One of the joys of living in a small town once again is that we now receive a weekly newspaper. As small town weekly newspapers go, ours is really quite good. The owners of the paper have discovered that focusing on advertising revenue has worked to keep the paper thriving. Instead of trying to make revenue from subscriptions, the paper is distributed free to residential mailing addresses in the service area, thus increasing the circulation levels, which in turn boosts the amount that can be charged for advertising.

We find that we read most of the paper each week and usually pass it on to our son, who lives just outside of our community. Small town papers have lots of differences from newspapers that cover larger urban areas. One thing is the weekly police reports. Our paper devotes a column each week to reporting the calls responded to by city police, county sheriff, and the local fire district. The service area is small enough that each week’s report contains only a few calls. Most of the calls are routine: noise complaints, neighbor disputes, tenant-landlord disputes, health crises, wayward pets, and the like. A few respond to more serious crimes: bicycle and vehicle thefts, an occasional break-in, executing warrants, and such.

Larger cities have too many calls on local first responders to print all of them in the paper. Bellingham, the larger city to the south of our area is where we attend church and we pay attention to news from that city, but generally get our news from that city’s daily paper’s website rather than reading a print edition of the paper. A police story from the Bellingham Herald did catch my eye recently, however.

The incident occurred on Aldrich Road, which is north of the city, not far from where we live. The story reports that one suspect was taken into protective custody while another escaped and eluded the officers. According to the report, the suspect taken into custody was slightly injured before the police arrived and was handed over for treatment. The story might not have been reported and certainly wouldn’t have captured my attention but for the fact that the two suspects were both beavers.

Apparently two substantial beavers were crossing the road and spotted by passing motorists who reported their presence on the road to police. A cruiser was sent to investigate and the officers saw the two animals, but one fled into nearby buses when the officers arrived. The other, which appeared to be slightly injured was placed in the back of the police cruiser out of concern for its safety and later turned over to wildlife managers at the Department of Fish and Wildlife.

The newspaper’s web site featured photographs of the beavers, which means that an alert reporter must have been listening to traffic on a police scanner in order to make it to the scene in time to capture some images before the animals had departed the scene.

There are a lot of reasons why I pay attention to stories about beavers. I have had a few memorable run-ins with the large rodents over the span of my life. I generally paddle wooden canoes which are very quiet as they pass through the water. When I am paddling on ponds and small lakes, I occasionally will startle a beaver, which responds with a slap of its tail on the water before diving away from my approaching boat. The splash nearly always startles me and makes me jump, disrupting the quiet peacefulness of my paddle.

Beavers are the traditional spirit animals of boat builders in some indigenous cultures. Observers are struck by their industriousness in building lodges and dams and providing for their offspring. The creatures are naturally social animals and when you see one there generally are others in the area. Their large flat tails are distinctive and make the creatures easy to identify from a significant distance.

I have always appreciated the non-human neighbors in the places where we have lived. I also appreciate our human neighbors, but enjoy living close enough to nature to be able to easily observe other animals as well. In our South Dakota home, I spent hours observing the deer and turkeys that came to our yard nearly every day. I was able to identify individual deer at times and enjoyed watching the fawns that were born in and spent their early weeks in our yard. Sometimes we assigned names to the babies. One year there were twins that were different enough in nature that we could distinguish which was which for at least a month.

We also enjoyed watching the turkeys in our yard even though they left quite a mess when they came up onto our deck. I learned the hard way that it is not a good idea to feed wild turkeys and if you do, it shouldn’t be in a place where you have to clean up after the birds. I had put a bit of cracked corn out to encourage them to come up onto the deck so my mother could more easily observe them. She enjoyed the show a lot, so it probably was worth the extra work in the long run.

Here we don’t have much wildlife in our yard except for the birds at our feeders and rabbits that nibble at the garden. I don’t think I’m going to be able to identify individual seagulls who come into the neighborhood each week on the day that garbage cans are left out for pickup. I do, however, think that the downy woodpecker that has been coming to our suet feeder is the same bird each day. I’m sure that return visits are regular for the other birds as well, but I don’t think I can tell individuals apart well enough to be sure. The red-winged blackbirds are fun to watch and they generally clear the back yard of smaller birds when they arrive. The lone pigeon who drops by, however, doesn’t seem to startle the other birds and make them scatter. It feeds on the ground and seems to be no threat to the little ones at the feeders.

I’ll keep lookin at the wildlife in our yard, but so far I’ve no suspicious beaver activity to report.