Sunday, April 09, 2006
Those tricky, tricky beavers
Elizabeth Strother
Recent columns
- For those who have too little
- Time to gather mountain views
- Our blind spot on roads
- Following the money trail
From the RoundTable blog
They're ba-a-a-ck.
Everybody knew they would be. But their timing is brutal, with Blacksburg's town council and mayoral campaigns in full swing.
Maybe the beavers in the Heritage Community Park and Natural Area are listening to the same advisers who guided the Swift Boat Veterans in the last presidential election.
Except, in this case, memories are fresh and the record is clear. The town's nature area just naturally attracted a pair of beavers who, just naturally, set up housekeeping by damming Toms Creek that, just naturally, created a wetland which, just naturally, threatened to flood the property of a nearby homeowner who, it is only fair to note, was there first.
In January, town council made the politically radioactive decision to kill the beaver couple. Given the animals' unfortunate proximity to human habitats, it was the reasonable thing to do. You know what they say about real estate: location, location, location.
But even at that time, Councilman Don Langrehr acknowledged that wildlife expert Jim Parkhurst's prediction that more beavers would move in was a dead-on certainty. Eradicating two did not eradicate a problem that just comes with the territory when wildlife and human habitats overlap.
Langrehr said he knew then of another beaver dam in the park, one that was too isolated to cause the same concern.
Tuesday, Blacksburg Heritage Foundation President Jim Fraser said he has seen a dam and has heard beavers in the creek.
The same ones you saw earlier? I asked Langrehr on Wednesday.
"I don't know," he said. "I can't tell them apart." Har har.
"They're not in the same area where I originally saw them. It looks like their original lodge may have been abandoned. I don't know if this is just another kid who got married or what."
Langrehr and his fellow Councilman Ron Rordam have good reason to disapprove of any such match. Neither holds a seat that is up for election this year. But Mayor Roger Hedgepeth's term is up, and the longtime incumbent has decided not to run. Both Langrehr and Rordam are seeking to replace him.
Then, on Wednesday, the unthinkable political dirty trick: The beavers return -- to the headlines, that is. Who knows how long they have been in the creek.
Rordam happened to be in the newspaper's New River bureau offices that day, and I asked him if he wanted to talk about the beaver problem.
He put his face in his hands and shook his head. No.
Then, wearily, he said, "They're in a place where they're not going to do any damage, so let it be. Let's take the opportunity to take this time to come up with a management plan."
"The saving grace," Langrehr agreed by phone, is the newly revealed dam's location. "It's backed off. It's downstream from private property. That has relieved us of any pressure to act hastily.
"It's in an area where we did do a lot of tree planting. I'm still worried about the food source." Beavers eat the trees they hew, as well as use them for building material.
Langrehr is on the town's Recreation Advisory Board, which was meeting that evening. He said Thursday that the board decided to ask Town Manager Marc Verniel for direction on whether to discuss developing a nature management plan for the park. Langrehr clearly thinks the town should head that way and create a plan that goes beyond a wildlife management plan.
"We know we have to do this kind of thing now" at Heritage park, he said before the meeting, and the plan should deal with more than a strategy for controlling beaver. "Wildlife is only one piece of it." He mentioned planting trees, creating and protecting bird habitat, writing dog-leash rules.
"We can't just say it's a recreation area. We have to do something about it." And that, he said, should mean writing "a total nature area management plan" -- he hopes with the help of Virginia's Department of Game and Inland Fisheries and with "all stakeholders involved."
"We need to look at the park as a whole and see how we should proceed."
For their part, the beavers are showing they have the chops for politics. They managed to get their plight back in the news at a time to cause embarrassment to the entrenched powers that killed their kin. But they have not made such a nuisance of themselves as to alienate the political center and bring about their own demise.
And now, they can be pretty sure they'll get a park management plan sooner rather than later, one, I suspect, that will try to accommodate them, if not give them full run of the creek.
"We can't keep dealing with this one event at a time," Langrehr said Wednesday.
"I'm not going to do anything with them," Rordam fairly groaned. "Not this time."
