two types of beavers that come to test out the city life. One type is looking to set up a permanent home and the other are referred to as “canal beavers.”
“The canal beavers are often transient,” Brower said. “They don’t set up shop. They come, chew up some people’s decorative trees along the ditch banks and people want us to come and get them out. But a lot of times it’s a munch-and-run situation. They usually don’t stick around too long, especially in those canal systems.”
Well, sure. Those canal beavers with their Venetian influence. What do you expect. Of course since the shopping mall is on the beaver highway as it were, getting rid of one will always always mean you make space for another. But I’m sure you knew that, right?
“Sometimes the county will call us or a cattle company or landowner that have a road or culvert that they use to irrigate or water cows and the beaver have come and stopped it up or they have flooded the road, causing damage of some sort,” Brower said. “We get a lot in the Ririe area, too. The beaver are coming up and gnawing on people’s decorative trees and shrubs.”
Rather than a death sentence, Fish and Game prefers to redirect the industrious critter’s energy elsewhere, inviting them to move into a fixer-upper. The Upper Snake Beaver Cooperative has identified several backcountry locations in eastern Idaho that historically had beaver but don’t any longer.
Okay. I guess its a millimeter better than killing them. Although depending on how the relocation goes it might be killing them slowly. I’ll give you credit for knowing beavers are valuable and more use alive than dead. And for setting up a beaver patrol at Fish and Game in the first place.
But honestly. Learn to wrap a tree and install a flow device will you?
“We would like to see them introduced because they’re habitat kings,” Brower said. “They just sit there and work and build dams and build ponds and improve streams, make straight channels flow year-round opposed to some that are perennial and stop certain times of the year. We do it in the name of habitat restoration.”
Now that’s worth boasting about.
