Month: April 2018

GOOD NEWS ON A SUNDAY

heidi08 Earth Day April 15, 2018

After yesterday’s downer It’s a relief to remember our rule of “Only good news on Sundays”. And plenty of good news! Starting with Tuedsday’s meeting at the PRMCC where we will officially ask permission for the beaver festival in Susan Park. (Don’t even make me laugh thinking they could say no.) The very first time I presented to them they were a tough crowd, now they love us, so I’m not worried. (Much)

Then Saturday is the huge John Muir Birth Day Earth Day event. And that is always a fantastic day for beavers and their supporters. This year we are letting kids illustrate three of our banner lamp post flags for the festival. We cordoned sections off for them to color in, and collected wildlife buttons leftover from our Mark Poulin activity a few years back in a container for them draw at random as payment and inspiration.

There are always plenty of volunteer artists at our booth, and poor Leslie and our stalwart volunteers usually work their eager beaver tails off.

You should plan on being there, especially because there will be over 50 environmental booths and it’s a fantastic way to support the planet and celebrate the green spots in our community, This year’s conservation award winners are sure to impress an our good friends at Safari West are among them. So make plans to be there and stop by and say hi!.

We’ll be right by the creek as usual.

Tory MP Nigel Evans furious after Royal Mail shuns Brexit to release stamps with endangered animals instead

A final burst of good news comes from our good friends in the UK where instead of issuing a nasty Brexit stamp like the post office was pressured to they issued a series of new endangered species stamps. And guess who is number one?

Aren’t those lovely? I can’t wait to inherit some from Jon’s willing friends or family.

And finally we have another donation to the silent auction. Which was very timely because it coincides with the 2nd quarter issue of Bay Nature describing it’s creation. It is the current edition of “Nature in the city map” by author Mary Ellen Hannibal and others featuring amazing illustrations by Jane Kim showing the wild wonders of San Francisco.

Together, the five maps are meant to encourage city dwellers to see nature as something that can be found right in their neighborhoods,

I don’t know about you but after I’ve learned what to look for I’m tempted to frame my copy and hang it on the wall. It’s that beautiful.

CONSERVANCY FOR ME, BUT NOT FOR THEE

heidi08 Who's Killing Beavers Now? April 15, 2018

See this pretty logo with the grasses blooming inside the ‘O’? It is for a marsh conservancy in Sacramento called the Natomas Basin Conservancy. Yes, I had never heard of them either Natomas is a Maidu word meaning “North place or Upstream of the people”

The Natomas Basin Conservancy is on the Sacramento river at the edge of the city, and “The purpose of the NBHCP is to promote biological conservation along with economic development and the continuation of agriculture within the Natomas Basin. ” As such they engage in species mitigation and replant native trees for bird use. They have a glossy. top dollar website that implores you on every page to DONATE NOW. They have a host of friends and landowning partners including folks at CDFW USDA and FWS.

And what they can’t stand is those dam beavers.

Here’s a blog post where they complain that the dam beavers are forcing them to wire wra0 replanted trees, and another where they complain that the beavers are eating the trees they planted for the Swainson’s hawk to nest.

Them pesky beavers

These are planted to serve as future nesting trees for Swainson’s hawk, and we are directed to plant them in the NBHCP. But the rate at which they have been felled by beavers is awe inspiring. So we replant. Note in the accompanying photo the security with which we have planted this replacement seedling. DOUBLE fencing, double staking. The stakes are necessary so the beavers don’t tear up the fencing or push it over. The Conservancy hired Sopwith Farms to do this replanting, and its crews have done an excellent job. Let’s see if we can be as persistent in preserving the trees for later Swainson’s hawk nesting as the beavers have been for cutting (gnawing?) them down for purposes of congesting the flow of water in the marsh complexes.

Those pesky beavers. I was warned by USFWS.

NBHCP knows that beavers are such pests that they manage them the only way folks can. In my recent stack of 149 beaver depredation permits I came across theirs issued for 99 beavers and promptly looked them up. The idea that a preserve that values marsh wildlife and kills beavers dropped my jaw a bit. So I looked at our prior PRA’s from past years.

They got a permit to kill an unlimited number of beavers last year too.

I’m sure their heart’s are in the right place, right? Surely they understand the ecology and know what they’re doing, don’t they? I mean it’s not like bunch of biologists and volunteers would kill beavers for no reason.

Here’s a photo of one of these destructive “beavers” from their executive director’s blog.

You would think, if you had been preaching the beaver gospel for a decade now, that SOME of it had penetrated the nether regions, wouldn’t you? That news about fish and salmon and nitrogen removal would sink into some of their hardened ears. Speaking of hardened ears, let’s talk about another permit I came across good for the take of 99 beavers in 2016. This one you might even recognize.

The Cosumnes River Preserve consists of over 50,000 acres of wildlife habitat and agricultural lands owned by seven land-owning Partners. The Partners include The Nature Conservancy, Bureau of Land Management, California Department of Fish & Wildlife, Sacramento County Regional Parks, Department of Water Resources, Ducks Unlimited, and the California State Lands Commission.

You might even have gone hiking or birdwatching on their nice boardwalk there. Here’s their mission

The Partners will utilize stewardship and compatible ranching and farming activities as methods to sustain native plant and wildlife communities and the processes that perpetuate adynamic mosaic of habitats

You would assume if the primary owner was the NATURE CONSERVANCY they would undertake to, you know, conserve nature, Well if you assumed that you’d be sadly mistaken. Because apparently not all nature deserves conserving. Some of them deserve to be issued depredation permits good for take of 99 beavers.

Oh yeah, and last year too,. And the year before that,.

So the next time you hang that glossy Nature Conservancy calendar on your bathroom wall think about the number of beavers they kill every year and the ecosystem services they destroy on purpose so that they can make their preserve look just the way they think the donors want.

I admit, this news upset me a bit. I had to sit on it for two days before I was ready to write about it. In the mean time I touched base with some beaver friends to ask if they knew anyone that worked there. I was given the name of what was described as a smart guy who had worked there before settling on another River Conservancy. I wrote him my concerns and asked if he might have any suggestions about who to contact or how to make approach.

He was very thoughtful and prompt. He answered that beavers were very very destructive and maybe I might want to take some some time to learn about the ecology of beavers at lower elevations first.

Deadly Depredation Digest

heidi08 Who's Killing Beavers Now? April 13, 2018

Looking at the depredation permits of 2016 it is clear we have a winner. (And lots and lots of losers.) For the first time in 5 years it’s NOT Placer. They were edged out by a nose to Sacramento. Although if you look at the number of beavers the permits were issued for, the contest is really not even close.

All told permits were issued for a total of 3,300 beavers in the state of California alone. (I doubt honestly that there are that many beaver anywhere in the state) obviously the actual totals wasn’t any where amount. I think USDA reported 696 beavers killed in 2016. Unlike everyone else they have to report actual beavers taken – not permission given. Wildlife services traps about two thirds of the beavers in the state, so I’m guessing actual take was less than half the allowable.

Still, Too Dam Many.

New this year is replacement of unlimited permits with permits for large sums, like 99 and 50. These are usually issued to utilities, large acre parcels or water reclamation districts. They are annual customers whose names we’ve seen before. If you took out all the big agencies the stats would look a great deal different. Still, it’s a third more than last year, which was twice as many as the year before that. Each permit is issued for more beavers in nearly every county. I’m guessing this doesn’t reflect a sudden boom in the population but a shift in management policy and a wish not to have to do more paperwork.

Bright spots in yesterday’s slaughter review? How about the property manager who listed prior efforts as having used “Friendship traps”. I’m not even sure I know what that is – maybe live traps? – I’m tempted to be totally cynically and ask ‘isn’t all friendship a trap, really?” The other bright spot you can see yourself on the graph if you look very very closely.

One permit issued for San Bernandino County!

Victorville, where the permit was issued, is about an hour west of Los Angeles. If you’re an old timer like me you will remember that there were no permits issued that far south for the past three years and it’s a big deal to have beavers recovering in that area.

(No that CDFG weighs that at all in their decision to grant a permit), but still, it’s pretty cool. There was a campaign to bring beavers back to LA a few years back.

Turns out all they had to do was wait.

DEPREDATION DUTY

heidi08 Who's Killing Beavers Now? April 12, 2018

In August of last year I sent a letter the California Department of Fish and Wildlife with a formal request for copies of all the permits issued for depredating beaver in the state in 2016. Under the Public Records Act they have 90 days to respond, and at about day 95 they wrote back saying they couldn’t find any relevant records to send.

I figured they didn’t understand or had misfiled my letter so wrote again saying I wanted copies of all the permits issued for beaver depredation in the state and surely some beavers were allowed to be trapped in 2016. They forwarded my letter to their attorney who called back and said. Oh, those records! We’ll get those out right away.

But they didn’t get them out right away or even after another 90 days, so I recently followed up with a third letter saying it had now been nearly 8 months since my original request and I still wanted copies of all the depredation permits issued for beavers in California.

And 8 hours later I received a massive set of emails from the attorney.

There are about 150 records, folks asking for permission to kill beavers all over our golden state. I am about half way through indexing them by location, complaint, and permitted take, and can see that one difference is that they are no longer issuing “unlimited” permits like they did years ago when Robin Ellison and I first did this in 2013. Although they’re still averaging about 150 permits a year they’re maxing the take at 99 beavers,which must be pretty near the same thing, (because I’m very sure no one counts or keeps a tally mark on the barn door every time there is a kill.)

So far according to my tallies there have been permits issued for the deaths of 1935 beavers. And,as I’ve said, I’m half way through. This is a significant (50%) leap from 2015 and prior years. I imagine because of slowly getting rid of unlimited beavers. As you can see below, as the number of unlimiteds drop the numbers of beavers permitted climbs, Which makes sense in a horrible sort of way.

Reading through them is as usual grim and tedious with few surprises. The part that catches my attention the most at the moment is the part where the permittee is supposed to list all the things they tried to solve the problem before asking to trap. You and I, and other reasonable humans would of course say things like “Tried wrapping trees, fencing the culvert or installing a flow device”,

But of course that is not what these landowners say.

It is beyond belief how often they say HAZING or CLEARED DAM or REMOVED DEBRIS. As if any one of those things would discourage a beaver from building a dam. There are some who feel they need to defend their behavior so little they say nothing at all or only that they got a prior permit. There seems to be no clear understanding that they should explain what they tried before hand to fix the problem be resorting to trapping. Many just list what the problem forced them to do to maintain conditions.

“I had to drain the runoff/remove debris every morning!” Which of course isn’t about stopping the beavers at all. I think of being in divorce court and the judge asking “What did you do to save your marriage” and the man answers “Her cooking was so lousy I had to eat at the bar every night!” After reading through some 75 of these things I keep expecting them to list irrelevant chores as well…like “I had to put gas in my car and buy milk from the grocery store!” Because it would make nearly as much sense.

Except for one permit that quite touched my heart. It was from a cattle rancher in Siskiyou county and it was one of the very few that were issued for a whopping 2 beavers. In the list of things he tried before resorting to getting a permit to trap he said he attempted:

“repeated removal of dams, mylar flagging as deterrent”

In five years of reviewing permits I have never seen any person mention they tried “mylar flagging” as a deterrent. I know of course people use mylar tape to discourage birds from smacking into windows or eating strawberries, but I’ve never heard of it being used to keep away beavers. Of course one of its repellent properties is the reflection it causes, which we would expect is highly unlikely to happen at night, when the dam-building beavers are actually there.

But still, going through these permits is so horrific one looks for cheer where one can find it. I think it’s kind of adorable. I’m imagining he just used an old balloon.

PONDER THE BEAVER MYSTERIES

heidi08 City Reports April 11, 2018

Some times there are important mysteries, even in your own family or home town that no one can explain to you. Mysteries like why your Halloween candy suddenly disappeared the Friday after you earned it by dressing up in that ridiculous owl costume and begging door to door, or mysteries like why your twin sister has darker hair than you, or why, for instance the same greedy mayor keeps getting elected over and over again?

But they pale in comparison to this new mystery that has suddenly taken shape at the location of the old beaver lodge downtown by Alhambra Creek. I’ve written city staff, city council the county recorder’s office and the city engineer. No one knows anything about what it is or why it’s being built.

I’m thinking it’s a Beaver Temple.