Many Mississippians may not think much about beavers, rodents whose thick fur usually associates them with dense forests further north, but Frank Massey does. Every day, in fact. So do his customers.

&#8220Out of all the animals in Mississippi, the beaver’s the one that causes the most damage, as far as mammals go,” said Massey, a trapper with the Department of Agriculture’s Fish and Wildlife Services, as he checked a drain he’d cleared of a beaver dam in a private pond in the Dogwood Lake subdivision near Bovina. When he first trapped in the pond about a year ago, he’d caught eight or nine beavers at the site, he said, where they’d plugged two drains, severely flooding the dirt road that cuts the pond in half and serves as a dam and roadway to homes.

The result could have been worse, he said: in 2004, an almost identical road/dam across state-owned Lake Dockery south of Jackson caved due to beavers burrowing into the levee, causing water from one side of the lake to spill through the rupture and fill up the other side. Nearby residents were forced to evacuate for a day or more while officials tried to limit the flow