Beavers in Pennsylvania

Last week one Edward Boop, laborer, trapped a 29-lb. beaver. What made the catch newsworthy was the fact that it occurred not in Canada or the U. S. northwest, but near Glen Iron in Pennsylvania. For the first time in 31 years Pennsylvanians were free to trap beavers, from March 1. to April 10.*

Though no beaver had been seen in Pennsylvania since 1900, the State legislature in 1903 declared a permanent closed season. Twelve years later a pair of beavers were brought from Wisconsin, turned loose in a State game refuge. At intervals in the next nine years Pennsylvania's Game Commission imported 46 more pairs. The beavers settled down to stay. Needing deep water for their island lodges, they gnawed down trees, floated them through canals of their own making, gathered up sticks, stones and mud. With their strong front paws they packed all such material together in high, solid dams (see cut). Their houses, too, they built of sticks & mud, above water on solid foundations down to pond bottom. la oven-shaped, mud-floored rooms about 3 ft. square, 2ft. high many a young beaver was born, to swim and frolic without care until in the summer of its third year it was ready to leave home, set up for itself.

With each beaver mother producing two to six cubs per year, a protected beaver population roughly doubles each year. By last year Pennsylvania's 94 beavers had become 15,000 and citizens had started to complain. The beavers had flooded farms and roads, plugged up mill races, destroyed valuable timber. Their year's damage amounted to $20.000. With mathematics proving that, if nothing interfered, the State would have 1,976,080.000 beavers doing $2,623,040,000 worth of damage in 1950, Pennsylvania's Game Commission this year called a halt.

Last week most of Pennsylvania's beavers stayed safely inside their big stick & mud lodges while trappers waited for warm weather to thaw out streams and ponds. With 50,000 trappers in prospect, the Game Commission has limited each one to ten traps, a catch of not more than six beavers during the season. No beaver may be dug or smoked from his lodge, or shot except when found alive in a trap. But the wise trapper, setting his trap a little back from the water's edge, weights it with a heavy stone to drag the struggling captive to quick death by drowning. Otherwise he is apt to find only a torn leg in his trap. Sensitive trappers, if they can afford it, use the Bailey live beaver trap, a hinged, circular device which lies flat, snaps closed when a beaver touches its trigger (see cut, p. 32). Best bait is a fresh aspen limb fastened just behind the trap. Beavers live chiefly on bark, twigs, the roots of water plants.

Beaver pelts were once standard wilderness money, accepted by Indians and whites at about $4 each. A prime pelt now brings up to $20. Best pelts, deep, lustrous, dark brown, come from Alaska, northeastern Canada, northeastern U. S. Pelts from states east of the Rocky Mountains, except Michigan and Wisconsin, are paler, worth from $4 to $12. Last week furriers were waiting to see the trophies of Edward Boop and other Pennsylvanians before they set a price.

*Beavers live in most of the U. S. but may be legally trapped this year only in Pennsylvania, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia. Kansas, Kentucky, parts of Michigan, Oregon, Texas and Wisconsin.

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