TILTING WINDMILLS FOR BEAVERS

As if it wasn’t enough to be on national news, the Port Moody beavers and their hard-working champions have also made it into the local front page. Judy wrote that they had their first, three hour beaver management meeting yesterday with the city, and she is cautiously optimistic. (Given that she is truly Canadian, that I have to say that sounds pretty cautious.)

Can you have PTSD from city meetings? It gives me a total flashback to the tortured days on the beaver subcommittee – every week for ninety days I forced myself to endure three hours of gruelingly polite persuasion. I had to reschedule  patients just to be there. Things started out downright genteel, but by the time the lawyer brought in the stuffed beaver wearing the sign that said “Help me go somewhere else” and the head of public works complained that Jon shouldn’t come anymore because he scowled too much, things had gotten pretty bleak indeed.

Let’s just say I sympathize with the job Jim and Judy have ahead of them,

I honestly can’t tell if I’m proud or jealous that as hard as their job is going to be, it’s certainly easier than ours was all those years ago. They get Adrien to come put in a flow device. 11 years ago there was no one trained to install flow devices at Furbearers because Mike Callahan hadn’t met Adrien at the State of the beaver conference yet. Because there was no State of the Beaver Conference yet. The first one happened the year after the sheetpile was installed. Skip Lisle attended that. There was no one who had gone through this before to talk to about it or offer advice about living with urban beavers. I called Sharon Brown of Beaver Wetlands and Wildlife once and Sherri Tippie once I think, In those dark days, there were in fact three web pages on the entire internet about how flow devices might work, but when I reached out to Beaver Solutions Mike was kind enough to write me back advice from time to time. I was excited to return the favor by offering video clips and encouragement for his DVD, which helped convince him to attend the next conference where he then met Adrien.

This truly is a brave new world. So many worked so hard to move us foreword. Saving beavers is never, ever easy, but its getting better. And I know they are up to the task.

A final note, today should have been my father’s 90th birthday. I just thought I should say that. Happy Birthday, Dad.