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GREENSBORO — City government sent an eviction notice to the beavers of Latham Park this week using chicken wire and a backhoe.

Municipal workers spent part of Tuesday removing the beavers’ dam from North Buffalo Creek with the backhoe. And they wrapped the park’s most vulnerable trees nearby in protective wire mesh to discourage the workaholic critters from rebuilding in the same spot, just north of Moses Cone Hospital not far from an Audubon Society natural area.

“So now we’re sort of back to ground zero,” David Phlegar, city storm-water manager, said Wednesday. “We’ll just have to see what happens next.”

The beavers will either take the hint and skedaddle or they will try to rebuild the dam just east of North Elm Street, a spot where their appetite for trees has been a problem.
City administrators also fear the beaver dam’s potential for triggering erosion, which would further pollute a stream Greensboro officials are trying to revive.

Beavers are determined cusses able to ignore annoyances that bother less thick-skinned wildlife, such as loud noises, said David Mizejewski, a biologist with the National Wildlife Federation.

“Being so aquatic, they are very hard to harass,” said Mizejewski, co-host of the “Backyard Habitat” series on the Animal Planet network.

“They’ll just slap the water with their tail, go under and wait you out. They easily hold their breath several minutes.”

The beavers arrived in recent weeks and took down several trees in Latham Park as they built their dam on the other side of North Elm. City administrators initially planned to hire a professional trapper, until they learned state law bans live-trapping and relocating beavers.

That meant it could only be curtains for the beavers if they were trapped, so Phlegar began seeking alternatives and came up with the strategy of taking down the dam while shielding the park’s remaining trees.

City workers wrapped the protective mesh around 50 trees in Latham Park, about 25 on each side of the creek.

Mizejewski said the wire mesh was a good choice because it curbs the toothy rodents’ appetite for bark and wood without harming them.

“If the beavers can’t find anything to eat, they will likely move on,” said the biologist, whose Animal Planet series included an episode on beavers.

Phlegar said he and other Greensboro officials are OK with the beavers as city residents if they just find the right address — a place where their yen for trees isn’t a problem and somewhere less susceptible to bank erosion.

If the beavers rebuild their dam near Latham Park, the city will remove it again, Phlegar said.

He hopes for the best, but he’s also prepared for the possibility that the beavers will leave the park only to set up housekeeping in an equally inappropriate area somewhere else.

What are the odds that might happen?

“That’s the $6 million question,” he said.

Contact Taft Wireback at 373-7100 or taft.wireback@news-record.com