{"id":2379,"date":"2016-02-02T14:26:14","date_gmt":"2016-02-02T20:26:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.savebuffalobayou.org\/?p=2379"},"modified":"2016-02-02T20:48:37","modified_gmt":"2016-02-03T02:48:37","slug":"sad-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.savebuffalobayou.org\/?p=2379","title":{"rendered":"Sad News"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Beaver Has Died<\/h4>\n

Boy Scouts Documenting Wildlife on Buffalo Bayou Make Unexpected Find<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

February 2, 2016<\/p>\n

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\"A<\/a>

A beaver dead of unknown causes on the sandy bank of Buffalo Bayou just east of Loop 610. Tool in front of nose for scale is four inches long. Photo taken\u00a0 Jan. 30, 2016<\/p><\/div>\n

A group of Boy Scouts researching wildlife on Buffalo Bayou came across a sad scene on a sandy bank opposite the Arboretum last Saturday, Jan. 30.<\/p>\n

Paul Hung is a fifteen-year-old Boy Scout from Bellaire who is working with Save Buffalo Bayou on a project to inventory the wildlife on the 18,000-year-old bayou as it flows past the Arboretum, Memorial Park, and the Hogg Bird Sanctuary. The project is Paul’s Eagle Scout Service project, and he had organized a group of six Boy Scouts with Troop 55, Sam Houston Area Council, to float down the bayou looking for and photographing wildlife tracks on the sandy banks. Paul had carefully organized his float trip, checking first to see that the water level was low enough to see the banks, and accompanied by several adults, the group put in at the recently re-opened boat launch<\/a> in Memorial Park at Woodway west of Loop 610, a wooded area known as the Old Archery Range.<\/p>\n

\"Boy<\/a>

Boy scouts and guides putting in at the Memorial Park Woodway boat launch Saturday, Jan. 30, 2016<\/p><\/div>\n

The group floated round a bend and another, passing under the West Loop 610 bridge, working in pairs in canoes to identify and photograph tracks and record their locations. But on a sandy south bank below a high-rise parking lot, the group encountered something surprising: the corpse of what appeared to be an otherwise healthy beaver.<\/p>\n

According to witnesses, the deceased beaver showed no signs of trauma and there were no tracks surrounding the beaver’s final resting place in the sand, which was near an area of willows known for beaver activity.<\/p>\n

\"Deceased<\/a>

Deceased beaver on Buffalo Bayou. Photo by Paul Hung, Jan. 30, 2016<\/p><\/div>\n

Otherwise, he and his fellow scouts had a “great trip,” reports Paul. They saw an “amazing” amount of wildlife.<\/p>\n

“I was surprised by how many animal tracks we found on the Bayou,” he writes in an email.\u00a0 “My partner and I alone found over 30 tracks. We saw Great Blue Heron, Coyote, Turtle, Raccoon, Beaver, and Great White Egret evidence.<\/p>\n

“This gives us a better appreciation of the Bayou, because it is right in the middle of Houston. This is the first of many expeditions on the Bayou. It will take 6 to 8 months to complete [the wildlife inventory], and I hope this will be helpful for\u00a0Bayou education.”<\/p>\n

Save Buffalo Bayou and Paul plan to publish the results of his Eagle Scout Service project as a pamphlet in order to educate the public about the abundance of wildlife living on Buffalo Bayou.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Beaver Has Died Boy Scouts Documenting Wildlife on Buffalo Bayou Make Unexpected Find February 2, 2016   A group of Boy Scouts researching wildlife on Buffalo Bayou came across a sad scene on a sandy bank opposite the Arboretum last Saturday, Jan. 30. Paul Hung is a fifteen-year-old Boy…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[115,171,18,55,304,306,176,307,19,188,308,175,116,225,1,183,71],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arboretum","category-archery-range","category-banks-2","category-beaver","category-bend","category-boy-scout","category-canoe","category-eagle-scout","category-habitat","category-heron","category-hung","category-launch","category-memorial-park","category-nature","category-uncategorized","category-willows","category-woodway"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.savebuffalobayou.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.savebuffalobayou.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.savebuffalobayou.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.savebuffalobayou.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.savebuffalobayou.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2379"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.savebuffalobayou.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2379\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2395,"href":"https:\/\/www.savebuffalobayou.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2379\/revisions\/2395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.savebuffalobayou.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.savebuffalobayou.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.savebuffalobayou.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}