Beavers create havoc in Jones County, elsewhere
May 29,2006
BRYAN C. HANKS
FREEDOM ENC
COMFORT, NC — When Nelson Craft and Ralph Banks were youngsters in the 1950s, creeks and streams around the Comfort area ran freely.
“They were clear and open with fish in them,” Craft said of the Jones County area. “They were running all the time and you didn’t see all these dead trees in them.”
Banks, said, “We could drink water right out of the creek.”
Then the beavers came. Since then, the creeks and streams have not been the same.
Now, they’re full of trees gnawed down and clogging their progress to the Trent River. Where once fresh water streamed, now there are only murky standing pools with limbs protruding.
“There are probably 75 to 100 acres from Huffman Forest to the Trent River that have destroyed trees,” Craft said. “There are stretches where they’ve lost 40 to 50 feet on each side where the trees aren’t productive.”
Worse yet, especially around the Comfort Elementary School area, mosquitoes swarm over the children as a result of all the standing water in the surrounding creeks, he said.
“The mosquitoes are breeding and we have put up with them,” Craft said. “The people living closest by have the biggest problem.”
Banks, 71, was loaned some chickens by N.C. State University to see if they would contract the West Nile Virus. After only a few weeks surrounded by the mosquitoes, the chickens did get the disease, he said.
Jones County Manager Larry Meadows said beavers have actually been a problem for almost a century.
Meadows said U.S. Wildlife agents brought in the beavers more than 100 years ago.
“And they’ve gone berserk since then,” Meadows said. “The duck hunters brought the beavers in because they liked the little creeks the beavers formed. But it’s gotten out of hand.”
When Craft has brought the problem to the attention of Meadows in the past, Craft said the county has worked on the problem.
“I know the county is doing all it can with the resources it’s got, but the state needs to develop some type of plan that will cure the problem other than just putting Band-aids on it,” Craft said. “Every time I’ve gone down there and said something to Larry and those boys, it’s not long before someone was up here opening it up. It’s more open now than it was last year.”
But the beaver issue costs more than the county can afford. Meadows said the county spends $4,000 a year to pay a federal agent to set beaver traps to thin the population. After the population is thinned a bit, the agent goes in and blows up the beaver dams with dynamite.
“It’s a problem everywhere, not just in Jones County,” Meadows said. “We can’t get the beavers trapped and the dams cleaned up as fast as the beavers are multiplying. It would probably take us two full-time people going as hard as they can go.”
With limited resources, Meadows doesn’t expect to see more help in the immediate future.
“I don’t see that happening with as tight as the budgets are this year,” Meadows said of additional agents. “But we might be able to sometime down the road.”
Some landowners have contracted outside sources to help pay for clean-up, an idea Meadows advanced. The responsibility, Meadow said, is also with the citizens of Jones County.
“We’ve talked about letting property owners own a particular creek and paying an annual fee to maintain it,” Meadows said. “After the fee, there will be no expense to them at all for the trapping.”
But Craft said many Jones County residents don’t have the money to pay for those types of sources. He thinks the state needs to develop some new equipment to solve the beaver problem.
“The solution is to develop a piece of equipment that will keep the streams open,” Craft said. “For lack of a better word, they need a ‘stream cleaner.’ I don’t think there is anything like that, but the folks at (N.C. State) could develop it. I can’t believe there isn’t something like that.”
Bryan C. Hanks can be reached at 268-2527 or at bhanks@freedomenc.com.
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