You’ll understand why I held my hands before my eyes the entire time I was reading to potentially shield myself from this article. I could just sense things were going to end badly, though I was understandably intrigued by this headline.
Chew on this: Urban beavers live among us, though rarely seen
Under cover of darkness, stealthy beavers are gnawing down trees and damming creeks — all within the city limits of Springfield. Their most visible work can be seen at Lake Drummond at Nathanael Greene-Close Memorial Park, where sharp-toothed beavers have downed willow trees and even defeated metal fencing placed around tree trunks to deter them.
“There’s a whole lot more beavers than you’d think in the city, especially on South Creek and near the Darr Agricultural Center,” said Ashley Schnake, urban wildlife biologist with the Missouri Department of Conservation. “They’ve probably never left but have adapted to the changes we’ve made as the city grew.”
At Darr Agricultural Center just east of Nathanael Greene park, Schnake said a bevy of beavers set up shop by building several dams across South Creek. The dams backup water and flooded some of the Darr Agricultural Center’s fields, prompting a nuisance complaint.
According to MDC, there’s no way to easily or safely capture beavers and relocate them because the local department doesn’t have the equipment needed to catch them alive. The beavers had to be dispatched.
Springfield is in the bottom left corner of Missouri – a state that has never been very advanced in beaver knowledge. I wasn’t surprised to see that they used the pelt of one they killed as an educational tool rather than let the living beavers teach their children about maintaining healthy creeks.
Yeah, yeah yea. Beavers eat trees and block culverts. Who knew? But imagined how surprised was surprise to read this:
Kromrey, an avid trout fisherman, said beavers even play a key role in preserving the rare McCloud rainbow trout that were introduced to Crane Creek southwest of Springfield in the late 1800s. They were imported by train all the way from California.
“On Crane Creek, beaver dams are holding water in pools where McCloud trout habitat wouldn’t otherwise survive when the water gets low,” Kromrey said. “They are real natural conservationists. They were the original detention-basin builders. A lot of soil sediment gets filtered out of a stream because of the dams beavers build.”
Now there are two paragraphs worth reading. Firstly a Missouri trout fisherman understanding why beavers matter, but secondly this real surprise about trout being transported by train from California in the late 1800’s. I originally read this as a story about beings being relocated from CA which is even more interesting because we had none then.
Brock Dolman of OAEC says we did replenish their rainbow stock with our healthy one years ago, so its sadly not a beaver mystery that needs solving. Sigh. I’m sure there are more out there that just need finding.
Yesterday we met photographer Suzi Eszterhas and a group of Martinez children and did a small tree planting photo shoot for Ranger Rick. You will have to make do with our grubby photos for now, but hers will be wonderful I’m sure. The kids did an awesome botanical job, and afterwards they all posed for photos in front of the mural. It was a perfect end to summer.
