Me?
Squirrels don't give me any trouble. I don't keep bird feeders. But I've got bigger backyard rodents to deal with: beavers.
Yep. Apparently the beavers have decided my deciduous trees are delicious. They appear to be helping themselves. Check this out! Here's the chewed tree we discovered this past weekend.This is a large tree, but it's going to be a stump impersonating a pencil point any day now.
Two more gnawed trees! (The one in the foreground is a double trunk.) And then walking up from the smaller tree in the photo, MORE damage!
But look, there's another tree that's been nibbled and yet another further back that's been chewed to nearly a stump.
Walking up from that small tree in the background we found this big bitten patch below.
Hopefully we can save it. It's just the bark that's been bitten. We've wrapped it with chicken wire along with a couple other trees that were only bark bitten. Which brings me to this discovery below a day or so later:
I know they have to eat too. But yeah, it bites. Better make plans for planting this spring.
5 comments:
Oh no! Those buck-toothed rodents dealt a major blow to your tree population. Is there any benign revenge you can enact or is trapping the only way to go I wonder?
We love nature but it can be cruel too.
In desperation, friends of mine in Quebec put out live traps because beavers kept damming up the creek that ran through their property and flooding it. My friends would tear down the dam, next day it was back. They set out the traps. Next day they found the beavers had built the traps into the dam.
I sympathize with you!
It's a tricky situation. We need them here to maintain their dam but we'd rather not give up all the maple trees by the water. Hopefully if we wrap the trees we want in wire they'll go grab other ones further into the bush. There's a tasty aspen patch I'm surprised they haven't visited yet. Fingers crossed!
Wow. I hope your plan works!
Thanks, Rebecca. I might have been granted a reprieve now that some snow has fallen. Fingers crossed!
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