By Joel Thurtell
If you believe the Detroit Free Press, beaver were trapped to extinction in the Detroit area, and “then industrial pollution in the mid-20th Century made the Detroit River too toxic for beaver and many other species to return. The cleanup of the river in recent decades has seen many species making a comeback.”
Were beaver thoroughly removed from the Detroit area?
Did pollution deter beaver from making a comeback?
I don’t believe the Free Press has proved either contention.
In fact, the newspaper could rebut its own story if its staff would check their clip files. I was writing in the Free Press about beaver in Oakland County in 1998, 10 years before a beaver was reported at a Detroit electrical facility in November 2008. Beaver were causing problems in Oakland County by the 1980s.
Do beaver go around measuring pollution levels before they build their lodges? I kind of don’t think so.
I don’t think trapping, by itself, caused beaver to depart from urban areas. Shorelines often are not inviting. They may respond to improved habitat. Workers at DTE have worked hard to create wildlife-friendly surroundings at their plants on the Detroit River. If beaver see natural rather than concrete and steel shoreline and delicious-looking deciduous trees, they may come calling.
Question: Where did these beaver come from?
Hmmm. Wonder if beaver ever totally left the Detroit area?
With permission of the Detroit Free Press, here is the January 7, 1998 story I wrote about beaver in the Detroit area.
Headline: THEY’RE BACK
WITH NO PLACE TO GO, BEAVERS GNAW OUT A NICHE IN MIDST OF CIVILIZATION
Sub-Head:
Byline: JOEL THURTELL
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
Pub-Date: 1/7/1998
Memo:
Correction:
Text: Oakland County — While kayaking in a Cass Lake canal last summer, Ronda Shapiro found a log stripped of its bark, with its ends chiseled into sharp points.
She knew what it meant: Beavers.
Shapiro called West Bloomfield Township naturalist Jonathan Schechter, who was skeptical.
“But she was so insistent on the phone that I went out to look,” said Schechter. Soon he was a believer.
“Beavers are back — and building without permits,” he proclaimed.
A dead beaver was found two years ago in Bloomfield Township along 16 Mile, or Big Beaver Road.
“It was a good-size beaver, about 3 1/2-feet long,” recalls veterinarian Dr.
James Mangner.
As civilization creeps north in Oakland County, Mother Nature has her own agenda. Beavers started making a comeback in northern Oakland County several years ago. In 1989, Gary and Alice Stanley complained to the Michigan Department of Natural Resources that a beaver dam threatened to flood their driveway.
Schechter on Monday pointed out a 50-foot-long beaver dam some 30 feet west of state highway M-15 in Ortonville. The dam has made a pond and flooded a lawn.
Beavers are more of a nuisance at the state’s Bald Mountain Recreation Area, where they have built log dams in culverts, flooding roads and trails and creating safety concerns, said recreation area manager Bob Reemer.
But Cass Lake seems a rather odd home for beavers. It’s a big body of water, true, but except for a township park on one end, it is a sprawling piece of suburban real estate, its shores crowded with homes. On a hot summer weekend day, noisy boats churn the water into heavy, rolling wakes.
“That surprises me — I was not aware of any beaver in West Bloomfield
Township,” said Tim Payne, district wildlife director for the DNR. “If we had one in Bloomfield Township and they’re in Cass Lake, there’s no doubt they’re moving in.”
Beavers also are living in Washtenaw and Livingston counties, said Payne. None have been reported in Wayne County, said Wayne County Parks naturalist Carol Clements.
Beavers once lived all over the state, but were driven out of southeastern
Michigan by people. Nonetheless, the beaver is far from endangered in
Michigan, which has a lengthy trapping season — Dec. 1 to March 31 in
southern Michigan — to control the beaver population.
Why would beavers move into Cass Lake, a well-developed area of human
occupation where there is little natural shoreline?
“I think more of their habitat up north is being dwindled,” said veterinarian Mangner. “You go north 10 miles from here and all that area that was remote five years ago is now suburbs. That’s why there’s hundreds of complaints of raccoons in people’s attics — where else are they going to go?”
The problem is overpopulation, Payne says. “As they reproduce, they kick out the young, and the young have to explore and find new areas.” Despite Michigan’s long trapping season, human predation isn’t enough to control the beaver population, Payne said.
The beaver’s only predator, humans, has about given up killing beaver, said Chris Normandine, a Port Huron trapper. Changing fashions have steered clothing manufacturers to other kinds of fur, so the market for beaver pelts is depressed.
“Recently, I got $17 for a really good blanket. It was a huge beaver,” said
Normandine. Smaller beaver pelts, or blankets, bring lower prices. “Seventeen dollars for your time and effort …you might check the trap every night for a week and spend more in gas and equipment than it’s worth.”
Normandine said the St. Clair County Road Commission pays him $35 per beaver carcass for trapping beaver where they have plugged up road culverts. Added to the price he receives for the fur, it is barely a profitable business, he said.
Schechter concedes that trapping is necessary where beaver-caused flooding endangers humans. Otherwise, he favors coexistence.
On his 11-acres of forest near Ortonville, Schechter recently discovered a
couple of dozen toppled poplar trees. The incisor marks, piles of wood chips, bark-stripped tree trunks and pointed log ends were certain evidence that beavers had moved onto his property.
Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
Caption:
The evidence is unmistakable to naturalist Jonathan Schechter. The
tree, sharpened to a point by beavers, is on his property in Ortonville.
Schechter has seen more evidence of the rodent resurgence, including on Cass
Lake.
Illustration: PHOTO RICHARD LEE/DETROIT FREE PRESS
Edition: METRO FINAL
Section: NWS
Page: 2B
Keywords: OAKLAND COUNTY; ANIMAL; BEAVER
Disclaimer: THIS ELECTRONIC VERSION MAY DIFFER SLIGHTLY FROM THE PRINTED ARTICLE.
