It turns out, that to relocate beaver successfully, you have to care whether they live or die.
I know it’s a lot to ask, Mostly people just care that they’re GONE, I know, but you have to spare a thought for, Oh I don’t know, how is that beaver going to survive in its new home and have I really made things better by relocating him rather than putting him out of my misery? I mean you could idly glance at the internet and learn a little bit about best practices before you do it.
But maybe that’s too hard. It certainly seems too hard.
Banished beaver gets second chance in San Pedro River
Rather than kill the “nuisance animal,” Steven Martin from Critter Control of Northern Arizona worked with the Tucson-based Watershed Management Group to find the beaver a welcoming new home at an educational nature center on the San Pedro near Sierra Vista.
“We were all really excited. It made our week,” Martin said. “You don’t always get a win in this business, so it was nice to have a win.”
Private landowners in the small community of Cornville hired him to get rid of the beaver after trying and failing to keep the animal away from the cottonwood trees on their creek-front property.
The thing is, the trapper probably feel like HEROES for going the extra – well not mile – but certainly 7 inches -and live capturing and releasing the beaver rather than killing it outright. The landowner feels like a saint because they wanted him moved instead of killed and the trapper feels like a wildlife hero because he was willing to do it. Of course a beaver alone in strange territory has no guarantee of survival and its odds would be better if they had A) thought to provide it shelter and b) thought to capture a family member at the same time.
This is about as noble as ‘catching the toddler’ from your neighbors kitchen and “setting it free” on the local highway.
That’s when Shipek turned to naturalist Sandy Anderson, whose nonprofit Gray Hawk Nature Center sits on private property and includes a stretch of the San Pedro River that has hosted beavers in the past.
Anderson was more than happy to welcome the transplant from up north. “Are you kidding me?” she said. “I told them, ‘Bring that beaver to me.’”
The aquatic rodents were once plentiful on the San Pedro, but they were hunted to extinction there in the early 1900s.
If beavers were first trapped out of the San Pedro in the early 1900’s I will eat a bug. But hey, it’s your article. Write whatever you like.
Within a decade, the population grew to more than 100 animals, only to decline again for reasons experts still can’t explain.
Now Watershed Management Group and others are trying to bolster beavers on the San Pedro and other so-called international rivers in the deserts of Arizona and Mexico.
Call it a hunch, but if you wonder what happened to all those beavers I would start talking to the neighbors. Because if I’ve learned anything in this 15 years it’s that most dangerous animal as far as beavers are concerned is about six feet and walks on two legs.
And it ain’t an ostrich.
