Eager to Help These Beavers

Move over, Samson. You’re getting some new neighbors.

Two female beavers arrived at the Orange County Zoo on Thursday as part of a relocation program to save two dozen of the animals, which faced extermination because they have been gnawing trees in a Riverside County preserve for endangered species of birds.

The beavers will join the zoo’s collection of wild animals, the most famous of whom is Samson, dubbed the Hot-Tub Bear because of his penchant for bathing in swimming pools and spas in Monrovia. Samson was captured and moved to the Orange County Zoo in 1996.

The beavers, who were caught Thursday in what are known as humane traps, got medical checkups at Orange County’s Veterinary Services Department, then rode to the zoo in Irvine in a padlocked white animal trailer.

Biologist Dan Fox, president of Animal Pest Management Services Inc., which snared the beavers, said their trip from the Southwestern Riverside County Multi-Species Reserve near Temecula was “very quiet.”

On arrival, the two flat-tailed rodents seemed unperturbed, peering at news cameras and curling up for naps in their travel cages. Zoo staffers covered the cages with wet towels and turned on an electric floor fan to keep the animals cool until they could be transferred to roomier quarters.

The relocation project has drawn protests from animal-rights activists.

Stephanie Boyles, a spokeswoman in Virginia for the national group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said keeping the animals in captivity is “not a fair trade. We prefer euthanizing over that.”

Boyles said PETA and Riverside environmental group Friends of Lake Skinner will seek a temporary restraining order to halt the trapping. “We want time,” she said. “They seem to need to do this yesterday.”

Managers of the Riverside preserve decided in January to trap and kill about 20 beavers at the 12,000-acre sanctuary because they were destroying trees used by a pair of least Bell’s vireos. The birds’ nesting season begins in early March, hence the deadline.

After animal activists protested lethal trapping, reserve managers decided to relocate the beavers in the wild. That proved unsuccessful, so the preserve then began nonlethal trapping and a zoo relocation effort.

Orange County Zoo officials decided about three weeks to offer homes to some of the animals. Others will go to Moonridge Zoo in Big Bear and Applegate Zoo in Merced.

Two more beavers are scheduled to arrive in Orange County today--if they are captured. “It’s a job” catching them, Fox said.

After a few months in an enclosure next to Samson, the beavers will move to new digs: a 20-by-25-foot area with a trickling waterfall and two ponds that will resemble the beavers’ natural habitat as much as possible, zoo curator Forrest de Spain said.

The challenge is to make the new habitat beaver-proof, he said, so the animals will not be able to gnaw their way out.

The Orange County Zoo is a haven for a number of animals that otherwise would have been killed. Before Samson--who now has his own line of baseball caps, pins, books and T-shirts for sale at the zoo--were the Freeway Foxes, who tied up construction of the Costa Mesa Freeway in 1991 until they could be caught and relocated.

The zoo also is home to Simba, an orphaned mountain lion, and a golden eagle unable to fly after being shot.

Zoo officials say everyone benefits from such adoptions.

“These animals are educational ambassadors,” De Spain said. “They would have been euthanized, and that wouldn’t have done any good.”

Times wire services contributed to this report.