Looks like the joys of killing beavers has gotten a whole lot more affordable. Apparently it’s free on August 27 in Tennessee.
All Tennesseans are reminded that Saturday, Aug. 27 is Free Hunting Day in Tennessee when state residents may hunt without a license. The annual event coincides with the opening day of squirrel season. In addition to squirrels, those species that have a year-round season will be open as well. The year-round species include armadillo, beaver, coyote, groundhog, and striped skunk.
What a great way to celebrate the start of Hamster squirrel season! Why not take care of some pesky beaver problems for free and let Junior have some more practice shooting the gun. Better yet, the state of Louisiana (where my very own great grandmother once owned a general store in Hannibal before the turn of the century)just got rid of 258 laws! Making it fully legal to shoot beaver without a permit any day of the year (provided you use a silencer if you shoot them at night). Bad luck for the otter and mink that try to raid crawdad ponds.
But if you’ve got raccoons, armadillos, opossums, nutria, beaver or other varmints raiding your crops, protection levees or crawfish ponds at night, you’ll be able to use new devices to kill them, thanks to three new laws. Act 64 adds otter, muskrat and mink to the list of “nuisance” animals for shooting with .17-caliber and .22-caliber rifles or with shotguns up to 12-gauge to protect crawfish ponds. Act 169 allows silencers on “outlaw quadrupeds” and nutria and beaver. Act 95 makes other changes.
Well now, the 2009 stats for USDA tell me that American taxpayers footed the bill for over a million animal deaths in this state alone. Having people kill them for free themselves is certainly cheaper.
Don’t ask about the long term costs of all that habitat and wetland lost – it would just confuse the matter.
I saw video from Moses this weekend I thought was pretty rare. Two muskrats ganged up on three mink and prodded them out of their territory. That’s like a steak jumping off your plate and trying to herd YOU to market. Muskrats are food for mink, not the other way around. Apparently it’s rare but not unheard of. Here’s what Bob Arnebeck has to say about it, and his video he caught of the defense. (watch close at 34)
Minks are sneaky little predators with a reputation for killing everything up to twice their size. They like to cache what they kill in their dens, and once, according to a book I read, somebody found 13 dead muskrats there. Muskrats are big rats that spend most of their nibbling grasses in and around ponds and rivers. They can swim, but so can minks. They are bigger than minks but not that much bigger.Then a few years later I was sitting beside a pond once and saw a mink making its rounds along the opposite shore. It poked it nose in the wrong muskrat burrow. Go, rat, Go!
Here’s a short homage to the underdogs….
Don’t Blink! A Mink. (I think)
Sweet! What do they eat? Fish? Meat?
Muskrat! Oh, that? Well, drat!
Poor little guy! I wonder why? He has to die.
What are they? Prey? You don’t say. Hey!
Ack! I thought they were a snack! Look out, attack!
and here’s how its SUPPOSED to happen
No mink this morning, just three beavers, an apple-green spider, and muskrats square dancing.
Way back in 2007 when I first learned about the “Keystone Species” concept I asked around to find out if there were others besides the beaver. I was told there definitely were but that information was passed a long time ago in school and they had forgotten. Worth A Dam’s receiving organization “Land for Urban Wildlife” was a great fan of ground squirrels, so I knew about them. And the mysterious tail motions of the egg-laying alligator were quirky enough to get my attention, but other than that I wasn’t sure. Turns out there is no “complete list” on the internet, but I thought you might appreciate this new tool that I have added to the margin. Click on an individual picture to learn why it is considered a Keystone Species. Some of them lack useful videos explaining their role, so for the moment I linked to a cool video instead. I’m sure that will change as more conservation ecology students do their homework this semester.
Some people say I’m too negative about the USDA. I’m always berating them for their vicious beaver/woodpecker/goose-killing ways. Maybe I should be more balanced. Say something nice about them for a change.
Okay.
Once I was attending a lecture in graduate school and, bored beyond belief, I glanced down at my sweater sleeve. It happened to have tiny flecks of color in the wool and the random pattern was fun to look at – or more fun than the lecture anyway. This time, though, the tiny flecks were moving.
I left class in a panic, certain I had such a bad case of head lice that they were dropping off in droves. I drove straight to the daycare where I’d worked forever knowing they could help. They fearlessly sat me down and checked my head. Then said, nope not lice.
I bug bombed the house. Threw out the sweater and shivered my way onwards. I didn’t see any more crawlies. I thought I was safe. Chalk it up to experience.
Next week I went back to class. Same teacher, same room, (practically the same lecture). I glanced down to keep from falling asleep and saw MORE CRAWLING!!!!!!!
This time I caught a few of the escapees. Someone told me to bring them to USDA in Concord to figure out what they were. They soberly took my tiny bugs. Dropped them in a vial of fermaldehyde and shipped to Sacramento. It was surreal, but oddly comforting. 2 weeks later the report came back.
Acacia Psyllids
As it happened they were Acacia Psyllids, a problem for the trees but not harmful to us or sweaters, and I had to walk through Acacia trees to get to class. And that, ladies and gentleman, is a good use of the USDA.
Seems there was an apartment complex in South Carolina that sported some recovering geese, injured by fishing line and beloved by residents. (Well, SOME of the residents).
The trucks pulled up at dawn. PollyAnna, a year-old disabled goose whose wing feathers were growing back, was asleep when the trappers approached. Not long after, Debbie Dangerfield, a real estate agent and 16-year resident of River’s Edge, a sprawling residential complex in Charleston, S.C., was leaving her condo to check on PollyAnna when she noticed she was missing. Also gone were a dozen or so geese parents and their young.
The crippled geese also seemed to have vanished: Nibbles, a young gander with a damaged wing; Limp, so-named because of an upper-leg injury, and VeeVee, the victim of fishing-line entrapment.
As Dangerfield approached the entrance to the complex, she noticed two USDA trucks pulling away from the guard house and broke into a dead run, reaching the vehicles as they slowed to accommodate speed bumps. She begged the drivers to pull over, peering inside one of the trucks as they did.
There she saw PollyAnna crammed into a crate with half a dozen other geese.
Ouch. That seems harsh. I know you have jobs to do and all, saving airways from disabled geese or whatever, but just FYI, you probably shouldn’t ever take wildlife with a name. Don’t worry. They weren’t completely heartless. They did give her the “Sophie’s Goose Choice”
Eventually the police came and the River’s Edge management agreed to let her keep one bird.
Mary Lou’s EXCELLENT article follows goose-killing in New Jersey, Alabama, Mississippi and Oregon. It’s a grim shocking look at a fairly invisible outrage. She describes a freedom of Information Act-forced disclosure documenting countless wildlife killed by the USDA. (Including beavers of course.) Since the article is paid for by a private DC grant, and she works for the McClatchy Tribune (Same as the reporter I spoke with before the festival) I have to imagine that this data is making the rounds and going to generate a few similar stories in the future.
Looks like the joys of killing beavers has gotten a whole lot more affordable. Apparently it’s free on August 27 in Tennessee.
