Page 20 - May/June 2019 W.C.T. Magazine

18nWCT
poplar tree FarMS under attacK
by John R. Consolini
“U
eat,” and boy did they. That is what it looked like by the time I was hired to get the beaver under control from the poplar tree farm manager.
h, the smell of cottonwood,” one beaver said to his friends; “Let’s
beaver. One area had a fence around the property that had a ditch around the property that would help keep the beaver out; so they thought. Once the trees were planted, they wouldn’t check on them for a couple years, but eventually they do come back to see what condition they are in.
Here, a few years back, there were poplar tree farms popping up everywhere throughout the Pacific Northwest and down in the southern states too. There was a big demand for poplar wood for the construction trade. These trees grow rapidly and can be harvest as soon as six to eight years. The companies that were planting these trees were leasing lands from farmers that had extra land lying around and were doing nothing with it. Some of this land was close to wetlands, small streams and rivers. On most farmer’s lands, there are always drainage ditches and what do all of these rivers and drainage ditches have in common? Beaver!
The poplar tree companies have crews go out and plant the trees or they would contract companies to plant for them. These people were getting paid to plant and they didn’t care how close they got to the water’s edge. And in most cases it doesn’t matter when it comes to
Beaver damage behind a fenced off area.
Abeavercrawl-underatafence.Thetreewastoo largeforthebeavertopullitunderthefence.
head back to the trucks, load them back up on the trailers, and move down to the next planted area. We finished up by 5:00 P.M. and drove maybe a 30 mile radius from their office. These planted areas were huge, acreage wise, with
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I received a call one day and the guy said they have a beaver problem on some of their poplar tree farms and wondered if I could help him out. We made arrangements to meet at his office the next day. He asked if I had an ATV and to bring it along so we could do an on-site evaluation. We stopped in at 7:00 A.M. and met the manager and his company foreman. The company foreman loaded up his ATV on his trailer and I followed him the rest of the day with mine. We started the dayoffby7:30A.M.goingfromone area to the next. We would unload the ATV’s, drive the tree farm,
thousands of trees and several large damaged areas from beaver. We drove around for ten hours and didn’t lay one piece of steel. These areas were costing them a lot of money in tree loses and flooded areas. The tree damage was seen by aircraft, but once on the ground, it was worse than one could expect and the company foreman was surprised on just how much damage they had.
Once we went to work, we would do one section at a time due to amount of beaver damage, number of traps, and daylight. We found that if you spread 100 traps over all of the areas that were damaged, not counting snares, it would take you way too long to get all places under control. The most effective way was to concentrate on one area at a time, so you could be more efficient. We would start at 7:00 A.M. as soon as the sun came up and run all day for at least seven to eight hours depending on daylight. One spot we concentrated on was the fenced in area. There was a small drainage ditch on the outside of the fence where the beavers were traveling up the ditch and had dug under the fence. They were bringing the downed trees to the fence, then under the fence into