12/16/2023 0 Comments Tasker pill reminderHe joined Facebook groups with beaver trappers. He got his damage and nuisance control permit from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. In the meantime, Craven was learning more. His buddy told someone else who told someone else: Earl Craven traps beavers. “I couldn't wait for the next chance to do it,” he remembers. But, when he finished the job, he knew he wanted to keep beaver trapping. Craven laughs when he thinks about his first assignment. It took six weeks to catch those two beavers – six weeks of going back and forth to the same dam every single day. They buried some of his traps and avoided others. But he had never trapped one before, even as kid in Nashville. “I’m a man doing a job who is very blessed who has much compassion for the animal, you know?” Craven started working with beavers within the last 10 years when a friend needed someone to clear a beaver dam in his backyard. “I'm not an evil person, I don’t want to be perceived that way,” Craven explains. It’s part of the reason Craven says he hesitated about doing the interview in the first place. But being good at trapping comes with a price: The beavers are killed. He documents each catch with a tally on the paper, a picture on his phone and a thumbtack of the location on his Barry County map. *** Hanging up on the wall of his garage, Earl Craven keeps a list of the 90-plus beavers he has trapped for Jim Dull. “This is a perfect job.” Dull’s work with the beaver dam is done. “Ain’t it pretty out here?” he asks, giggling. When Dull finishes clearing the dam, he walks out of the chilly October water in boot-foot waders with a smile on his face. “It beats the hell out being in the office,” he says. His truck is littered with equipment he might need on the road – scissors, bug spray, jackets, a deflated fitness ball, camouflage boots, black boots, a lunch cooler, rope and a discarded chocolate chip granola bar wrapper. He’s out looking at drains, answering calls on his flip phone, driving through the county with paper maps and dealing with the beavers. in the office every day and then he’s out. If they don’t trap them, Dull says, the beavers will come back the next day and the next day and the next day. Last year, the drain commission team caught nearly 30 beavers. During the peak months in the spring and fall, he deals with them on a daily basis. Dull doesn’t deal with just a beaver here or there. Even if it’s not a county drain, if someone calls and needs help clearing a dam, the drain commissioner will go out and clear the dam. As drain commissioner, he has to clear every dam that clogs a county drain – in a county with nearly 330 lakes, he says. It had clogged up the drain and the road was flooded. A beaver's in the backyard, they would say. And, when he started, people kept calling him about beavers. How many people do you know work all night long to get something built? I know a lot of people that don't work at all.” After years as an excavator, homebuilder and county commissioner of District 7 in southeastern Barry County, Dull took over as drain commissioner in 2016. “Anybody that is as ambitious as they are. “Man, you gotta appreciate it,” Dull says. A good dam, one made by the mother and father, could take 30 minutes of ripping and pulling and tearing to break apart. It must have been some younger beavers, Dull says. This dam near Coburn Rd off of M-37 in Hastings Township took just five minutes to disassemble. But from the instant he starts to rake, the dam comes apart and the water starts to flow. Everything is entangled, intertwined and wedged together, strong enough to hold back a stream and flood a local resident’s yard. He yanks out tree branches, moss, mud, leaves and more branches. Jim Dull stands in the creek, waist-high in water, raking at a dam.
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