Pale Beaver
 

I got a phone call here a few weeks ago, some USA feller that likes to build things from fur phoned me up looking for pale beaver. He wants pale beaver and he wants lots of them, lots as in really lots, like stupid lots, yes.

So he wants me to buy him beaver, major amounts of pale, X-pale beaver, and th n on top of wanting lots of pales, he also wants high quality. So obviously winter prime, I doubt falls, but you never know. And then of course the beautiful short window stunning spring X-heavy beaver.

The guy was def not born yesterday, has been everywhere buying his beaver, but in modern times he is having extreme difficulty in purchasing properly sectioned goods, meaning when he buys pales, he gets them from everywhere. He is very interested in buying Alberta Saskatchewan Montana pale westerns, but does not want to buy Arkansas beaver nor beavers from other such horrible places. You cannot simply buy goods in a sale, and handpick and dump the unwanted, you have to buy them all, pay commission on thm all, take delivery on th m all thus shipping costs on unwanted, then pay packing/handling on them all, gets freakishly expensive in a hurry.

He really wants good pale beaver, makes beautiful stuff, high end stuff, is the real thing, however if he cannot buy what he n eds without buying 1/4 of th continents beaver, he is going to drop beaver from his line.

Solutions???

I told him maybe I could round up a bunch of beaver folks and send them all his way, but he kinda wants to deal with some sort of a collector, that (his words) "...has a littl skin in the game..."

Side question: how far north do the pale beaver exist in numbers? Certainly Milk/Bow/Oldman/Red Deer Rivers. How about the Battle? North Saskatchewan? Athabasca?

I guess I could have just text d some buddies and asked, but in th nspirit of the big grey ones post, I hereby petition thee!

Pales
 

Marty,

Pales are just a colony thing. I catch them everywhere. Most common are obviously the reddish, or brownish standard westerns. I get into a few colonies or pale or extra pales every year. Just pulled a couple LM’s off the board that are pales. They typically sell well at auction also. I would say they are found everywhere in the west right up into Alaska. PM me, and we can talk about details.

Did somebody say beaver??? What's this guy willing to pay. I got a freezer full of sweet beavers honestly only 5 to 10 what I would call pale. Gorgeous fur. Late fall ice trapped, can get more if it's even remotely worth the while. Sure ain't gonna give them up to make some stranger rich. I'm in the battle area and it's very random for real western pales. More in the ponoka area than any where I have found. But catch two beaver and one is pale and one red in the same family. I love the pale beavers especially the smsll ones with no scars.

This guy that's looking for them was buying out of one specific area known for its pales, his source (buyer) retired and he seeks a new source. It'd be nice to see a user continue using wild fur, especially a western staple. Or a would be Western staple.

He will pay. He's a high end guy. I know that he buys some coyotes too and pays $150 USD for the very best, likely getting all he needs domestically.

So I always figured pales were Western wide, but wasn't sure, never trapped them elsewhere.

Send picture of what he considers as pale.

The last I dealt with NAFA formerly Dominion Sudac, they put pelts in lots according to grade and color. In other words, they did not sell pale hides with dark or red hides.

Maybe that has changed, but I would bet that if a furrier offer to pay a premium for color selected top grade hides, the auction house, any auction house, would be glad to comply if it were a serious offer from a high numbers buyer.

Bottom line, I think there is something fishy about his story.

Pale hides have always brought higher prices, in any of the top grades. He may be trying to do an end run around the auction house to get his pelts at a lower price.

It's a game I've encountered in the past, and in my experience, I have never known it to net the tapper better prices.

Keg
I concur, This struck me as curious when Marty brought it up.
He could talk to the auction and get something working for him if he wants that many hides . I just dumped 70 skins a couple weeks ago at $15.00 each , a mixed lot of smalls and blankets to a local buyer . I think he was suffering buyers cramps , and he likely will send them for tanning and resell. He apparently has a good low priced tanner down east.

They still split them into colours, he claimed they mixed sections, that is different from colour. Section is the area they are from, colour is the colour of the fur.

Pale beaver from Alberta to Arkansas... pale beaver.

I suspect he is playing fast and loose with the truth.

I expect they do mix pelts from different areas, why wouldn't they. It's all about the grade and color, that is what the furriers ask for.

I doubt very much that anyone other then a geneticist could tell the difference between a grade A++ pale pelt from Alberta and the same grade and color from Montana.

I have no problem believing that the further south one goes the less of top grade pelts one might find, but I doubt any one area has exclusively poor grade or poor color pelts.

That being said, it makes sense to me that a buyer would want to concentrate his efforts where they would get the best results. That's just good business sense.
And If I were looking for top quality pelts of a particular color, in large quantities, I would go to the fur auction.

It seems to me that paying a collection of local individuals with no fur grading training to find the best pelts of a particular color could prove to be overly expensive and fraught with potential hazards.

I could see one of those local agents collecting a ton of pelts and then this buyer declining to buy them saying they were not high grade, or more likely, offering a much lower price then expected, saying they were poor color or poor grade pelts.

It seems to me it would take a considerable investment in time and fuel to collect the desired pelts and I doubt very much that anyone would offer a guaranteed price for unseen pelts, which would leave the buyer, you, very vulnerable.

Well I suppose everybody is entitled to an opinion.

The wisest fishcop in the whole world once said, "...Everybody is entitled to an informed opinion..."

What a wise man!!!

I didn't say Alberta Montana mix... he'd be quite ecstatic about that, I said Alberta to Arkansas mix. That would be a problem for a guy who wants to match skins and cut into little pieces and make stuff, and especially to have people pay a good dollar for his finished product.

:thinking-006:Just wondering, is a pale beaver similar to a blond beaver? I have seen a couple of blond ones but can't say I ever encountered a pale one.

Fair enough, it was a bad choice of words on my part, but my statement still stands. Because it would be as true if I had said Alberta and Arkansas or Alberta and Alaska, or Alberta and Argentina for that matter.

My information says pelts are grade by color, size and quality. So a course, sparsely furred deep southern pelt would not wind up in a batch of A++ Alberta/Montana hides.

To put it another way, if it is graded A++ pale, it would not matter where it came from, if my information is correct.

Of course I may be wrong, I make no claim to expertise in the subject, yet logically, if one were selling to the European furriers who buy tens of thousands of pelts a year, as the auction houses do, I doubt very much that one would be in business very long if they mixed low quality southern pelts with high quality norther pelts of any grade or color.

But don't let me talk you out of what you clearly think is a good idea.
As I said, I am no expert on the subject and I openly admit I am far to cautious.

I've been burned often enough to suspect any such plan. I know this has cost me at times, but it has also saved me far more then any loss I have incurred.

It works for me, but that does not mean it would work for you.

There's a kid that calls his fancy coyotes "stunners". The old school buyers/graders call the same thing "BOOMERS".

And next are the millennial graders... coming right up... heavens! Help us!!!

So ya, pale, tan, light brown, and blonde if you wish. But when I go to town and these blonde ladies are running everywhere, their blonde is nothing like a pale beaver. No blonde colour in the sale, but there is pale.

need a photo
 

My question, same as post #5 above, what's a pale color beaver look like? Anyone have a photo they could share?

Pale beaver is one that realizes he is in your crosshairs!

Pale Beaver
 

Here is a pale. This is not the XP blondes that Marty is looking for.
Once I am done boarding the batch of beavers I have I will post a picture of the color variation. This thread is a month late as I shipped 75 in early Dec.


Spruce

Nope that's not what I call pale. The belly and back are almost the same color. I'll send a picture too of what I consider a pale western. I hammered them in 96 and 97 when they were worth a fortune compared to today's insult prices. And I'd get ten out of a hundred that were that beautiful light brown. No red at all. That's battle river beavers tho. They would grade them pale and extra pale and sell in different lots but not worth more than the ones graded dark at the time but without a few bucks

Well hate to break it to you, but that will grade as a pale. Like I said, not an xp, or xxp. They still sell the same, some years for more $.

Spruce