Fall is a great time to head back to Milwakee and check on how the beaver recovery is coming along. Here and now Producer Chris Bentley recently gave a nice report on WBUR. Unfortunately it’s featured with an otter photo from Getty images which they say was sleeping “on a branch” which is the greatest possible fail. But we hope more beaver sightings will straighten them out eventually. It’s a nice  5 minute listen, enjoy.

Milwaukee welcomes back beavers, after hunting and pollution drove the industrious rodents away

Beavers are moving back into Milwaukee.

The American beaver was once a fixture of this area, at the confluence of three rivers by the shores of Lake Michigan. Then the region’s first European residents made Milwaukee one of their main fur trading posts. They hunted and trapped beavers for their pelts, and the population plummeted.

But a few years ago, people started noticing trees along the riverbanks in the heart of downtown Milwaukee that had been gnawed down to a point — a telltale sign of a beaver.

There’s even a quick mention of our buddy Bob Boucher’s study about flooding, but then it’s back to worshiping at the trout rumors.

That’s another reason ecologists are happy to see beavers returning to urban areas.
Last year, researchers at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee found beavers could substantially reduce flooding in some of the county’s most flood-prone areas.

Trout fisherman, however, worry too many beaver dams could muck up their fishing streams.
But in urban Milwaukee, there’s still room for people to share the rivers with a few more beavers.

The sun eventually set on our canoe ride and we got back on shore while bats snapped up bugs over our heads.

You know how beavers are. Always ruining streams for trout. The oddest thing is that they only seem to do that in WISCONSIN. In every other state they are GOOD for trout.

Weird.