Gnaw-body Here But Us Beavers

Dam beavers’re back.

And when the beavers return to Las Colinas. nobody is particularly thrilled. At least two couples of the little lumberjacks have been spotted plying the waters of Beaver Creek, and a few more were sighted off piddling on the Royal Lane lakes. For every one of the shy creatures sighted, bunches more probably lurk. Odds are good the little lumberjacks are gonna breed, and Las Colinas folks know what that means.

They’ll go around chewing up perfectly landscape-worthy trees. Damming up perfectly good free-flowing streams. And just lying about.

You see, Texas beavers are not like their more industrious northern cousins, those stereo-typically eager beavers of woodland lore. Same species- but Texas beavers somehow became bums. Shiftless.

Your Yankee beaver gets up at the crack of dawn, meditates, jogs, and then goes to work repairing his condo, an ingenious little project usually situated in the middle of the artificial pond Bucky Beaver has created for himself.

The Yankee Beaver Lodge, in the north and often near an Elk’s Lodge, is a high-rise affair with all kinds of neat little tunnels and meeting chambers and lots of parking.

It’s a major undertaking. Yankee beavers work on it year round, rounding up investors, improving this, remodeling that, adding a wing here, closing one there, stocking the larder with gourmet bark, and inviting other beavers over to impress them.

What does a Texan Las Col-inas beaver, surrounded by towering, mighty works of architecture, do? As little as possible.

The little buck-toothed inbred local Las Colinas dullards lounge around in the southern sunshine much of the time, and when it’s time to think about real estate, they just go to the bank.

That’s right.

They just dig a hole through the mud in the bank of a creek and curl up underground, no doubt drinking Shiner or Lone Star in their undershirts, watching daytime TV and reading the National Enquirer.

Even the armadillo, as dumb a mammal as God ever made, is capable of as much.

Clarence Beezley, with Texas Parks and Wildlife and thus a natural apologist for anything with fur, entertains more charitable views about Texas beavers, writing off their entrepreneurial shortcomings as being geographically induced.

“It’s probably just easier to build in the bank here. You got nice sandy banks around here, while up north you got harder, rockier soil. Maybe up north the digging conditions aren’t as good.”

Another factor may be that in the absence of local predators- now that many commercial realtors and some of the lawyers are leaving-the beavers just don’t need the protection of a moat. But while the local rodents are lazier, they can be just as damaging to the Las Col-inas flora as the worst of their northern brethren. Hit with fits of munchies for bark, they do trees kind of like corn on the cob, just nibbling their way all the way around. The result is that the tree is girdled and dies.

Las Colinas landscapers are not, however, prone to take this lying down. Live traps have been placed in Las Colinas’s likely locales. The beaver swims in but can’t swim out.

When captured, they will be sent not to the furrier’s but to the beaver equivalent of Happy Acres: they’ll retire along with Ben Carpenter, head of Southland Financial Corporation, to one of the more rural properties, the run of which he is content to leave to beavers.