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Mar. 24th, 2012 04:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickMy god, I sound like a redneck. Not just a little bit.
I went to breakfast at La's this morning (Saturday). At breakfast, La inquired as to whether or not there were actually any beaver in my lake. See, Theron (La's brother) has a son who, having completed his hunter safety course thing, has been of late desperately interested in trapping beaver. (No, we don't know why. He just likes things. Weird things. Right now, it's trapping a beaver.) This is the younger son and his interest in beaver is confined to the tree-chewing sort with broad flat tails. (The elder (fourteen?) son's interest in beaver does not involve tree chewing of any sort but could very probably be deemed to involve the words "wood" and "tail" if one were so inclined to go there. I suspect that the elder son has even less idea of how to go about catching his sort of beaver than the younger son does his.)
The sort of beavers that younger son is interested in need good-sized creeks or ponds. Now, if you're a particularly enthusiastic boy of eleven, logic always works both directions -- if the statement "if beaver, then pond/creek" is true, then also the statement "if pond/creek, then beaver" must be true, too. I have a pond, therefore beavers must be in my pond, in the world according to this younger son. La was asking about whether or not there were any beavers in the lake because she understands about the overly enthusiastic optimism of eleven year old boys. As it happens, I would not encourage attempts to trap beavers in my pond if there were zero chance of success. (McElligot's Pool represents the sort of eleven-year-old optimistically foggy thinking that I would prefer not to encourage.) Heck, I would not encourage the trapping of beavers if I liked the beavers. Fortunately for the boy, I don't like the beavers and there are actual beavers (or at least one) in the pond. There's a nest or hive or whatever down by where the summer people boats are. There are also a lot of fairly fresh, suspiciously pointy tree trunks on the border of the lake. And the summer people have been asking me what we intend to do about the beaver. (I believe that they had some sort of live trap-n-release vision, there. It is not my job to make reality mesh with their visions.)
At any rate, earlier this week I'd been put on the spot about allowing beaver trapping efforts in my pond to ease the younger son's desire to snare beaver and eventually I was like "Okay, fine. But have a license and do it up properly according to the rules and stuff." So on Friday, Theron and the boys and their trapping advisor (a friend who apparently does this on a semi-pro, get-paid-for-it basis) came down to the pond and set beaver traps in the water according to best practices and stuff. Traps are supposed to be checked every day once they're set, so after breakfast on Saturday, Theron and his boy and a cousin came down to check the beaver traps.
I was in the middle of smoking proto-bacon from the pig that jumped out of the horse trailer in an attempt to commit suicide before it got butchered (my life is a whirlwind of activity) when Theron called me on his cell asking if I had a camera. I knew he was to be checking the traps but I really didn't believe he'd gotten a beaver. I didn't think it would really work, like for real. See, there are five or six days left in PA beaver season. We (Theron and I) figured that they'd set out the traps and check them beaverlessly (I was going to say "fruitlessly" but we're not trying to trap pineapples, here.) for a couple of days and then go, "Well, we gave it our best shot! Maybe next year." and that'd be that for the whole beaver trapping episode because the boy would then lose interest before next November. The boy, of course, had an entirely different vision in mind. Turns out that his vision was the one favored by, well, fortune.
If you had asked me prior to today how people got beavers, I would have allowed that they trapped them. D'oh. Everyone knows you trap beavers. Everyone. Long history of trapping beavers. French and Indian War. Fur trapping people in Canada, fur trapping re-enactors nowadays. Beaver pelts as a driver of trade to the New World. Trapping. OF COURSE you catch beaver by trapping them. And yet, it is a whole nother world of real to discover that you can put forth traps into a pond and retrieve them later with actual dead beavers attached to them. (Maybe you had to be there.)
As you will see from the video, the way that beaver trapping works is that you set out the beaver trap in very shallow (couple of inches) water on the shoreline. The trap is threaded onto a cable, which it slides down only one way. One end of the cable is attached to a very large rock set about three and a half to four feet deep in the water. The other end of the cable is attached to the shore so that it doesn't get lost. I believe they secured it to a tree trunk in this particular instance. The trap slides towards the large underwater rock but cannot slide back up towards the shoreline tree.
Now, beavers are, y'know, mammals what with the air breathing and fur bearing and stuff. When a beaver gets caught in a trap, it struggles and pulls (usually towards deeper water, which is the only way the trap will move anyway) to try to get away. It cannot get away, because it's trapped. As the beaver struggles, it shifts the trap deeper and deeper into the water (the only direction the trap will move) until the beaver can't swim up to get air because of the heavy rock attached to the trap. And then it drowns. (I did not know this about beaver trapping prior to today.) When you go to retrieve your trapped beavers, most likely they will be of the already-dead variety. This is not a certainty and obviously beaver trappers are advised to take along with them a small sidearm (a .22 pistol should be plenty) to dispatch any beavers that are of the still-alive variety when they are doing their daily trap-checking.
Due to the mostly-already-dead nature of the prey, as it were, beaver trapping is not a very exciting Man vs. Nature contact sport. Any mental images of an active Man v.s Nature conflict that you have regarding this sport should be put to bed. In my (admittedly limited) experience, beaver trapping is the sort of Man vs. Nature conflict that resembles fishing roadkill out of a pond.
This is not to say that beaver trapping is for sissies. Not at all. There are multiple opportunities to be a manly man while beaver trapping. See, once the sprung traps have been pulled in and checked, they need to be reset and re-situated. The traps are re-set by someone with fairly strong hands (eg. not an eleven year old boy) and placed in about four inches of water along the shoreline. However, the large underwater rock, the one attached to the far end of the cable, needs to be put back out in four feet of water. The large underwater rocks were carefully chosen by the parent to be of a size that an eleven year old boy can lift but that a drowning beaver cannot lift. The person wading out into four feet of water in the lake in late March, carrying a large rock, is the person who really, really, really wants to trap beaver. That person is not the adult in this enterprise. He also does not have a pair of waders. He just gets soaking wet. In the lake. In March.
Anyway, in the video, you can see that the beaver that the boy is hauling in is pretty well dead. It's not freshly dead because freshly dead things are more floppy than that. (Beaver forensics is not my forte so please excuse the lack of properly scientific phrases here.) The video beaver has been dead a while, but not longer than about 12 hours because they only set the traps last night after school.
Here's the video, in which I sound entirely too rednecky. According to our resident expert (the guy who actually does this on a semi-pro basis for money), this beaver is about half-grown, the size that would get kicked out this spring to go hunt for a new place to live. Adult beavers are bigger than this one.
And here's a picture of the so-happy-he's-vibrating boy and his dead aquatic rodent:
I got to thinking about this, which is basically a picture of, y'know, a smallish boy and his dead rodent. It's actually a little creepy and weird, but there you go. I'm used to it. My local newspaper, in November, runs front page pictures of people with their dead male cervids. The only guideline the paper has besides "Deer must be a buck, we do not publish doe pictures" is to suggest that the deer's tongue not be hanging out in the picture as it upsets the readership. (One has a mental image of successful deer hunters tucking deer tongues back into the mouths of dead deer prior to the photo op...) Pictures of people with dead animals is like a cultural thing for me, so no biggie.
I went to breakfast at La's this morning (Saturday). At breakfast, La inquired as to whether or not there were actually any beaver in my lake. See, Theron (La's brother) has a son who, having completed his hunter safety course thing, has been of late desperately interested in trapping beaver. (No, we don't know why. He just likes things. Weird things. Right now, it's trapping a beaver.) This is the younger son and his interest in beaver is confined to the tree-chewing sort with broad flat tails. (The elder (fourteen?) son's interest in beaver does not involve tree chewing of any sort but could very probably be deemed to involve the words "wood" and "tail" if one were so inclined to go there. I suspect that the elder son has even less idea of how to go about catching his sort of beaver than the younger son does his.)
The sort of beavers that younger son is interested in need good-sized creeks or ponds. Now, if you're a particularly enthusiastic boy of eleven, logic always works both directions -- if the statement "if beaver, then pond/creek" is true, then also the statement "if pond/creek, then beaver" must be true, too. I have a pond, therefore beavers must be in my pond, in the world according to this younger son. La was asking about whether or not there were any beavers in the lake because she understands about the overly enthusiastic optimism of eleven year old boys. As it happens, I would not encourage attempts to trap beavers in my pond if there were zero chance of success. (McElligot's Pool represents the sort of eleven-year-old optimistically foggy thinking that I would prefer not to encourage.) Heck, I would not encourage the trapping of beavers if I liked the beavers. Fortunately for the boy, I don't like the beavers and there are actual beavers (or at least one) in the pond. There's a nest or hive or whatever down by where the summer people boats are. There are also a lot of fairly fresh, suspiciously pointy tree trunks on the border of the lake. And the summer people have been asking me what we intend to do about the beaver. (I believe that they had some sort of live trap-n-release vision, there. It is not my job to make reality mesh with their visions.)
At any rate, earlier this week I'd been put on the spot about allowing beaver trapping efforts in my pond to ease the younger son's desire to snare beaver and eventually I was like "Okay, fine. But have a license and do it up properly according to the rules and stuff." So on Friday, Theron and the boys and their trapping advisor (a friend who apparently does this on a semi-pro, get-paid-for-it basis) came down to the pond and set beaver traps in the water according to best practices and stuff. Traps are supposed to be checked every day once they're set, so after breakfast on Saturday, Theron and his boy and a cousin came down to check the beaver traps.
I was in the middle of smoking proto-bacon from the pig that jumped out of the horse trailer in an attempt to commit suicide before it got butchered (my life is a whirlwind of activity) when Theron called me on his cell asking if I had a camera. I knew he was to be checking the traps but I really didn't believe he'd gotten a beaver. I didn't think it would really work, like for real. See, there are five or six days left in PA beaver season. We (Theron and I) figured that they'd set out the traps and check them beaverlessly (I was going to say "fruitlessly" but we're not trying to trap pineapples, here.) for a couple of days and then go, "Well, we gave it our best shot! Maybe next year." and that'd be that for the whole beaver trapping episode because the boy would then lose interest before next November. The boy, of course, had an entirely different vision in mind. Turns out that his vision was the one favored by, well, fortune.
If you had asked me prior to today how people got beavers, I would have allowed that they trapped them. D'oh. Everyone knows you trap beavers. Everyone. Long history of trapping beavers. French and Indian War. Fur trapping people in Canada, fur trapping re-enactors nowadays. Beaver pelts as a driver of trade to the New World. Trapping. OF COURSE you catch beaver by trapping them. And yet, it is a whole nother world of real to discover that you can put forth traps into a pond and retrieve them later with actual dead beavers attached to them. (Maybe you had to be there.)
As you will see from the video, the way that beaver trapping works is that you set out the beaver trap in very shallow (couple of inches) water on the shoreline. The trap is threaded onto a cable, which it slides down only one way. One end of the cable is attached to a very large rock set about three and a half to four feet deep in the water. The other end of the cable is attached to the shore so that it doesn't get lost. I believe they secured it to a tree trunk in this particular instance. The trap slides towards the large underwater rock but cannot slide back up towards the shoreline tree.
Now, beavers are, y'know, mammals what with the air breathing and fur bearing and stuff. When a beaver gets caught in a trap, it struggles and pulls (usually towards deeper water, which is the only way the trap will move anyway) to try to get away. It cannot get away, because it's trapped. As the beaver struggles, it shifts the trap deeper and deeper into the water (the only direction the trap will move) until the beaver can't swim up to get air because of the heavy rock attached to the trap. And then it drowns. (I did not know this about beaver trapping prior to today.) When you go to retrieve your trapped beavers, most likely they will be of the already-dead variety. This is not a certainty and obviously beaver trappers are advised to take along with them a small sidearm (a .22 pistol should be plenty) to dispatch any beavers that are of the still-alive variety when they are doing their daily trap-checking.
Due to the mostly-already-dead nature of the prey, as it were, beaver trapping is not a very exciting Man vs. Nature contact sport. Any mental images of an active Man v.s Nature conflict that you have regarding this sport should be put to bed. In my (admittedly limited) experience, beaver trapping is the sort of Man vs. Nature conflict that resembles fishing roadkill out of a pond.
This is not to say that beaver trapping is for sissies. Not at all. There are multiple opportunities to be a manly man while beaver trapping. See, once the sprung traps have been pulled in and checked, they need to be reset and re-situated. The traps are re-set by someone with fairly strong hands (eg. not an eleven year old boy) and placed in about four inches of water along the shoreline. However, the large underwater rock, the one attached to the far end of the cable, needs to be put back out in four feet of water. The large underwater rocks were carefully chosen by the parent to be of a size that an eleven year old boy can lift but that a drowning beaver cannot lift. The person wading out into four feet of water in the lake in late March, carrying a large rock, is the person who really, really, really wants to trap beaver. That person is not the adult in this enterprise. He also does not have a pair of waders. He just gets soaking wet. In the lake. In March.
Anyway, in the video, you can see that the beaver that the boy is hauling in is pretty well dead. It's not freshly dead because freshly dead things are more floppy than that. (Beaver forensics is not my forte so please excuse the lack of properly scientific phrases here.) The video beaver has been dead a while, but not longer than about 12 hours because they only set the traps last night after school.
Here's the video, in which I sound entirely too rednecky. According to our resident expert (the guy who actually does this on a semi-pro basis for money), this beaver is about half-grown, the size that would get kicked out this spring to go hunt for a new place to live. Adult beavers are bigger than this one.
And here's a picture of the so-happy-he's-vibrating boy and his dead aquatic rodent:
I got to thinking about this, which is basically a picture of, y'know, a smallish boy and his dead rodent. It's actually a little creepy and weird, but there you go. I'm used to it. My local newspaper, in November, runs front page pictures of people with their dead male cervids. The only guideline the paper has besides "Deer must be a buck, we do not publish doe pictures" is to suggest that the deer's tongue not be hanging out in the picture as it upsets the readership. (One has a mental image of successful deer hunters tucking deer tongues back into the mouths of dead deer prior to the photo op...) Pictures of people with dead animals is like a cultural thing for me, so no biggie.
