Variety is the spice of life,
I mean when you review beaver news every day you hear the same thing over and over. Residents saying “Don’t kill the beavers because they save water” or “save fish” or “save wildlife”. But you don’t hear this very often.
“We are worried about the abundance of wildflowers and pollinators we had in the area”
Tiny will work with residents on better ‘beaver-friendly’ solutions
Leave it to beaver to create a link between the township and residents of a neighbourhood.
The connection is between residents of Wymbolwood Beach and municipal staff that removed a beaver dam in the area of Skylark Road and Tiny Beaches Road South.
Tiny resident Julia Aronov took up the matter with council at a November meeting. Staff brought back an answer at a January meeting, after putting together the pieces of the puzzle.
“The Township of Tiny is an environmentally focused municipality,” said Tim Leitch, director public works and interim chief administrative officer. “Unfortunately, we do have areas in the municipality that have beaver activity. It is part of our environment and we definitely do not want to do anything to disturb that.”
However, he said, there are some confined areas within the township’s drainage network that experience accumulation of debris due to beaver activity.
‘Tiny’ is in fact a regular sized town in Ontario near Toronto. It’s about 2500 miles from our friends at Fur-bearers but they apparently have gotten the memo anyway. Just listen to this.
“We want them to involve us in this,” she said. “We had so many people saying they could help build a pond leveller.”
According to Nature Conservancy Canada, “pond levellers are glorified pipes that extend through a beaver dam and prevent upstream flooding. Setting the pipe at the desired water level allows any excess water to flow through the pipe to the downstream side of the dam. This allows the beavers to remain in their dam, while alleviating upstream flooding nuisances.”
Aside from this, when Aronov had approached council last year, she had included myriad documents to the effect in her presentation.
“I’d like to see if the township is willing to try a more friendly method,” she said.
Hmm I’m not sure I’d call them “gloried pipe”. But okay. They know what they are and they’re willing to help install one. What does the city say about that?
“The research we’ve done…the devices still require maintenance and a lot of them just make it easier for us to take away the sticks from in front of the culvert than inside the culvert,“ he said. “One commitment that I did make was that where we see a situation where we’re able to anticipate problems occurring, we will reach out for different approaches and hopefully be able to develop some plans to minimize any impact on the beaver activity.
Boy that was some research. You must have done hours and hours of research to come up with that bit of gossip. I can just imagine city staff now, sitting bleary eyed in front of a stack of books at county library in the wee hours trying to keep awake by drinking iced coffee and charcoal biscuits.
Or hey, maybe when he says “research” he means “Bob’s brother in law in YK told him that those things never work!”
The idea isn’t that the build outside the culvert. The idea is that they don’t build at all. Here watch this helpful video and get your grandaughter to slap you several times.
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Maybe leave the research to the librarians next time? And you can get back to filling potholes.
“The Township of Tiny is an environmentally focused municipality,” said Tim Leitch, director public works and interim chief administrative officer. “Unfortunately, we do have areas in the municipality that have beaver activity. It is part of our environment and we definitely do not want to do anything to disturb that.”
However, he said, there are some confined areas within the township’s drainage network that experience accumulation of debris due to beaver activity.
“With this blockage,” added Leitch, “damage can occur to the infrastructure, private and public property, within hours. It’s our responsibility to ensure these blockages are removed.”
I’m sure if everyone your team works very very hard they can make Tiny advances in how beavers are managed.
