By JEFFERSON WEAVER
Staff Writer

Although he normally loves a challenge, Gregg Lee was tired and frustrated.

Lee is a Wildlife Services agent based out of the Whiteville office of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. His job is removing beavers, muskrats, and other wildlife that create problems on farms, timberlands, and municipal properties.

Several years ago, he was battling a particularly pesky colony of beavers that dammed a municipal drainage canal near Bladenboro. The beavers had built a series of dams in a virtually inaccessible place, and were backing water up for miles.

The beavers were protected by duckweed, another invasive species. Duckweed and gatorweed are plants that choke and fill almost any water source, making passage difficult if not impossible for conventional boats. Approaching the dams via the canal’s banks was difficult because of heavy growth and the flooding caused by the beaver dams.

The weeds combined with silt, snakes, and other hazards to give the beavers a safe haven. Lee had no choice but to walk, wade, and sometimes swim down the canal to approach the dams.

“We tried boats, ATVs, you name it,” he said. “There was no way to get there without wading for an hour or more.”

Until the day he saw an airboat.

“I knew that’s what we needed,” he said.

Airboats are flat-bottomed fishing boats equipped with engines that drive airplane-like propellers mounted over the stern of the boat. Airboats are commonly used along the Gulf Coast for fishing, hunting, construction, and even search and rescue operations. Since the boat’s power source is above the water, the hull encounters very little resistance from weeds, logs and debris below the surface.

A private weed control agent had been hired by the town of Bladenboro to deal with the troublesome weeds, and was using an airboat on the same canal Lee was trying to clear.

Lee hitched a ride on the airboat and used explosives to clear out the beaver dams in less time than it would have taken to walk halfway to the beaver colony.

“The time it saved me on the job was really something,” he said. “It was nothing to go in, blow the dam and come out. That got me to thinking about how we could put one to use.”

Lee began researching airboats, and convinced his boss, Gerald “Butch” Adams, of the efficacy of the vessel. Adams got approval from his regional supervisor to pursue the project, and Lee got to work.

The only drawback was a lack of funding.

Making it work

New airboats cost from $15,000 to $40,000, depending on the size, speed, and engines. Used craft generally run half that.

Purchasing a new or used airboat was not an option due to budgetary restraints, and since the technology hadn’t been applied to beaver control in North Carolina, it was unproven.

Besides that, Lee said, he had some other ideas. The weed technician’s boat was excellent for spraying herbicides in hard-to-reach places, but Lee needed something that could carry one or two people, plus several hundred pounds of equipment and supplies. Commercial boats can easily carry that much weight, but he needed something light enough to be handled by one man.

“I saw where some improvements could be made for our purposes,” he said.

The agency could obtain enough money for parts, and it had a nearly-new aluminum boat left over from another job.

Lee, who said he enjoys working with metal, contacted the designer of the boat that ferried the trapper around on the Bryant Swamp Canal.

“I liked his design,” Lee said, “but there were some things I wanted to do differently. He told me to go ahead.”

Lee used scrap metal, the 12-foot surplus boat, and a 90-pound ultralight aircraft engine. He added a winch and a rustproof, aluminum winch frame, raised the seat, built protective boxes for the controls and necessary gauges, and strengthened both the engine mounts and the protective cage around the four-foot propeller.

The result was what is thought to be the first airboat owned by the USDA in North Carolina. The first boat was such a success that Lee built a second, slightly larger boat.

Since then, Lee has written a safety and operations manual for the airboats, and is regularly called on by other agencies to help gain access to remote areas. He has used the boat all over the state where conventional boats couldn’t get to beaver dams.

“Gregg did an outstanding job on this project,” Adams said. “I was skeptical at first, but he’s proven it works. He’s really good at finding creative solutions.”

“New challenges”

Lee said he likes solving problems.

“I like to find ways to help the landowner,” he said, unloading the boat near a flooded timber farm recently. “That’s what we’re supposed to do. I like the tough jobs no one else wants, because I like new challenges. I like to find problems and create solutions.”

At this particular farm, generations of beavers had flooded several dozen acres of timberlands, obscuring the original creek and creating a huge, shallow lake filled with dead trees, stumps, and debris. The land was in the lowlands of the Cape Fear River, and every time the river crests its banks, more water is added to the lake, but none can drain because beavers have blocked a creek and a canal.

Roads leading to the problem area are impassable to most vehicles, so Lee unhooked the boat and towed it to a mudflat with an all terrain vehicle. He designed the attachment system to link the trailer to the powerful ATV, since he regularly works areas that trucks can’t reach.

“If you can’t get a boat to the water,” he said, “it doesn’t do you any good.”

At the water’s edge, Lee used a winch to keep the ATV stable and half-floated, half-dragged the boat into the shallow water. After a few minutes of warming up the engine and a check that was similar to pre-flighting an airplane, the boat was ready to go.

“Let’s go find a beaver dam,” he said.

Airboats are often thought of as extremely loud, which would be a problem for some Wildlife Services applications. Lee was also concerned about disturbing residents when he works populated areas.

The agent solved the problem by installing a silencer from a large motorcycle engine.

“It makes a big difference,” Lee said.

While operators and passengers must still wear hearing protection, it’s still possible to have a conversation onboard the boat without shouting.

“The whining noise you hear is from the tips of the propeller breaking the sound barrier,” he explained. “Most of the engine noise is cut out by the muffler.”

The boat is turned by twin rudders that stand behind the propeller. The rudders are directed by control sticks beside the operator’s seat – again, like the yoke of an airplane. Air blowing against the sides of the rudders causes the boat to turn left or right much faster than conventional boats.

Searching

Lee carefully navigated the boat across the forest-turned-floodplain, easing the boat across half-submerged logs and even coasting over stumps that would have impaled an outboard-driven boat.

“You can go a lot of places in these,” he said, “but you have to be careful doing anything.” In open water, the boat can travel 20 to 25 miles-per-hour.

The boat breasted logs and fallen trees with less trouble than a car negotiating a speed bump. It drove right over a muddy area covered in feed beds used by muskrats and nutrias, and easily maneuvered around large cypress trees as Lee looked for fresh beaver activity.

Lee stopped the boat in what was once a grove of hardwoods, but was now more like a pile of driftwood, thanks to the beaver-induced flooding. He took a global positioning system reading using a handheld mapping device, and tried to plot the original course of the creek that caused the flooding.

“The maps say the original run is over there somewhere,” he explained. “We’d never find it on foot, and the maps say it’s a small run anyway. The beavers have been working here so long the creek has disappeared.”

After a half-hour of searching, Lee found a series of dams along the original creek run and plotted their locations. Later, he would contact the landowner, and outline plans to destroy the dams.

“I like to be able to compare the topographic maps and what I find to see how much water is being held back,” he said, “because that can sometimes tell you exactly where a dam is. But sometimes you have to find dams the old-fashioned way, by just looking. It’s still the surest method, and this boat helps me get where I can do that.”

Gesturing to the 40-foot wide barrier, Lee checked the depth on the downstream side.

“If we needed to,” he said, “we could drive right over that dam without any trouble.”

The ability to cross a beaver dam or other obstruction without stopping is another advantage airboats have over conventional craft, Lee said.

“It makes some people nervous when they see the boat going straight at a dam,” He grinned. “They think we’re going to crash, or start flying. Instead, we just slide right over and keep on going. I’ve given some people some white knuckles.”

He poked the lake bottom with the handle of a potato rake, and found eight to ten inches of mud under only two feet of water. The nearest accessible shoreline was hundreds of yards away.

“You couldn’t wade through this and search for a dam,” he said. “You’d be stuck or worn out in just a little while.”

Out-of-the-way places his favorite

Lee said the airboats are just one more part of a job he loves. He missed becoming a game warden for the state twice. When he first attended the Wildlife Enforcement Academy, he would have graduated a few months shy of 21, the legal age to carry a handgun. The second time he entered the school, he was involved in a serious car crash.

“I think God was telling me something,” he said.

The trapper said he was contacted by Milton McLean, who also traps for the local USDA office.

“Milton said he had a job he thought I’d like,” Lee said. “He was right – I love it.”

Lee said he especially enjoys getting into out-of-the-way places where private trappers have given up on finding problem beavers.

“The further out you get, the more remote, the happier I am,” he said. “It’s even better when I can help the landowner save some timber, or maybe help a farmer save his cropland.”