Dedham resident traps beavers for town (video)

In a wild patch of Dedham, not far behind Legacy Place, is where the journey for the objects of Craig Armstrong’s desire begins.

As we paddle the canoe, he points out some willow trees that beavers have girdled – chewing away the bark to eat the layer of green underneath. We travel the length of Wigwam Pond and up into Wigwam Brook, where Armstrong checks his first Conibear trap.

When the animal goes through, the Conibear trap usually snaps them around the head, he explains: “They drown. If they don’t die instantly, they drown.”

It’s empty.

Armstrong walks through some thickly covered terrain, warning about poison ivy, and leads the way to a beaver dam he breached the day before. Overnight, the aquatic mammals built a high pile of sticks and debris to fill the gap.

“I had this flowing nice yesterday,” Armstrong says, clearing away the beavers’ work with a rake. “They had a big 4-by-4 in here yesterday. Thing weighed a ton.”

It’s just another morning out on the water for Dedham’s beaver trapper. The town called him in March, when record rain falls flooded nearby streets and basements, and exacerbated the problem of the high water levels that residents east of Wigwam Pond have seen since the family of beavers moved in two years ago. Town Administrator William Keegan somberly said in late March that installing low-flow devices called “beaver deceivers” and breaching dams helped manage the situation, but that trapping was “the only option left to consider.”

Armstrong, who is a licensed problem animal control agent, does his trapping for free. He mostly bow-hunts – deer are his favorite targets – and recently shot two turkeys each in Vermont and Massachusetts.

“I’ll hunt anything, anywhere. As long as it gets me outside and in the woods,” says the Riverdale resident, who was a plant manager until a few years ago, and now does carpentry and other handyman jobs.

Armstrong says the main goal is to lower the water level for nearby residents’ homes. Two dams, including one off Eastern Avenue, have beaver deceivers in them. “It’s the deceiver dam that’s really backing up the water behind the Legion and back up on Jersey Street.”

For a while, there was nowhere to trap because the brook and connected channels were so flooded, so Armstrong waited for the water to go down.

It has receded somewhat by the Friday morning when Armstrong takes the Transcript’s reporter on an excursion. Even so, he gestures to a new swampy area, saying, “All this back here used to be dry. These trees, look at ’em, they’re all dead.”

It’s not so easy to catch the beavers, beginning with the dangerous traps. He hurt himself twice before getting safeties, he says.

“Yeah, these beavers were beating me up at first. First trap went across my thumb and my fingers. Geez, that hurt,” he says. The second time, it sprung over his whole hand. “I couldn’t grab anything for awhile.”

He also tells about going through mud when all of a sudden his foot sunk, and the heavy trap basket he was wearing pulled him down backwards into the water, spilling his soda bottles and cigars. He lightened his basket after that.

He sports thigh-high waders. Wearing just boots it is tricky to get around without slipping into the muck, but Armstrong sensibly advises walking on branches and using a paddle to probe for relatively solid ground, which seems to work.

The beavers seem to have good survivor’s instincts, he says.

“They were using this one pretty frequently,” Armstrong says of a channel where he caught two on the previous Sunday, April 25. But on this day, the three traps he has placed there come up empty.

Armstrong was “so excited” when he finally found their lodge – a massive mound of sticks on a canal that connects to a holding pond by T.G.I. Friday’s. Armstrong drags the canoe over land so we can paddle up close to the lodge, before proceeding to another trap, which has snapped but has nothing in it.

He checks six traps in all. “That’s unfortunate. I was hoping I’d be able to show you a beaver.”

He says town officials estimated there were 15 to 30 beavers in the area, but he thinks many neighbors who have had close encounters actually saw another water-faring furbearer – muskrats.

Armstrong told the health director he’d be lucky if he caught six beavers. Last Wednesday he found his fourth, at the dam on Wigwam Brook. The trap went off the day before without catching anything, so Armstrong put in two near the dam. “Went over this morning, and sure enough I nabbed this guy on one of them. He was a pretty big guy – probably 40 pounds or so.”

Armstrong gives the carcasses to his buddies for bear bait. That includes a fifth beaver who perished on the Needham Street Bridge. After his wife called and told him about it, he ran over and grabbed it, he said.

Armstrong gave a perhaps-overlooked explanation for American expansionism, saying that people kept moving west to hunt beavers. The last time the creatures were around Wigwam Pond was probably 1700, he says.

Now, within a few years of their return, they’re being hunted again.

Armstrong’s efforts seem to be having the desired effect. He says the water level has dropped quite a bit, and the Jersey Street dam and the lower deceiver dam have both been flowing well. He’s not sure where the beavers are living, but says, “I couldn’t find any evidence that they’re still in that lodge.” With no activity at the dams since he made his last catch, he’s pulled up all his traps.

“I don’t know how many beavers are left,” Armstrong says. “There can’t be many, because there just isn’t much sign.”

Back on that shiny Friday morning, his enthusiasm is more palpable during the return ride across the pond.

“I really enjoy doing this,” Armstrong says. “I got lots of other stuff I should be doing. But I find myself saying, let’s go find some beavers.”

Dedham Transcript staff writer Edward B. Colby can be reached at 781-433-8336 or ecolby@cnc.com.