Beaver-slayer saves Tache from menace

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This article was published 16/11/2009 (6021 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

NEAR LORETTE — Beavers were having their way in the RM of Tache on Winnipeg’s eastern border, damming ditches, water diversions and even the Seine River.

Then came 13-year-old trapper Naomi Plett to the rescue. With her fur cap, uncertain smile and pigtails as thick as marine rope, she looks like the next coming of Davy Crockett.

Actually, Naomi was 12 when she first started trapping beavers here. She trapped 15 beavers that first year. Since trapping season started Oct. 1, she has already snared another 14. Some of them weigh up to 60 pounds.

“She’s doing a really nice service for the municipality,” Tache Coun. Bob Koop said.

You think of trappers as living in a boreal forest in a log cabin with a wood stove for heat and snowshoes hung on a spike in the wall. But there is an abundance of wildlife right on Winnipeg’s boundary.

“There’s been so much water and rain the past couple years that the beavers are really spreading around,” Coun. David Menard said.

The beavers dam up waterways that carry runoff into the Red River, causing water to back up and flood people’s properties, he said.

Similar problems are occurring across the province. The North Interlake is having horrendous problems with beavers after all its rainfall and flooding the past couple of years. Some Manitoba municipalities have hired full-time animal-control officers to trap beavers, said Jack Dubois, provincial director of wildlife protection.

In Tache, beaver dams are being reported as large as nine feet high that the municipality must get around to destroying with a backhoe.

“You have to get rid of the beaver first, otherwise they’ll rebuild it. They’ll rebuild the dam overnight. That’s why they say ‘eager like a beaver,’ ” Menard said.

The municipality has upped its bounty to $50 per head for problem beavers. That includes the $15 per head the province provides in its Problem Beaver Management Program. Trappers removed 7,600 beavers under the provincial program last year.

Naomi’s dad, Darnell Plett, a pastor at Prairie Grove Fellowship Chapel here, said his daughter approached him a year ago about trapping beavers to help the community. A woman at church had complained that over half her stand of about 100 trees had been gnawed down by beavers.

Plett has another theory why his daughter decided she wanted to be a trapper.

“I think she wanted to forge an identity,” he said. Naomi is the youngest child in an outdoorsy family that includes seven dogs, two horses, two cats, a dirt-bike riding brother, and 110 acres of prairie and bush next to the Seine River.

“She likes pioneer stuff, and making swords and throwing knives, and she did some bow-hunting for deer this fall,” her dad said. Naomi’s also into fishing and wilderness camping.

What does she enjoy about trapping? “The main part is spending time with my dad,” she said. “And getting a little money.”

The biggest challenge, Naomi said, is skinning the pelts. It takes her about two hours. She skins them, stretches and dries them, and then sells the pelts at a fur auction. Last year, she made about $20 a pelt, a terrible price and indicative of the poor market. A good price is double that.

She also saves the musk glands used in making perfume, which fetch another one or two dollars each.

All Naomi’s trapping is within about three or four kilometres of the floodway, near Lorette. She has also started trapping foxes, raccoons and mink, and has even caught a coyote that was killing cattle on a farm.

Naomi gets a mixed reaction from kids her age, but her friends support her and are considering helping with skinning.

Dad allows he’s had some awkward moments with parishioners who don’t agree with the trapping. “We don’t want to offend people,” he said.

bill.redekop@freepress.mb.ca