I recently went to areas that I trapped 38 years ago in Alabama.What I remembered was beautiful pastures and fields of grass with a small stream running through them. I caught beavers up on the hillside before they got to the bottom. I went by there with a picture in my mind of what it used to be.
What a mess. All grown up flooded trees and woods and pasture. What used to be a beautiful scenery below the hillside is now just a flooded massive tangled up trees and unusable land. Beavers have destroyed tremendous amount of properties it was so beautiful before. Maybe you’ve had some of the same experiences. I wish I had a photographic memory that I saved of areas I trapped that were abandoned by future trappers that never were.
Maybe some of you have similar experience but you saved the before’s.

Amen Kirk. Except around here you go back to a tree lined creek you knew many moons ago to find a straight dredged ditch with riprap no trees and a big blacktop parking lot.

Sounds better than a new housing development!

Sadly changes are part of life.Nothing ever stays the same.

We have that too!

I used to hunt a farm that had a creek running through it. Many years ago, horses, mules, and wagons forded the creek to work the farm land on both sides. Now, the lower side is a beaver swamp and the owner does not have deeded access to the other side where some valuable timber is growing. His neighbors know his problem and refuse to allow him access. They also freely hunt the unused side. Beavers caused this.

Trap the creek behind my house my entire life. Sure has changed since I was a kid.

Around here when you go back it’s either cut over or a pine plantation, no hardwoods much anymore.

Kirk... That is what happens when we get old... to me it is so sad. It is just good we grew up when we did... I think we lived the last of the good times and life.

Garry-

Yup, travelling through the small town I grew up in some 40 plus years ago and decided to take a walk down memory lane through my old rabbit snaring and grouse hunting paradise which was the foundation for my trapping bug. All pavement and townhouses. Sad.

We still have hardwoods in my part of Virginia.

Well where my house sits was a farm field 30 years ago, now it has a house with one outbuilding and the rest is planted in native grasses and forbs, think prairie. There are now Bluebirds nesting in this field. On the other side of the place is a small field that was cut for hay. Now its going in the same direction as the field the house sits. The woods have been thinned and White Oaks are and other species of trees are being planted. The worst invasive native plants are being slowly eliminated.

So not everything is getting worse, at least my place is getting better.

The only constant in nature is change.
Personally I love wetlands. Diverse habitat and wildlife. It also keeps most people out.
Duck hunting in these backwater wetlands is quiet and peaceful. These areas keep the building sprawl down. Here the wetland buffer for development is hugh. So they leave it alone.
Besides, I trap beaver as a full time job. Great advertising when as Kirk describes it most folks think it is ruined so we get hired. Win win here.

Seems like every place i used to put a canine set Now has a house, trailer or shack with the piles of trash around them Getting hard to visualize a grassy ridge with a bright fox standing there

One mans trash is another mans treasure. My area could use some flooded impenetrable timber. It seems like every ditch is getting cleaned out and every brush row is getting pushed into a pile and burned around here.

Beaver have been extirpated here for the last 120 years. They have lots of work to do when they move back in and I'm looking forward to it. The closest colony I know is about 40 miles away. I figure in 20 years we will have beavers here again.

Sad deal Kirk!

Good to hear from you Kirk. Hope you are doing well and safe. We sure do miss having Taylor around, but I know you are glad to have them back home. And that new grand baby to spoil. Keep safe to you and yours.

Sounds like great wildlife habitat. Your lucky It didn't turn in to a strip Mall or a golf coarse.

I would take your grown up flooded areas with trees over my Apartment buildings, Walmarts and Starbucks anyday. At least you have something to work with. I don't.