New Farm Project

Our farm is blessed with a LOT of water. We have water on three sides of the property, and are basically a penisula into a small lake. We have a medium sized stream that runs around the back and curls around one side, a black water pond which spills into the "big water". Perfect habitat for water loving creatures: herons, turtles, otters, egrets (Egrets? - I've had a few!) snakes, and the hero of this blog, at least one beaver.


As my brother and father know who have helped unblock and clean up after him, we have a very busy beaver(s). Unless the temperature dips below 30, or the water is flooding over our spillway, we wake up 5 days out of 7 with Mr. Beaver blocking our spillway overnight. So every day, Joe (or more normally me) goes down and fishes out all the crap he has piled in there the night before. I am utterly amazed at the size of some of the logs (think small telephone poles) that end up blocking our spillway, and the engineering that goes into the construction of his (or her) dam.

Most local animal control and even state wildlife people consider beavers nuisances. In South Carolina, the preferred method of getting rid of a nuisance beaver is to kill it in a drown trap. Obviously, for an animal lovers like me and Joe, that is not an option. The beaver is just doing his job of making his home liveable. I met an orphan baby beaver, a kit, once. He was just as adorable and cute as any puppy or kitten and just as well behaved.

Beavers are pre-programmed to dam running water. They hear it, and they have an instinct to go dam it. And given the propenderence of small trees, large trees, and pond weeds in our blackwater pond, the beaver has about enough material to keep damming for the next 50 years, give or take a year.

So low and behold, I was just cursing the beaver again when I caught a show on Animal Planet called "Leave it to the Real Beavers". It introduced me to the Beaver Deceiver, a way to keep beavers from damming culverts using cedar posts and fencing. (See the Beaver Deceiver here: http://www.beaversww.org/solutions.html). So now my problem is to adapt the deceiver to a spillway, not a culvert.

So I'm contacting the US Fish and Wildlife division, Partners for Fish and Wildlife and see if they can help me come up with a design to adapt the deceiver for a spillway. I think the initial design will work, with some small adaptation. And then it will be time to round up a crew to build a new beaver deceiver.

I'm hoping that I can interest SC Dep't of Natural Resources to write an article about the implementation of a beaver deceiver so that folks see that there are ways to live with a beaver that don't involve its death.

This ought to be a cool project in a lot of different ways. As it progresses, I'll blog about it. Til then, may you stay as busy as our friend!