Canopy Roads of South Georgia

Beaver dam

They slide here:

Pictures by John S. Quarterman, Lowndes County, Georgia, 19 Feb 2011.

-jsq

Beaver walking

Hello!

You did this, didn't you?

Lowered Beaver Pond

Did the great beaver dam pipe experiment succeed?

Why yes, yes it did. You can see one of the pipes underneath the second log. And the water in the beaver pond is clearly lower.

Maybe the beavers won't gnaw down as many trees.

Here's where the water goes:

Overactive Beavers

This is what we're trying to prevent by draining some beaver ponds:

Trees gnawed down by beavers.

Here Gretchen pans around the pond:

Draining a Beaver Pond

We like beavers; they keep the water in our 12 acre pond. But they're getting a little too ambitious. They've build another dam upstream, and they're gnawing down trees. So we decided to put a pipe through their dam to fool them (this idea owed to David Fields).

This is an ordinary 4 inch perforated drain pipe, bought at North Lowndes Hardware. It needs to go through that dam I'm standing on. How do you do that? First remove a bunch of sticks (gloves are useful for this):

Beaver fixing dam

OK, I admit we poked a hole in the beavers' dam to make them fix it. Here's one now:

It's best to watch this as a slideshow.

Pictures by Gretchen Quarterman's wildlife camera, 22 Feb 2008, Lowndes County, Georgia.

Beaver v Dogs

This beaver has wandered into the dogs' play pit.

The yellow dog decides to catch it:

VDT: Quarterman Road project completed

The Valdosta Daily Times caught me working on being tactful.

Matt Flumerfelt's writeup actually conflates two different county commission meetings, but gets the gist right:

The fate of the tree canopies lining the rural road were thought to hang in the balance. Several residents spoke in favor of the paving, citing dangerous conditions along the road during periods of stormy weather.

John and Gretchen Quarterman, whose ancestors lent their name to the country lane, led the fight to preserve the road in its original pristine dirt-road condition.

The forest along Quarterman Road is “a scrap of the longleaf fire forest that used to grow from southern Virginia to eastern Texas,” said John Quarterman following the ribbon-cutting ceremony. “This forest has been here since the last ice age.”

Quarterman Road, pre-paving, was the kind of dirt road down which Huckleberry Finn might be envisioned skipping barefoot with a fishing rod projecting over one shoulder.

It was the kind of road near which Thoreau might have planted a cabin.

“Many people don’t know that a longleaf pine forest has more species diversity than anything outside a tropical rain forest,” Quarterman said. “In our woods, we have five species of blueberries, ...

Oh, the beaver will be mad. I forgot to mention the beaver.

The rest of the story is on the VDT web pages. More pictures of the event in the previous blog entry.

For pictures of what lives in the forest, see longleaf burning gopher tortoises, snakes, frogs, bees and butterflies, spiders and scorpion, and raccoon, and beautyberry, pokeberry, passion flower, pond lily, ginger lily, Treat's rain lily (native only to south Georgia, north Florida, and a bit of Alabama), thistle, sycamore, palmetto, mushrooms, lantana, magnolia, grapes, yellow jessamine, dogwood, and native wild azaleas.

The VDT has a good picture of Gretchen cutting the ribbon.

But it's not over just because one road project is completed:

“More people around the county seem to be paying attention these days. Commissioners tell us that already another road in the county has had its canopy saved during paving, and the commission has promised residents of Coppage Road that if their road is paved, their canopy will be saved. Commissioners even seem to like the idea of recognizing canopy roads as a feature of quality of life for residents of the county and for visitors.”

We have a forest. The county just has roads.

Now let's go see what they're doing to the rest of our roads. And schools, and waste management, and biofuels, and industry.... If you'd like to help, please contact the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.