The Beavers

I just walked with my dog down to the creek. We dropped a few dozen feet of elevation off the ridge where we built our house into the board flood plain of the Lawson's Fork. Then we turned west and hiked up the sewer right-of-way to the confluence with Cold Water Branch. The smaller creek got its name because in its headwaters seven springs rise.

For half a century that whole little draw of the seven springs, maybe a half mile upstream from our house, is drowned under a good sized lake where some of Spartanburg's well-healed now call home. Nobody much remembers the days when there wasn't a lake there. The springs are only memorialized in a street name on the east side of Spartanburg.

In the last few months beavers have dammed the little creek in three or four places, little Hoover dams made of sticks and saplings gnawed into sharp points. The current dribbles out the sides and over the tops, but generally it's quite an acceptable hydro-project any engineer with respect.

Beavers have made an impressive and dramatic comeback in the upstate of across the entire east coast. In the past twenty years they've gone from rare to down-right common. Anyone with an eye for beaver activity-dams, gnawed saplings and adult trees near streams, drag marks on the banks of rivers and streams-can spot them almost everywhere from the suburbs to the state parks.

Most people who are aware of beavers can be divided into two minds-those that hate them, consider them vermin to be eradicated, or at least controlled, and those who see their return as a sign of wildness recovered. The beaver haters see their activity as endangering bottom-timber, flooding backyards, creating wet areas that were long dry. The beaver lovers see the animals as merely re-colonizing the flood plain territories we took from them for agriculture, ill-suited housing, golf courses, and road beds. Give them some time, these beaver lovers say, and the landscapes near streams will look like they did 300 years ago. Besides, the woodpeckers will have some grand snags to hunt for grubs n the meantime.