Beaver Snark

This was apparently Mike Callahan’s first professional job ever. It has required additions over the years.

Editorial: Northampton’s lake beavers test conservation creativity

The beavers of Fitzgerald Lake are proving themselves formidable foes of the Broad Brook Coalition, which for years has been trying to regulate the level of the lake and protect a dock used by visitors to this conservation area on the north side of Northampton.

Last month, members of the coalition and a company called Beaver Solutions rolled out what that firm’s owner, in a display of dark humor, called “Plan D.” The beavers pretty much made sawdust of Plans A through C.

Sheesh, you tried four times in 20 years to solve a problem? I’m pretty sure that’s a success that most of us would envy. My Dad used to bring a carburetor with us to switch out on vacation every summer! You have Mike 10 miles away who can tinker when you need to. And in the mean time the beavers have been a ROUSING success at keeping other beavers away with their territorial behavior and increasing inverterbrates with their digging which has fed an expanding fish and bird population. I feel a certain Shakespearean tirade coming on…

What, rouse thee, man! thy Juliet is alive,

For whose dear sake thou wast but lately dead;

There art thou happy: Tybalt would kill thee,

But thou slew’st Tybalt; there are thou happy too:

The law that threaten’d death becomes thy friend

And turns it to exile; there art thou happy:

A pack of blessings lights up upon thy back;

This is a great “count your beavers speech” but people never listen do they? Romeo sure didn’t.

This time, the coalition went big. To keep beavers from reaching an underwater outlet drain that controls the lake’s level, coalition volunteers hauled 20 tons of traprock out to the drain, which Michael Callahan of Beaver Solutions had already caged in with chain-link fencing.

No easy task, to be sure. The rocks rode out to the spot aboard specially devised rafts. Volunteers standing up to their chests in the lake painstakingly moved rocks down around the base of the fencing, hoping to create a lasting barrier to beavers that had been tunneling under the fencing to reach and clog the drain.

Plan C, a few years back, involved placing rebar around gaps in the underwater fencing. Beavers kept fighting back, though, and Callahan cooked up the idea of hauling in 40,000 pounds of rock. He is cautiously optimistic. Only time will tell.

Callahan might want to start working on Plan E.

Ya ya ya. Beavers build dams. It’s a thing.