PAGE TEN
Lake Louise Beavers Are Pleasant
Neighbors, C. F. Goeringer Thinks
Only Remaining Local Couple Have Resided
On Estate Three Years, Once Flooded Road
The beautiful wooded shores of C
become, quite by accident, so far as
a retreat for discriminating beavers
onrad F. Goeringer’s Lake Louise have
any one has been able to determine,
. . . and while the couple which have
made their home out there also made considerable inroads on his stand
of timber, Mr. Goeringer considers them very pleasant neighbors indeed,
and will allow no traps to be set
for the industrious little trespassers.
They are something of a prize pos-
session to him . . . for after all it's
not every country gentleman who
can have a pair of beavers in his
front yard.
A few days ago a reporter from
The Post went out to Lake Louise
to investigate the beaver situation,
since the Goeringer beavers are
about the only family in this sec-
tion of the county and hence are
really very prominent residents of
the Back Mountain region.
Mr. Goeringer himself wasn't
home at the time, but the reporter
followed up a couple of errant sheep
and ran across one Joseph Gavek,
who works about the Goeringer
farm and knows all about beavers.
“Beavers,” he explained, on the
way down to the wooded shores of
the lake . which incidentally,
Mr. Goeringer created himself some
nine years ago, because it seemed
to be about the only pleasant geo-
graphical features his estate lacked
. “are destructive little beasts.
The ones we have here cause more
damn trouble than they're worth.”
It was easy to see what he meant
when the little party reached the
lake shores, for all along the eastern
bank it looked as if a twister had
wandered aimlessly through the
woods, knocking down trees in all
directions. Beavers, you under-
stand, are intrepid woodsmen and
are willing to tackle any tree up
to a foot in diameter. Not just
any kind of tree will do, though, said
Gravek, for beavers are discrimi-
nating and won’t sink their cutting
teeth into any but soft-wood
growths. The toll on poplars and
birch is particularly heavy, and bass-
=
MUSKRATS AND WATER
SNAKES SHARE LAKE
WITH BEAVER FAMILY
Beavers, of course, are not
the entire complement of wild
life at Lake Louise. A thriv-
ing colony of muskrats has
lived out there on Goeringer’s
estate for a number of years,
too. There seems to be some
affinity between muskrats and
beavers, and wherever one ani-
mal is found, the other is near
by. The Goeringer musk-
rats have their runs and homes
adjacent to the beaver hutch
and seem just as satisfied with
the Lake Louise territory as
the latter.
There are a good many
snakes about the lake, too,
and one day last month Joe
Gavek, an employee of Mr.
Goeringer, shot 15 at the outlet
of the pond.
IN
wood and soft maples are consid-
ered toothsome, too.
Are Good Lumbermen
The Lake Louise beavers don't
seem to care where they cut, either,
and every so often Gavek has to
take his axe and cut away trees
which have been felled across the
pathways of the wooded private
park. Perhaps the beavers prefer
to work around the paths, because
it’s easier for them to get around.
Their methods are fairly simple.
A well-trained beaver will stand on
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{
Typical Beaver
Haunt
It is in quiet forest pools such as this one that
beavers prefer to make their homes, well protected
from the inroads of humans, whom beavers regard
with suspicion, and surrounded with soft-bark trees
from which the busy little animals take their food.
his hind legs, which brings him a
foot or so from the ground, and
chew around the trunk until an ade-
quate cut has been made. And then
he stands back from his work and
waits for the wind to blow up and
topple the tree to the ground. All
the wild tales about beavers knock-
ing trees over by slapping them
soundly with their tails is strictly
nonsense says Joe, who has made
something of a study of beavers and
knows what he’s talking about.
After a tree has been felled, the
beavers strip off its bark with their
teeth and then cut off all the twigs
and branches within reach. And
then just to make sure that no one
else makes off with the assembled
debris, they take it into the lake
and anchor it to the*bottom, where
it’s money in the bank until winter
time.
Oh, yes, in case you've been won-
dering, beavers do all this in order
to get three square meals a day.
Being herbiverous little beasts, they
like nothing so well as a good chew
of bark or mouthful of sapling. And
for some reason or another they're
always putting a little aside for a
rainy day. A night in the summer
hasn’t been well-spent unless a tree
has been felled or a fallen tree
stripped. Given a few more years
. they've been there for three
now . . . the Lake Louise beavers
will have constructed a wicker-ware
bottom for the entire pond, and
perhaps then they’ll retire from the
timber business and sit back to en-
joy life.
A year or so ago they constructed
a dam, from force of habit, along
the road which skirts the little lake,
and succeeded in flooding a consid-
erable portion of the eastern shore.
In fact, so successful was their en-
terprise that the road was impas-
sible for quite some time, complete
ly awash in the dam back-water.
For two small creatures they've cre-
ated considerable stir and roam in
the period of their residence.
Move To New Home
After a year or so on the eastern
bank, however, they decided that
| perhaps their whereabouts would
become known, so about a year ago
they picked up their household ei-
fects and traipsed across the lake
into new territory. Their new
home is just acoss from the picnic
clearing on the eastern shore, and
fits snugly into a little cove before
a well-nigh. impenetrable section of
the woods on the west bank.
Woods, however, mean nothing to
The Post reporter, and he plunged
into the dense underbrush behind the
sturdy back of Gravek to get a bet-
ter look at the beaver haunt. As
he and the woodland youth ap-
proached the new beaver hutch, he
éould ‘see a number of smoothly
worn trails heading towards the
lake . . . Beaver slides they're called
. along which the couple navigate
in their travels. Incidentally, the
beavers had the good judgment to
i build just beyond a stone fence,
which was calculated to keep out-
siders from prying into their pri-
vate lives. That fence, by the way,
must be a hundred or more years old
and was a feature of a farm that
used to cover the one-time meadows
now flooded over by the lake waters.
The top of the beaver hut looks
like . . . and is . . . a huge pile of
cut twigs and branches, with moss
and clods of earth pushed into the
intercesses to make it watertight.
The real living quarters, though,
says Joe, are under water. Probably
the beavers have tunnelled under
the lake bottom for quite a space,
to make sure that they would be
free from interference. There is one
opening above water, but the main
entrance is located® somewhere be-
neath the surface.
Gervak has seen the beavers oc-
casionally. They're nice, plump, lit-
tle animals, he says, with luxuriant,
glossy fur of brownish-black. They
weigh somewhere around thirty
pounds, and their pelts or blankets,
as they are sometimes called, would
bring fifteen or twenty dollars on
the open market. But perhaps the
beavers understand how nice they
would look around a pretty girl's
neck, and so whenever they see
some one coming they make them-
selves scarce. Now there, says Joe,
is where their tails come in handy;
when a beaver hits his stride, he
uses his tail for leverage. You can
hear a good, husky beaver thump
his tail a mile away, when the wind
is right.
How long the beavers will stay
around the lake is purely a matter
Agriculture Had
Heyday In 1915
Farm-Crop Value Was
Higher, Problems Less
Records of the Pennsylvania De-
partment of Agriculture show in-
teresting conditions existing in
farming in this state 25 years ago
when agriculture was enjoying a
heyday as compared with the mul-
tifarious problems of 1941, Secre-
tary of Agriculture John H. Light
asserted today.
In 1915 there were approximate-
ly 219,000 farms in Pennsylvania
compared -with about 169,000 at
present, acreages devoted to the
various grains were greater, yields
‘were as high and in some instances
higher and yet prices received by
the farmer were above those of to-
day. Livestock, poultry and milk
prices, however, were lower and
the same was true of wages, but
more people were employed be-
cause farms had not reached the
present high state of mechanization.
In 1915 the estimated wheat har-
vest was 24,928,000 bushels from
1,312,000 acres: which had a total
value of $26,174,000 compared with
the 1940 production of 18,789,000
bushels from about 900,000 acres
which had a value of $15,219,000.
The total estimated production of
of conjecture. They are more or
less nomadic, and whenever the best
has been taken from the forests,
they are very apt to set out for
other Elysian fields. That's prob-
ably how they happened to move
to Lake Louise to begin with, al-
though there has been loose talk
to the effect that the State Game
Commission planted them in the
neighborhood.
Whether or not the Lake Louise
beavers have been raising children
on the side is not known. At least
no one has seen any young beavers
about. It might be a good thing
for the beaver population if they
have, however, for the breed is
rapidly falling off in these parts. A
colony that used to make its home
on North Mountain has fallen on
hard years, and the beaver situa-
tion has been so critical in Wyo-
ming, Sullivan and Columbia Coun-
ties of late that no trapping is al-
lowed in these regions at all.
corn was 54,792,000 bushels which
had a value of $41,641,920 com-
pared with a production of 53,640,-
000 bushels valued at $38,621,000
last year. Hay shows little change,
the production 25 years ago having
been 3,558,000 tons compared with
3,238,000 tons, but the value of the
crop a quarter century ago was
placed at $56,752,200 compared
with $31,850,000 last year.
The average price received by the
farmer for his milk was $1.76 per
hundred pounds, 33 cents for a
pound of butter, live chickens 12
cents a pound, 80 cents a bushel for
potatoes and 38 cents per dozen for
eggs. Milk retailed at an average
of seven cents a quart.
The average farm wage with
board by the year was $235 or $1.20
a day with board and $1.60 a day
without board. The last general
report showed the average wage
rate per month with board was
$29.50 and the daily wage $1.80
Warning
A warning has been issued by the
Department of Agriculture to all un-
licensed livestock dealers to pro-
cure their licenses at once to avoid
prosecution. Several prosecutions
have already been made for failure
to procure 1941 licenses and in each
case fines have been imposed in
addition to the costs of prosecution.
Tobacco
There is a total of 113,841,000
pounds of Pennsylvania seedleaf to-
bacco in storage in the warehouses
of the country. This compares with
112,788,000 pounds stored a year
previous and 79,260,000 pounds
held January 1 this year.
with board and $2.35 without board,
but considerable advances will be
shown from those figures when the
present survey is completed as a
result of the defense industry wage
appeal to farm labor,
FHik 427%
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