Warren County Beavers – Worth A Dam

Once upon a time there was a county in the Adirondacks in New York that had the misfortune of a road washout which they thought was caused by a collapsed beaver dam. It cost the county a great deal of money and no one wanted that to happen again. All the officials sat down and tried to think of how to solve the problem. Finally one bright man from the soil and water department suggested the idea of paying trappers an extra bounty for every beaver they killed! Especially when those beavers lived by county roads! Sure more dead beavers would mean safer roads right?

What Warren County didn’t realize was that while a trapper can be required to lop off a tail to prove he has killed a beaver to collect his bounty, he cannot show a log from each dam he dismantled to prove he took it apart. So the beavers might be dead, but the dams might still be there.

More dead beavers=More untended dams=More washed out roads.

Warren County has just made themselves into a big ole pie of stupid.

Warren County officials consider ways to prevent beaver dam problems

That term may be a bit crass, but Warren County officials are exploring giving stipends to trappers to remove beavers whose dams and ponds threaten roads or public infrastructure.

The idea of paying trappers was one of a number of suggestions that county officials kicked around this week to try to deal with a growing problem of impoundments created by beavers that threaten municipal property.

Several beaver dam collapses in recent years have washed out roads in the region, a number of them in Warren County. That has led to county officials looking for ways to deal with a burgeoning beaver population that has grown as the number of trappers has declined.

Jim Lieberum, the Soil & Water Conservation District’s district manager, said one remedy was to try to foster more trapping, by paying licensed trappers for each beaver they take in addition to whatever they can sell pelts for. A $10 payment per beaver could be a starting point, he said.

Since our friends at Beavers: Wetlands and Wildlife are IN New York State, I can only assume they will try their beaver best to shine some light on this intenstinal darkness. Something tells me they will have their work cut out for them. Good luck team beaver!

I hope you don’t scare easy because here’s something else we need to talk about. This is the stats by county of the numbers of beavers killed by Wildlife Services in California in 2010. This doesn’t even count beavers killed by permit from CDFW.

These numbers were obtained from the FOIA request by Sacramento Bee reporter Tom Knudson. 1082 total. I’ve been thinking they needed to be a graphic to get the whole picture but I never got around to it until yesterday. What I’d like is a chart of counties colored by the numbers of beavers they killed with WS. If I ever figure out how to do that, you’ll see one of our grimmest offenders is Northeast of Mendocino – this big swath of Colusa, Butte, Plumas and Lassen counties. which is responsible for more than a quarter of all WS beaver deaths in the state. Our friends on the Klamath have their work cut out for them.

If you’re like me you need some good news after that beaver mortuary. Here’s some good cheer I received this morning from Karen Werner of San Jose. She works in Education at the Happy Hollow Zoo in San Jose.

Awesome! After four failed attempts to see wild beavers (Antelope Lake in the Sierra, San Luis Reserve by Los Banos, Guadaloupe River downtown and Lexington Reservoir in Los Gatos) we visited Martinez last night and were rewarded with three beavers, munching away, swimming about and interacting with us. After reading your recent blog entries, I’m quite confident that we saw this year’s kit, last year’s kit, and a mature adult. I took some photos (I need a longer lens!) which I’m happy to send if you’re interested.

Thanks for being a voice for the beavers! We’re not much for crowds, so we avoided the festival last weekend, but all reports say it was a triumph – congrats!

Thanks Karen! And I’m so glad you enjoyed the show. We certainly do!

An aerial view of the problematic beaver pond. (Submitted Photo/MATTHEW DOMNARSKI)

Warren works to stay ahead of beavers

BREACHED DAM FLOODS HUMAN HABITATION

WARREN — When Sherry Rapisarda called 911 on May 25 to say water was rising around her family’s trailer home on Route 67, she was told to evacuate. “I looked out the door and I told (the dispatcher), ‘I can’t evacuate, I can’t even get to my car,’ ” she said, remembering how the Fire Department arrived with a boat and ferried her, her husband, their two grown children and two cats to dry land.

The two floods, which officials have said were caused by the breaching of a beaver dam on state property just west of Colonel’s Mountain, have left behind damage on Route 67 and around the Spring Street area, where cars were sitting in about 3 feet of water.

People whose homes and businesses are flooded should expect their town to protect them and do whatever is possible to prevent it from happening again. They certainly deserve to have the causes analyzed and carefully understood so that they don’t suffer the same fate 3 weeks later. Scapgoats, lazy finger pointing and pretend facts do them no favors.

Before the dam broke the first time, it was holding back a big pond. Mr. Boudreau estimated conservatively that about 3 million gallons of water came down the hill like a tsunami.

But with two floods in three weeks, people will likely remember this for a while, and they won’t let local officials forget, either. They’ve sent a letter to selectmen and want something done about the beavers.

Still, fixing the problem requires a process. First the Board of Health must issue an emergency trapping permit so the beavers can be removed. Health Board Chairman Kenneth Lacey said Mr. Boudreau is working on the permit now.

Since state trapping laws prohibit the relocation of beavers, they must be killed, officials said. So the town needs a licensed trapper to do the job and funding to pay that person. Trapping season, when the beaver pelts would have had some value, ended in April and won’t start again until November, so the trapper doesn’t benefit much unless he is paid.

The beavers have been at the site for at least 50 years. Officials know that because the dam and pond show up on topographical maps from 1956. Mr. Boudreau said there are four huts, which he guesses are home to about 20 beavers.

It’s good to know that the problem is in such capable, thoughtful hands. I’m sure the beaver dam didn’t fail because of some other man-made problem upsteam or some trapping you allowed earlier. I’m sure that the 2012 study you reported almost exactly a year ago, entitled “Warren County study finds roads could be endangered by beaver dam failures“ couldn’t possibly have provided any information at the time that could have prevented this. I’m sure you know it was entirely caused by those verified 20 beavers and if they just kill them it will never ever happen again. I’m sure the trapper hire will give them a money back guarantee that the area will never flood in the future.

I can’t help thinking of this.

Looks like our two kits have moved back to their summer home by the secondary dam. This morning we filmed both of them coming back and downstream into the bank hole to settle for the night. I suppose the entire beaver section of Alhambra creek is like a giant ranch home where they spread out according to their own tastes. Here’s one swimming down under the Marina Vista bridge before ducking home.