Jim Dull stands in the creek, waist-high in water, raking at a dam.
He yanks out tree branches, moss, mud, leaves and more branches. Everything is entangled, intertwined and wedged together, strong enough to hold back a stream and flood a local resident’s yard.
But from the instant he starts to rake, the dam comes apart and the water starts to flow. Dull almost seems disappointed.
“They didn’t do a good job,” he says.
He's talking about beavers.
This dam near Coburn Rd off of M-37 in Hastings Township took just five minutes to disassemble. It must have been some younger beavers, Dull says. A good dam, one made by the mother and father, could take 30 minutes of ripping and pulling and tearing to break apart.
“Man, you gotta appreciate it,” Dull says. “Anybody that is as ambitious as they are. How many people do you know work all night long to get something built? I know a lot of people that don't work at all.”
After years as an excavator, homebuilder and county commissioner of District 7 in southeastern Barry County, Dull took over as drain commissioner in 2016.
And, when he started, people kept calling him about beavers. A beaver's in the backyard, they would say. It had clogged up the drain and the road was flooded.
Dull had to learn about beavers quickly. As drain commissioner, he has to clear every dam that clogs a county drain – in a county with nearly 330 lakes, he says. Even if it’s not a county drain, if someone calls and needs help clearing a dam, the drain commissioner will go out and clear the dam.
“We try our damnedest to try,” he says.
Dull doesn’t deal with just a beaver here or there. During the peak months in the spring and fall, he deals with them on a daily basis. Last year, the drain commission team caught nearly 30 beavers. If they don’t trap them, Dull says, the beavers will come back the next day and the next day and the next day.
But Dull doesn’t mind it. He couldn’t imagine working a desk job. He forces himself to spend 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. in the office every day and then he’s out. He’s out looking at drains, answering calls on his flip phone, driving through the county with paper maps and dealing with the beavers. His truck is littered with equipment he might need on the road – scissors, bug spray, jackets, a deflated fitness ball, camouflage boots, black boots, a lunch cooler, rope and a discarded chocolate chip granola bar wrapper.
“It beats the hell out being in the office,” he says.
When Dull finishes clearing the dam, he walks out of the chilly October water in boot-foot waders with a smile on his face.
“Ain’t it pretty out here?” he asks, giggling. “This is a perfect job.”
Dull’s work with the beaver dam is done. Now it’s time to trap.
***
Hanging up on the wall of his garage, Earl Craven keeps a list of the 90-plus beavers he has trapped for Jim Dull. He documents each catch with a tally on the paper, a picture on his phone and a thumbtack of the location on his Barry County map.
But being good at trapping comes with a price: The beavers are killed. It’s part of the reason Craven says he hesitated about doing the interview in the first place. He doesn’t want people to misunderstand.
“I'm not an evil person, I don’t want to be perceived that way,” Craven explains. “I’m a man doing a job who is very blessed; who has much compassion for the animal, you know?”
Craven started working with beavers within the last 10 years when a friend needed someone to clear a beaver dam in his backyard. But he had never trapped one before, even as kid in Nashville.
The beavers didn’t go easy. They buried some of his traps and avoided others. It took six weeks to catch those two beavers – six weeks of going back and forth to the same dam every single day.
Craven laughs when he thinks about his first assignment. He can’t believe how long it took him. But, when he finished the job, he knew he wanted to keep beaver trapping.
“I couldn't wait for the next chance to do it,” he remembers.
Word spread. His buddy told someone else who told someone else: Earl Craven traps beavers.
In the meantime, Craven was learning more. He got his damage and nuisance control permit from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. He joined Facebook groups with beaver trappers. He made friends across the country, in Vermont, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. He watched YouTube videos. He “hit pay dirt” on a beaver-catching DVD that changed his whole outlook on the operation. He started a business, Easy E Trapping.
Around 2019, Craven got the part-time job with the drain commission as its beaver trapper. When Dull clears the dams, it lures back the beavers, who want to rebuild their creation. Craven will then place a trap near the destroyed dam, baiting them one by one. He will check on the traps every day until seven days pass without finding a dead beaver. Sometimes it can take weeks of clearing the dams and trapping the beavers to fully clear an area. Even then, the beavers might come back and start all over again.
Craven sets up a Bridger #5 trap in his garage in the city of Hastings. He won’t share all of his tricks. Some stuff is on the record, some stuff is off. But he’s willing to show that it works.
He kneels down on the concrete floor and props up a rod. He chains a foothold trap to the rod so that it dangles down in the air. Normally, the trap would be hidden underwater, with a piece of the rod and pink tape sticking out from the top of the water.
It’s a small trap, the size of a bowl, with a pedal-looking feature in the middle. But, when it snaps, it’s strong enough to break Craven’s finger.
Craven must bait the beaver into stepping exactly on the pedal. Then the clasp will snap on its foot and the beaver will sink down the rod, into the water and drown. When Craven cannot see the pink tape anymore, he knows he has caught a beaver.
He's still experimenting with his trapping methods. He's trying out a new rod and he even bought a trap that looks more like a rectangular dog-crate. With this trap, if he catches another animal, like an otter or a turtle, he can let them go without harming them.
“I ain’t getting rich off this. I ain’t making a whole lot of money at all,” Craven says. “I do it because I enjoy it. I enjoy the trapping, the cat-and-mouse. It's an old tradition nobody does.”
Killing beavers, though, has an effect on the ecosystem and it isn't inconsequential. Actually, it's quite the opposite. They’re considered a keystone species.
“They're essential in creating these wetland spaces,” says Mary Parr, stewardship manager at Pierce Cedar Creek Institute. “And so that's kind of what makes them a keystone to that ecosystem. In their absence, you know, none of that would exist.”
The beavers aren’t building the dams to be a nuisance or flood roads. Instead, Parr says, they’re “creating wetlands where there were no wetlands previously.”
The beavers literally fly underwater, carrying logs the size of their body weight in their mouths, breathing through a second lip. They will fill all of the holes in the dam with wood before using mud to “plaster” the structure, Parr says.
But Parr also calls them “big meatballs.” On land, they are vulnerable to predators. Under water, where they can use their webbed feet and hold their breathe for 15 minutes, they feel safe.
In turn, they also create habitat for a number of animals, like waterfowl, muskrats, otters, minks, toads, frogs, salamanders and fish. It provides a place for ducks and geese to park overnight as they migrate.
“In a time of climate change, when a lot of wetlands might not have existed as they did previously, those habitats are going to be essential for dispersal of species as they're moving north into the climate range that fits their suite of skills,” Parr says.
But there’s a conflict.
“They prefer the same regions that humans do," she says.
That means flooded roads, yards, houses and drains.
And that means Jim Dull gets a lot of phone calls from people in Barry County needing help.
***
Some days, Dull estimates, he receives two phone calls. On other days, he’ll get 40. Either way, the phone calls don’t bother him. He always tries to answer his phone and, if he doesn’t, he will call back.
“I got a pet peeve about that,” he says. “I don't like to call somebody not to get a response. So I try to call them within less than a day. … You're gonna call me, you probably got a reason that you want answered.”
Dull gives everyone his cell phone number and he rarely takes a day off. His wife likes taking trips across the country, but not Dull. He doesn’t like leaving work and he doesn’t like leaving Barry County. “I’m just tickled to death to be here,” he said. When someone calls him, he wants to be able to call back and do something about it.
“The more exposure we get, the more people will know what we're doing,” Dull says. “If they have beaver dams, they'll know enough to call us.”
They’re not trapping beavers for fun, Dull emphasizes. They’re trapping because some beavers need to be trapped.
“I don't care for trapping because I don't like to kill things,” he says.
Craven calls it “management.” And he follows a strict code. He does everything he can to avoid having to kill a beaver. He will only take necessary jobs, he said, like when a road or home is flooded.
“I don't get a call from the road commission because some guy’s got a beaver eating his tree,” he says.
When it's beaver season, November through April 2022, Craven can skin or eat the beaver. If they’re going to die, he tries to get the most out of the animal.
“I don't get no glory out of killing anything,” he says. “Much respect to them; I try to use anything I can off of it.”
But there’s not much more the drain commission can do as far as dealing with beavers, Craven and Dull say. If a beaver is causing a safety hazard for humans, it has to go.
Relocation of the beavers is not a good idea, Dull says. Beavers are territorial and, when they enter the haunts of another beaver, the result is often bloody and violent.
Even if Craven does move the beavers, he’s just “relocating a problem,” Craven adds. Trapping is their best option. And that’s a testament to the beaver, Craven says – his favorite animal.
“If they build that dam and you go tear it out, they will build it again tonight,” Craven says. “If you tear it out, they will build it again the next night.
“You will not win.”