Beaver Trouble, Ashfield, MA

In the spring and fall, adolescent beavers move downstream from the mother lode of seven up-stream beaver ponds, looking for places to practice building new home territories and lodges. Unfortunately, they usually arrive in our backyard where we have two ponds at which we human owners of the property like to relax and to swim. In the fall and in the spring, the beavers work all night, every night, cutting down trees and shrubs in the nearby woods, dragging the trunks and branches to our ponds and then building a dam beneath our little wooden bridge at the upper pond, and also filling up the two steel culverts at the lower pond. The problem is that when their dams are built, the water from the upland stream is stopped at the normal outlets and instead runs out over the two land bridges. When this happens over a long enough period of time, the land bridges can be undermined and collapse. What we worry about is that if the lower land bridge, the one that holds the culverts, collapses, a wall of water would rush downstream and could potentially collapse the bridge that passes over the stream on a nearby country road. Somebody could get hurt. Not to mention the fact that it cost us a lot of money, time and labor to build these ponds. Should we just let the beavers, and nature, have these ponds? We could, but we love to hang out, play music, read poetry and just gaze into nature as we walk around and sit down by the ponds. So in the meantime, we're trying to live with the beavers by breaking up the dams, clearing the culverts, and wrapping all local deciduous trees with chicken wire up to a height of three feet. So far, the beavers haven't been interested in negotiating, and we don't know when we'll reach our limit of dam-busting, culvert clearing and tree wrapping. Stay tuned for other creative solutions in the future.

Category:

Pets & Animals

Tags:

• Ashfield MA
• beavers
• wildlife damage

[250xundertaker]

so so so sad