Chasing Beaver

[Rally]

Spent the day with four Foresters blowing beaver dams on my current beaver contract. It was a training exercise, with one guy training the other three to get them certified for explosives. Not sure how to turn these pictures, but they end up sideways from my phone????? The first picture is looking down stream from the main dam after blowing a secondary dam downstream.



Second picture is the main dam prior to them getting on site, where I've trapped 13 beaver from.



Wiring the big dam up with eight charges inline, two charges per hole, four at the top where the dam is thickest, and two charges per hole as they went down face of dam. Yellow chord is det. chord.



View of the dam after detination.





Looking downstream from the dam, where below pictured secondary dam was.
It was pretty interesting watching them mix the stuff and using the new style det. chord. Uses a size 409 primer to ignite the charges. Compound comes in two parts, powder Ammonia nitrate and a liquid that looks like cherry Kool Aid. Mixed in the bottle the powder comes in, pouring the liquid in that bottle, which has slots to hold the det. chord along thir sides and the guys taped them to sticks, which are place in holes bored in the dam with a spud bar or large stick. Old style used an electrical charge to ignite. Didn't catch any beaver there today, that's a good thing on a contract like this. Three more ponds to clean out beyond these, which will have roads and dams removed in the spring via a backhoe.

 

[RicinYakima]

Why are you removing the dams? We encourage beavers to build dams in WA to slow the water down, prevent erosion and make better fish habitat.

 

[Ian]

Not as much grade in the north-central plains. Erosion ain't the problem, having half a state under 2' of water is.

 

[Rally]

Like Ian said, half the county would be under water if we didn't have some beaver control effort. In fact one Cty HWY has been under water twice this last summer. Leaving a road bed submerged or saturated over winter is a sure way to come back to no road in the spring, after spring run-off. I've taken 26 beaver out so far, in an area roughly two square miles. Still have three ponds to clean out, so should be 40 plus come out of this area. The pond pictured had 13 beaver in it, with 4 pups and 9 beaver over 60" , or over three years old. Three of the beaver had bite marks (infected) from fighting already. This spring would be all out war amongst them, fighting for breeding rights and territory. The logging road coming into this area had water over the road in four places. Conservative guess would be there are over 40 active beaver ponds within 5 square miles in this area. It will fill back in this coming spring-summer with dispersal this spring. Beaver push the 19-20 month old beaver out before having a new litter. An adult female beaver usually bears four pups her first litter at just under three years of age, and I've skun spring females with as many as 9 pups in them. The better her health and food supply the more pups she has. If half of the 9 adults I took out of this pond were female, and they all had at least four pups, that would add at least 16-18 new beaver to that immediate area/ flowage. Cheaper for the taxpayer to hire me to remove the beaver and dams, than to rebuild the infrastructure, and allows the roads to be used for winter access to harvest timber beyond.

 

[Rally]

Hey thanks to whomever fixed the pictures! Can't figure out what is going on with my phone and posting pictures. Some times they load up just fine, then the next time they are sideways?

 

[Rally]

looking out over the pond. Note the debris on the ice from the explosion. Sticks and mud about 40 feet in the air above the dam.

 

[RicinYakima]

OK, now I understand. Most of our streams start at 4000 to 7000 feet and in 20 miles are down to 1500 feet.

 

[Rally]

Ric,
That area is actually "Hilly", for this part of the country. Up and down small hills with notches between the hills where the water runs off, until the beaver build dams in the notches. Quite often I have to go to the county engineers office to get info on where a flowage is suppose to be draining. He has maps that tell the actual height of land at an exact spot. Pretty handy when your looking at a couple square miles of flooded ground. I shouldn't run out of work for a long time.

 

[Ian]

Rally, I only hope there will be others like you to take your place when you decide to hang up your snares for good.

 

[Rally]

Not likely Ian. With the current price of fur and production cost, it's a losing game. Trucks and operating costs go up, fur goes down. Curio markets are pretty shallow. Tanneries are taking beatings from EPA. Can't hardly even give a deer hide away anymore! The best beaver in North America are worth between $8 - 10 a lb.(hatter market), fleshed and dried, shipped to a major auction company. Local market is about $7-8 in the round to a buyer wanting the meat and castor. Castor is $78 - $82 lb. dried, so worth way more than the beaver. Beaver carcasses for dog food or trapping bait is $3 each. Some shallow markets for livers, kidneys, and hearts for Leech bait. Some real shallow markets for teeth and toes in the mountain man trade, for jewelry. Skull markets won't pay for shipping, and tail markets are gone with leather trade. Only real market for trappers is in the Nuisance Animal Trade/ Animal damage control. Urbanites don't care how much it costs when a raccoon is running around in their attic and chewing the wiring, and farmers will pay when their crops are flooded. Skunks in garages and digging up groomed lawns works for some guys. I've done species collection for universities and animal telemetry studies catching coyotes they couldn't catch themselves, duck and pheasant nest studies for Delta Waterfowl, and wild rice restoration projects for DU. Truth is the taxpayers are my best clients now, trapping beaver to protect roads and forests. My area here, the land has reached holding capacity for beaver and is getting interesting now, but the next few years is going to get real expensive for states. Maintenance contracts are going to be the reality here pretty soon, which would be bidding large tracts of land on annual contracts to try to keep ahead of timber sales. The average age at a trappers convention is usually around 55.

 

[Kevin Stenberg]

Ralley Will the blown dams stay that way until next spring. When new beaver migrate from another over populated area. To replace what you have taken or were killed in the dam removal?

 

[Rally]

Kevin,
The beaver will restore that dam as soon as a new pair moves in, usually by mid May to late June. The more beaver that are removed from an area the longer that flowage will remain free flowing. Beaver colonize an area because they have a good food source and water. They build their dams higher, to raise water levels, to flood larger areas, so they can harvest more food, while relatively safe from predators while they are in the water. Young beaver are somewhat susceptible to predation by Otter, but that is the only real predator for them in the water. Eagles also get a few young beaver during daylight hours, but beaver are pretty much nocturnal.
That area just had a select cut, and the Poplar was all removed. In a couple years that shoreline will be lined with regenerated popple (beaver candy), and will be prime habitat again. Mostly Birch and Oak left, with Ash in the lower areas. Beaver will eat all of them but they are all secondary sources. It's my job to make sure there aren't any beaver left in these ponds, to rebuild the dams now. They should stay free flowing until well after spring run off, but my bet is the beaver will be back in there by July of next summer, but will only have the summer rains to fill the ponds.

 

[freebullet]

That's incredible, thanks for sharing the pics & your experience.

My sole experience harvesting beaver was on our small Elkhorn river frontage. Just happened to see one going down river. Popped him with a 22. Don't do any trapping. Have a couple friends that do. The one fella came out to set traps along our bank line. Had a few dens, about busted my ankle in one. Went in knee deep. He's thought yotes made them but his traps only scored a feral cat & the biggest racoon we ever saw. It's such a small chunk of ground hunting wouldn't be worthwhile.

 

[Bret4207]

We've just discovered the beaver are moving back upstream into an area that will flood out on road and my access to the back half of the south side of my farm. I took many, many beaver out of there some years back and they moved downstream. I lost one pasture pretty much permanently to them and they've cost my neighbors some meadows (hay fields). Another neighbor has been battling them for years to keeps some fairly light (for this clay area) from becoming a pond. I like beaver, I like skunks and porkies too. They have to be controlled or they make it impossible to retain the use of the land you pay for. Just a simple fact that law making city people can't ever grasp.

 

[JonB]

I love hearing your trapping tales.
this one is best so far, as it includes explooosivves...and photos

 

[Rally]

Brett,
Don’t get me started, I wouldn’t need notes!

Jon,
I usually tear these dams out by hand, but this was a training session to get two of the guys certified. Seeing as you are a taxpayer in our fine state, you probably wouldn’t want to know what that four man team and explosives cost. I usually remove them for about $250 for both of them. Two of the four there are now in admin state jobs, two trucks with trailers and wheelers, and cost of explosives. I need to raise my rates! Lol

 

[RicinYakima]

Luckily when you're down to the flats here, it is desert and no beaver but a few muskrats. The only still water are the pits dug to build the interstate highways. The state bomb squad started using the two part red stuff (Asti-lite?) years ago for counter-charges. Like to hear more about the DET cord igniter, as they were still using the military detonators with clackers.

 

[JonB]

As a life long Minnesotan (54 years), I've grown accustomed to how tax dollars are spent here.

NOW, as to your response to Ian's question about future trappers...WHAT I WOULD TOTALLY LOVE, is for the State to pay you a goodly sum, to mentor and train new young trappers. It'd be worth every penny for me, just to see the reactions of certain other Minnesotans, when they hear we are training trappers on the tax payer dime.

 

[Ian]

I recalled you usually tore out the dams by hand, and with all the mud, grass, twigs, sticks, limbs, and logs carefully packed together it sounds like a month-long task for a couple of young men with extremely stong backs wearing dry-suits. I don't know how you manage the labor and not freezing to death out there by yourself. You must be very strategic and efficient...and careful...in your efforts or you wouldn't still be here and making a living st it.

 

[Bret4207]

I don't know how Rally does it, but the few dams I've torn out all had a good head of water behind them. Once you get it started the dirt and smaller stuff gets washed away and if you can pull the sticks it will wash out pretty good and if there's enough water it will do a lot of the work for you.

OTOH, explosives sound like a lot more fun!