By Josh Margolis
HAVRE, Mont. (NMB) – The Hill County Park Board’s Rules and Regulations Committee held a public meeting on Wednesday evening to continue discussions regarding the creation of a formal trapping policy for Beaver Creek Park.
This series of meetings has been spurred due to what many consider to be an overabundance of beavers in the park, which Superintendent Chad Edgar and many cabin owners and park users say has caused serious problems such as downed trees and warm water temperatures.
“The real damage is when they start moving,” Edgar said. “When they get kicked out of their lodge and their parents have had it with their (young beavers), where do they go? We’ll have areas that haven’t had beaver activity in years and all of a sudden it pops up a half mile from where there’s no other beaver. They do move, a lot.”
Around 20 members of the public were in attendance, and the meeting lasted over 90 minutes.
The majority of those that spoke seemed to be in favor of trapping as at least one necessary method to deal with the beaver population.
“There needs to be something done…Unfortunately, in my opinion, that’s going to have to eradicate some of the beavers,” said Bill Lanier. “Not completely, but it is destroying the park. We have a Boy Scout camp out there that we’ve had issues trying to maintain because we can’t get equipment and things across the crick because of damage that’s been done by the beavers. It’s also eliminated multiple campsites that we have due to damage from the beavers. So something has to be done because it is destroying the park.”
However, former Park Board member Renelle Braaten spoke passionately about the need for the park to attempt more humane methods of dealing with beavers, such as a ‘beaver deceiver.’
“I would just like to encourage people to google information about beavers about what good they do. Because there’s a lot more good than bad that beavers do, but you have to look at the information. And there’s a lot of different things you can do besides trapping. That’s all I’ve heard this whole meeting, was everything was back to trapping, when there’s tons of other things that are out there.”
Meanwhile, Lou Hagener, a certified professional in rangeland management, tried to get both sides of the hot-button issue to understand each other by putting the history of beavers in the park in context.
“In the last decade, we’ve had three substantial floods that have occurred in our park. That altered the stream. Streams go through a process of recovery and deterioration of all that stuff, and beavers are a component of that. Chad has had difficulty getting trappers to do the work out there on different occasions and maybe has had to revise his policy over that time. So I’d ask the Committee to take a real hard look at what really is the issue here. Really look at what the problems our and what our goal is for the park. Look at the science-based, look at the evidence-based aspects of this management.”
No action was taken, and more meetings are expected to be held in the coming months, with Commissioner Mark Peterson saying he will bring in experts to speak on the subject.
“You’re hearing right now that there is a lot of different ideas and there’s a lot more than trapping beavers that we have to look at. There’s a lot of interaction and cause and effect. The more we talk about it, the more that information does come out.”
Without a formal plan in place, the Board has given Edgar permission to select people to trap beavers at the Park. Currently, there is only one trapper with permission.
