Trapping beavers – Worth A Dam

It’s always darkest just before the beaver dawn

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Environmental, Who's Killing Beavers Now? September 29, 2013

[Annual Wildlife Control Issue] The Big ‘Fore’

FEATURES – ANNUAL WILDLIFE CONTROL ISSUE

Managing golf course wildlife — including whitetail deer, beavers, muskrats and Canada geese — is a tall order. Here are some tips from a nuisance wildlife control operator who is also a golf course grounds employee.

PCT tackles the big FORE. You know what PCT stands for don’t you? I’ll give you a hint. The first word is “PEST”. Can you guess the second? And the third is just to make it sound like there’s some kind of science to their killing pastime. Pest Control Technology. You know where there based, fight?

Ohio.

Beaver. The largest North American rodent possesses one of the most prized fur coats and, as a result, is highly regulated by the DNR. As with deer, nuisance beaver can be trapped during the regular trapping seasons, which are also in the fall/winter. But they also can be trapped outside those seasons with an additional DNR-issued permit. Beaver damage is usually very obvious even to the untrained eye. Flooding the fairway from a plugged drainage culvert is just the tip of the iceberg because they can chew through trees — which can cause fallen trees and flooding. Beaver are nocturnal with the ability to raise the water level 6 to 7 feet from blocking a single water source. I have stood up to my shoulders in water on a 2-foot diameter culvert pipe trying to pull out debris to bring the water level down to a level conducive for setting traps. Beaver lodges and dams generally will not occur in isolated ponds in the middle of the course because they are too wide open.

There are several methods for getting rid of nuisance beaver. Please note that in almost all cases nuisance beaver will have to be destroyed either by the trapper or the trap itself because there is really no where they can be taken where they won’t cause the same problem (and they are by no means endangered).

The first is shooting but the window of opportunity on any given day is about a half hour since they are nocturnal and you may only see them for about a hour before sunset. Trapping is the best method for removal. The first and probably the most popular beaver trap is the 330 Conibear. These traps are lethal, designed to break the neck and vertebrae for a very quick ending and are placed in the water in the main runways where beaver can swim through them. As you can imagine, these traps also can be dangerous to the user so if you have no experience with them, let a professional trapper handle a nuisance beaver situation.

Foot hold traps also can be used but the newest beaver trap is a cable restraint, which is simply a loop of airline cable placed in runways similar to the Conibear and then anchored to a nearby tree. Both the foothold and cable restraint are live traps so the captured beaver will have to be dispatched with a firearm. Make sure then the traps are checked early enough to be able to use a firearm.

Behold the nuanced stewardship mindset of the golf course trapper. Who with his “untrained eyes” can kill a path for you to put across the green. He has so many lethal options to chose from! And not one of them is humane. No mention of flow devices although installation requires the same willingness to get wet and watch beaver behavior. Still, putting in a flow device has the gruesome drawback of actually FIXING the problem. Whereas trapping will need to be paid for again and again. They’re no fools.

Of course they chose trapping. They have boat payments and mouths to feed.

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And maybe I was too hard on Illinois yesterday. Check out this throwaway line from the activities at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum

“Animal Secrets” at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum is a new exhibit that attempts to bring children and nature together, with 5,000 square feet of Illinois animal habitats for kids to explore — indoors. The exhibit re-creates the natural environments of a stream, a cave, the woods and a meadow. So while the- children are building a beaver dam in the stream, parents gain ideas and messages they can apply in their daily lives, especially the idea that we all need to connect with nature more.

Building a beaver dam in the stream? How much fun would THAT be at a beaver festival?

The Noble Trapper: Episode MCMVII

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Environmental, Who's Killing Beavers Now? December 3, 2012

Scott Rall’s column about the lost art of trapping in The Worthington Daily Globe is the latest in a never-ending homage to people who make a living killing things for money – well, not for money because, of course, according to the article “No one does it for the money anymore“. Mr. Rall goes on to nobly blur the boundaries between the concept of being connected to the natural world and being in the service of folks who are inconvenienced by it. Nice.

“Randy checks his traps each and every day. This is a huge commitment. You never get a day off and there are very few people you can call on to cover the trap line for you…Nobody that traps is in it for the money. A good week of trapping will cover the cost of fuel to run the trap lines that week….Trapping to Randy is truly a calling — much like restoring habitat is a calling to me. You do it for the history and nostalgia and to keep tradition and an American way of life alive. After a few hours I got the feeling that trapping is a connection to the land that can only be achieved by participating in the predator-prey relationship.”

The mind reels. The jaw drops. The fingers type. Where to begin?

Shall I begin with the comment that folks nowadays don’t have enough commitment to do something every day anymore? (Ahem.) With the notion that trapping connects you to history and nostalgia? (Killing Indians and keeping slaves was an American way of life once. Should we consider it noble now to keep that tradition?) The disservice to the term “calling” by using it in this way? (Mother Theresa had a calling. Martin Luther King had a calling. John Muir had a “calling”.)Randy has about as much of a calling as Dexter, the Artful Dodger, or Thenardier.

But I think the clearly onanistically derived fantasy about participating in the “predator-prey relationship” is as rich as anything you are likely to read in this lifetime. I don’t know if Mr. Rall longs to be on Randy’s dinner menu or if he has just been immersed too deeply in his daughter’s copy of The Hunger Games but there is no excuse for a grown man getting paid for that level of hyperbole.

Rather than be outraged at the language, the cruelty or the glorification of this excuse for laziness, or even without commenting on the ironic failure to realize that the best way to protect habitat might be not to kill the animal that creates it, I will just say that Mr. Rall is unoriginal. Five columnists in the past three months have written a better articles praising trapping then you. This is old news. Here’s a description of one of my favorites.

Most bitterly ironic sentence from the entire article deifying beaver killing?

“With so little water left around the area due to drought, the prime spots for setting traps are dramatically reduced. I would guess 90 percent of what is normally wet is now bone dry.”

frozen beaver pond — Photo taken from a trappers forum where they were discussing great ways to kill beavers.

Nothing Could Be Finer…

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Festival, Who's Killing Beavers Now? March 27, 2012

The beavers are on the warpath in North Carolina, kicking ass and taking names building dams and taking trees along the 70 mile stretch from Cary to Greensboro. This picture was snapped by someone enjoying Bond Park and sent to a columnist who wrote that the beavers were ‘being relocated’, which I’m sure you understand as well as I do. (You know like when your parents told you that puppy went to ‘live on the farm’.)

I did a little searching for the Beaver Man and found the number is linked to the home of a 77 year old man in Stantonsburg NC. No business listing but his (?) son is listed as the rifle safety coordinator for the North Carolina Trappers Association, so that’s nice. Gosh, I can’t tell you how surprised I am that someone with the name ‘beaver man‘ on his truck turns out to be a trapper!

Well apparently they have lots of feelings about beavers in NC because look at this clip from Greensboro where they are worried that beavers will ruin their water quality.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but are you saying that this town rips out beaver dams over and over, tipping mud and silt and debris into the water again and again and then worries about water quality? Apparently the terms ’cause’ and ‘effect’ are not well understood in the area. Dear, challenged Greensboro. Don’t you know that beaver dams are sometimes called the ‘earth’s kidneys‘ because their filtering actually improves water quality?

Well, the benefits of beavers bandwagon may not have reached North Carolina yet, but it certainly has been making the rounds. Yesterday I received a call from Guelph, Ontario about printing my letter to the editor, a call from Maine from someone who wanted to save some beavers in the city park and start their own beaver festival there, and an email from Kentucky where a certain young stopmotion filmmaker we are fond of spent an hour with a reporter walking through bulldozed beaver habitat and talking about their benefits to the ecosystem.

To paraphrase for our friends in North Carolina: the arc of restoration may be long but it bends towards beavers!

10,600

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Who's Killing Beavers Now? November 29, 2011

"Trapping is not about money, Neil Olson of Bethel said. "The day it turns into work. I quit. I just love trapping." Daryn Slover/Sun Journal

Well-known Bethel trapper is one of only five left in the state

Daren Slover: Sun Journal

Olson started trapping as a kid with his father, something Olson is seeing less and less of. “Kids have so many more choices to choose from now. So many more opportunities,” said Olson, the third base coach for his grandson’s baseball team, the Southern Maine Black Flies.”Kids are getting so far removed from nature,” worries Olson.

Olson is doing the best he can to keep kids interested. “My best days trapping are when my grandsons go with me. Trapping teaches kids how to work. Teaches them responsibility,” Olson said. “When you leave a trap, you leave a responsibility out there. The next day you have to go take care of that trap.”

Olson has kept a handwritten daily record of his harvest since 1973. He has trapped 10,600 beaver, more than 3,000 red fox and 1,400 coyotes.

“Trapping is not about money, Olson said. “The day it turns into work. I quit. I just love trapping.“

10,600 beaver in 39 years? That’s 271 beaver a year or about a family a week. Gosh, what else can I possibly say?