'Nuisance' Beavers Increasingly Face Bounties

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At first, Charles Luehmann considered the beavers cute, with their whiskers, buckteeth and flat tails. But it wasn't long before he found nothing endearing about the animals' dams, ruggedly engineered of hundreds of his trees they methodically toppled.

PONTOON BEACH, Ill. — At first, Charles Luehmann considered the beavers cute, with their whiskers, buckteeth and flat tails. But it wasn't long before he found nothing endearing about the animals' dams, ruggedly engineered of hundreds of his trees they methodically toppled.


"I've got about 210 acres -- about half is timber, and about half the timber is dead," Luehmann, 77, said of the furry squatters' heavy toll on his oaks, persimmons, hickories and walnut trees.


So when the mud-packed blockages -- often so sturdy they take backhoes and blasts to undo them -- flooded swaths of his land, a fed-up Luehmann did what many are doing: He hired a trapper to eliminate the unwanted critters.


As the beaver population rises in Illinois and across the nation, so-called "nuisance" trappers are making a decent dime deploying devices that drown the beavers or snap their necks. Armed with the proper permits, such beaver bounty hunters are clearing anywhere from $30 to a couple of hundred dollars -- sometimes more -- for each grievance call from vexed landowners.


Although animal-welfare activists consider the tactics barbaric, trappers say simply moving the animals instead of killing them just means exposing someplace else to their tree-chomping ways.


Though there are no firm numbers, the editor of the National Trappers Association's official magazine said he thinks the ranks of nuisance trappers has doubled or tripled in the past five years across the nation.


"It's a pretty good industry -- just open your Yellow Pages," Tom Krause said from his home in Riverton, Wyo.


During Illinois' legal trapping season, the harvest can fluctuate with fur prices. But the paltry price for a pelt these days -- generally about $10 -- isn't worth it to many trappers, who often must slog with traps and lures through mud up to their knees and water up to the chest, then lug out a beaver that can weigh up to 60 pounds for a pelt that then can take hours to render.


Paying high gasoline prices to get to the often-remote sites doesn't make trapping any sexier.


"The work that's involved is incredible," said Ken Staley, a Maryville man who along with his 15-year-old son, Nick, recently earned $3,000 from Illinois' Madison County and a township to remove nuisance beavers at $30 a head.


Because those beavers were taken during the hunting season, Staley -- 49-year-old owner of a window-coverings business by day -- kept about 30 to 40 of the larger pelts and plans to have them tanned. He sold many of the rest, averaging about $11 apiece.


Beaver meat is edible, said to taste a bit like roast beef. The sweet-smelling contents of the animal's castor sacks -- scent glands found near its back end -- are used in making high-end perfumes. The liver is good catfish bait.


But beavers killed as nuisances outside of Illinois' hunting season are of no value to the trappers, who by law must incinerate or bury the carcasses.


"If I could do it for a living, I would," said Gary Thompson. The full-time farmer has supplemented his income with a wildlife nuisance-control service for about 10 years from his home near Marshall in east-central Illinois, about 10 miles west of the Indiana line.


Thompson generally charges a client $150 to $200 for the first beaver, then $50 for each after that. But he's willing to negotiate; three beavers he extracted recently for a customer got him $200.


"We don't trap for fur. We trap because the animal's causing a problem," said Rob Erickson, a beaver hunter from DeKalb, west of Chicago, who founded Wildlife Control Technology Magazine. Erickson, who also makes beaver lures, figures he gets about a 100, maybe 200 jobs a year and typically pockets $100 to $120 per beaver, in addition to a trap-setup charge.


Environmentalists say killing nuisance beavers is unnecessary. Property owners, they argue, could simply wrap their trees with wire that can withstand the beavers' choppers, or design water-control structures so that the animal can't hear the flowing water that attracts them.


Clandestine pipes known as "Beaver Bafflers" or "Beaver Deceivers" lower a pond's level without disturbing the beaver dam. Beavers frustrated by being unable to raise the water level often will move on.


Because beavers aren't good climbers, a three- to four-foot fence also can be a permanent deterrent and might be the best option when trees are grouped together.


"There are wonderful alternatives," said Ledy VanKavage, a Collinsville attorney for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. "The current method (of trapping) is extremely barbaric."


Still, she said, "there aren't that many places for beavers to go where they're not going to be a nuisance" in Illinois and other states where suburbs are engulfing farmland.


Staley makes no apologies.


"You control termites and insects. Beaver is nothing more than large mice," he said. "I like beaver, and I'd never want them to disappear. By trapping them and controlling their numbers, they won't."


Source: Associated Press


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