The house was unoccupied for a month and the mice moved in, bigtime. I peanut-buttered some mouse traps and caught five or six adults. But I'm not finished with the mice; there's some compelling evidence that an occasional mouse is still attempting to share my food. Meanwhile, the lawn and garden are dotted with mole-holes. The moles are harder to deal with than mice, but they stay outside, so they're less offensive. In the compost pile, chipmunks are at work, but I don't begrudge them their scraps of vegetables. I'm more worried about the groundhogs, who can strip a flourishing garden in an evening. I've patrolled the places in which they've installed themselves in the past, and, so far, there are no signs that they've returned. One of these years, though -- the garden is a tempting target. But the big news is the beavers. When we arrived, two weeks ago Friday, the pond was up a good eighteen inches. It was also stagnant and there was a huge heap of mud and sticks where the water should have been flowing out rapidly. I tore out some of the material and produced a little Niagara -- a couple of acre-feet of water leaving us in a hour. But by Saturday morning the dam had been re-built and the water was up again. I got out the shovel and hoe and totally dismantled the dam. I must have sent several hundred pounds of mud and a big pile of twigs and branches downstream. Sunday morning I made my inspection: no repairs. This meant one of two things: either the beavers had moved on, or they don't work Sundays. But it's now two weeks, and they haven't returned, so I'm declaring victory in the rodent wars.
This morning I found some suspicious stuff that looks like bat-droppings in one of the shed rooms. Are bats rodents?
The north American beaver, Castor canadensis, is a formidable creature -- males characteristically weigh 60 pounds and a big one can reach a hundred. But the extinct local beaver was 5 to 6 times larger --bear size. It's a good thing I didn't have to use shovel and hoe on the dam of one of those babies. I wouldn't want to get on the bad side of a four hundred pound rodent --even if it were a vegetarian.
July 5. Sarah (see comments below) asks: what's the problem with beavers. Well, they render the pond unusable, for one. No more grandchildren peacefully paddling. Because they create a new dike which water flows through, not over, algae, twigs, and scum of all sorts accumulates, rots, and sinks to the bottom. The size of the pond expands very rapidly as the beavers move to create a suitably large habitat -- so the fields become flooded. The beavers cut down all the trees that I've been carefully cultivating. In a few months, the land will be totally transformed.
I'm hoping that the beavers find a new home on someone else's land. I didn't want to trap or kill them, but I'm certainly happy that I was able to discourage them from taking up permanent residence.
Just out of interest, why did you want rid of the beavers?
Posted by: Sarah | July 05, 2007 at 02:58 AM