Today, a neighbor said we’ve got beavers. No smartass reply welcome. The guy was serious. Some trees were gnawed, and might fall.
We live near water. Nice to sit at the end of the day and look at this water with trees reflected in it.
In one of the trees an American Bittern stares down at you. This wading bird should be in reeds, but it’s up a tree. Birds do what they want.
There are orioles and tanagers in these shoreline woods. Phoebes, too. They like to hunt over the water and return to a hanging branch. You see Belted Kingfishers sometimes.
And Red-winged Blackbirds very often. You might think these are so common they’re boring. But they never get boring. None of this stuff gets boring.
The neighbor said the powers that be in this community are thinking of hiring a beaver removal service. “Humane relocation” guaranteed. A claim that makes your BS detector go off.
But if more trees get chewed, it could come to that. Leave it to the beavers. Let’s hope they relocate on their own.
Sometimes nature needs a little mucking around with…especily when beavers build a dam inside a 6 foot culvert and cut off the water supply to an existing lake full of fish and wildlife. In a perfect world we could let natuake its course but in a world already mucked up by us choices are inevitable.
Must agree with several folks here. We need to stop mucking about with nature and let everything run its natural course. We have beavers; lot of beavers in the creeks behind our house…they come and they go and just do their beaver thing. I rather like them.
I like Rachel’s thought – perhaps we try too hard to keep nature from changing when change is what nature is all about.
Won’t letting the beavers do their thing bring herons? And then dead trees will bring woodpeckers. The water, after time, will turn into a marsh and then there will be a whole new population of occupants to observe. Unless it’s a threat to the local homes, why not let nature do what it’s meant to do?
Humane removal services are supposed to relocate the critter 10 miles from where it was found. That’s the part I don’t trust. 10 miles? Even if pick up and disposal is humane, it’s in the removal service’s best interest if the critter returns to its place of origin. More business for them. And it’s not as if a homeowner could identify their particular critter in a line-up and lodge a complaint…
We don’t seem to have beavers, but The S.C. Dept of transportation does a fine job of removing 300 yr old live Oak trees. They say they have to for safety (the texting and drunk drivers)…
I can’t say we have a beaver problem here in the city, but there have been rumored cougar sightings.