Lance Messinger, Bob Fife, Tom Osmer, Geoff “Hubbs” Hubbell and Steve Seron met one Saturday in August at the Kimball Pond dam and re-installed the “beaver deceiver.”

Bob cut the cable ties holding the two sections of the deceiver pipe where it lay downstream in the woods and we carried the sections up from the woods to the dam spillway, where Bob reattached them. He drove two metal posts into the ground in the spillway (one of them was a re-purposed rail for a garage door) and wired the pipe in place.

A rope was attached to the upstream end of the pipe and tied to a concrete building block. Lance brought two kayaks and Hubbs and he paddled out about twenty feet from shore and sank the weighted end of the pipe in the pond where the water is about ten feet deep. The underwater end of the pipe is about two feet under the surface. Hubbs weighted the downstream end of the pipe with some largish rocks to hold it in place.

And there it is! Aside from being dislodged by a huge flood the pipe should stay in place. If the beavers pile up more sticks and mud in the spillway around the deceiver, water can still flow underneath and the water level in the pond should be under control.

Thanks on behalf of the Canterbury Conservation Commission to Lance, Bob, Tom, Steve, and Hubbs for their hard work on a wretchedly humid August day in rebuilding the deceiver.

~ Written by Steve Seron and submitted by Beth Blair