O Gertrude, Gertrude,
When sorrows come, they come not single spies
But in battalions.
Hamlet Act IV: Scene 5
Sick baby beaver rescued in Martinez has died
WALNUT CREEK — A sick, malnourished young beaver found on Mt. View Sanitary District property in Martinez this week has died.
The kit appeared to be on the mend, but succumbed early Thursday evening. Experts still have no idea what caused the recent mysterious deaths of four other beavers living in nearby Alhambra Creek.
Two sanitary district employees found the three-month-old beaver kit on Tuesday. It appeared to belong to a family of beavers in Moorhen Marsh, a 21-acre wetland area where the sanitary district discharges treated wastewater that is home to beavers, river otters and western pond turtles. They brought it to Kelly Davidson Chou, district biologist. The tiny critter had a runny nose and appeared lethargic and unsteady on his feet, she said.
“I was expecting a much larger beaver because it’s not the time of year you see kits of this size,” said Chou, who took the ailing animal to the Lindsay Wildlife Rehabilitation Hospital in Walnut Creek for treatment.
The young beaver was two to three pounds underweight and most likely had an upper respiratory infection, according to Guthrum Purdin, director of veterinary services at the Lindsay. Purdin was treating the kit with antibiotics and hand feeding him rodent formula containing pureed grass, soybean hulls, wheat germ and other plants.
Four Alhambra Creek beavers, including three kits born this year, have died since July. The sudden deaths have perplexed veterinarians at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife who have ruled out rabies, pesticides, toxins, poisons and tularemia, an infectious disease commonly found in rodents.
“All we know is what it isn’t, we don’t know what it is,” said Heidi Perryman, executive director of Worth A Dam, a Martinez nonprofit dedicated to protecting and promoting the beavers.
Yesterday that kit from Mt. View Sanitation took a turn for the worse and died. They have no idea why. It’s not unreasonable to think it might be related to our kits’ cause of death. Lory is picking up the little body and taking it to UCD for necropsy this morning. Everyone is heartbroken about this little death, even the reporter I called with the bad news last night.
What is happening to beavers in Martinez?
At the edges of the heartbreak is something else: a stony relief. Maybe the fact that our kits died wasn’t our fault: I’ve been trapped under anvils feeling weighed down with the notion that I’m supposed to protect them and I didn’t. Maybe it wasn’t our dirty creek, our scary homeless, our public feeding. Moorhen Marsh is about 4 miles away and much less trafficked. Maybe it wasn’t anything I could have/should have controlled. Maybe death is gripping our beavers for reasons we can’t understand. Maybe this baby will give us answers.
But it still sucks.
While we’re discussing pointless tragedies, here’s one I encountered last night on the way home from work. NPR in its infinite wisdom was running a story about some entrepreneurs who are making some money off the feral hog problem in Texas by selling helicopter rides to shoot them from the air. No I’m serious.
Now I don’t want to be a save-everything, or start the first chapter of Worth A Hog, and I believe feral hogs can cause problems. But selling tickets to an all-you-can-shoot air ride is beyond horrific. And the fact that it was promoted on National Public Radio was outrageous. You can listen to the story here and share your outrage here. Or even better yet directly with the suits here:.
