Mukilteo Musings

Close Encounters of the Wild Kind

http://mukilteomusings.blogspot.com/2004_03_01_mukilteomusings_archive.html

Almost a year ago I wrote about some wild animal stories in my life. Lest you think I wrote about everything....well, I have more. And it doesn't take much to trigger my memories. Today in the Everett Herald, under the traffic section where readers can write in and ask why a particular intersection or bottleneck exists, they wrote about beavers.

http://www.heraldnet.com/stories/05/01/31/100loc_street001.cfm

Evidently, in a perfect appropriate spot on a creek, beavers built a fabulous dam. The problem is the dam caused a beaver pond to cover a busy road. Recently when we had some days of below freezing temperatures, one can only imagine the gigantic skating rink in the middle of traffic. Now, here is where my county officials went wrong. Seriously, they should have called me.

"The county tried to tear down the dam, but that didn't slow the industrious creatures.
'Getting them to stop building a dam works less than 1 percent of the time,' Jacobson said."

No, no, no I say--me a child of a man who understood how animals think--me a child of a man whose favorite fishing spot was Beaver Creek on the Missouri River near Helena. If you tear down a beaver dam, they will only build it bigger and better in the same exact spot. Such an act provides a family of busy beavers a challenge. I can just hear Mama beaver yelling at her teen age boy beaver baby, "You must have used rotten sticks and the wrong mud. Now, get out there and try try again until you get it right. And this time it better be good or you can't go to the Slap Tail dance tonight!!"

You see, my Dad engaged in such behavior for fun. He would tear out a beaver dam and then revisit the construction site days later to witness an impressive Hoover Dam, beaver style. I do believe my brother has carried on the tradition.

Anyway, my county officials could have saved some taxpayer dollars if they had called me but instead they learned the hard way. And the solution?? Next summer, they plan to redo the road and raise its elevation so the beavers' Lake Powell cannot cause a flood. My concern is that my county officials are not thinking like beavers. Perhaps the beavers' plan all along was to slow or stop traffic so they could continue living blissful beaver lives without human encroachment. We'll see!