Channel 8 news Austin has this story of heroic challenge:
When Robyn Sutton moved to a house along Brushy Creek five years ago, she found some furry neighbors had arrived there first. “It was frightening. We weren’t sure what it was,” Sutton said. “At first, we thought it was teenagers throwing cinderblocks in the water. Then, we realized it was beavers.”
Ahh those were the days. When me and my posse would hang at the creek throwing cinderblocks into the water! Good times. No one stays young forever.
Typically, what they’ll do is they’ll girdle a tree, they’ll eat their way all the way around until they’re able to cut it down, and then they’ll cut the branches off and take the branches away and feed on that bark,” Texas Parks and Wildlife mammalogist John Young said. At that time, the homeowners association decided to wrap the bottom of at-risk trees so that beavers couldn’t get to them. The wrapping on some of those trees still remains, but the current HOA has told Sutton that it would cost too much to get the rest of the trees professionally wrapped.
Say no more! Of course it’s too expensive to put wire around a tree or spent 6.50 for a gallon of latex paint and mix it with mason sand. We here at the HOA understand your dilemma and your attachment to your trees, but just can’t spend your hard-earned dollars money to save them. We’ve come up with a better idea. Much more expensive than wire and it needs to be repeated every year until the end of time. (Go ahead, guess, I’ll wait.)
That’s when she found out about the HOA’s intentions to hire someone to install underwater traps that could kill the beavers. The HOA declined to comment.
Why cure when you can kill? Why solve the problem for the next five years when you can spend hundreds every year on Tex’s cousin ‘Red’ who makes a little money on the side trappin’ possum and beaver? Why indeed?
But Sutton doesn’t think the HOA has considered all its options, and hopes the neighborhood can find another way for the beavers to stay in their habitat. “We kind of have a responsibility to adapt to them and do what we can to co-exist with them, since they’ve done pretty well with co-existing with us,” Sutton said.
