We Catched Us a Wild Mountain Beaver!

We have mountain beavers ( Aplodontia rufa rufa )in our yard. This concerns my wife, since she doesn't like the idea that these rabbit-sized rodents are burrowing under our house, which they are. She's all shock-and-awe, suggesting we try flooding their burrows, deploying smoke bombs, poison and tactical nuclear devices to get rid of these furry phantom menaces. (What can I say? She's got sort of an old-testament thing goin' on there.)

I'm more of a "bring 'em back alive" kinda guy, so I borrowed a Havahart trap from my next door neighbor, and set it up with a fresh apple core for bait. The plan is, catch them here, then deport them a couple miles up the hill, at the end of the road, far, far way from our foundation and tomato plants.

Couple hours later, I got me a wire basket chock full o'some fresh, feisty mountain beaver! Yee haw. A bona-fied living fossil, the oldest living rodent on the face of the earth. A shy kilogram's worth of dirt-brown, warmblooded diggin' machine. A pest that will incidentally eat your garden, if he/she happens to have a burrow close enough for him to bother.

Mountain Beavers just gotsta be free.

And here is the part where we let him go: