It used to be that North America had enough wildlife and wild places that it was easy to think that everyone could help themselves. During the fur trade there were no bag limits and just imagine what it would be like if the only thing standing between you and your fortune were a few unlucky beavers.

Now things are more complicated, but we still aren’t sure how to proceed. This article by Kyle Artelle points out that a great deal of our ‘policy’ isn’t based on the science we pretend is determinative.

Is Wildlife Conservation Policy Based in Science?

An overview of the model reveals something that might come as a surprise to much of the public: Wildlife management in Canada and the United States primarily means management of hunting, and it is focused on the small subset of the human population that hunts, not on the conservation of species and their habitats for their own sake. Some of the blurring is likely intentional, an adaptation of organizations to evolving cultural mores that place a high value on conservation. For example, the Boone and Crocket Club, the world’s first hunting club, describes itself as a pioneer in conservation, and adheres to the aforementioned wildlife model that guides hunting across Canada and the United States, the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation. However, even though conservation and wildlife management might overlap, understanding where they don’t can be critical, especially as it pertains to management ostensibly done on behalf of the public.

Conservation is certainly not incompatible with hunting. Cultures across North America were sustained by animal populations for millennia before European colonization triggered the widespread degradations seen in recent centuries. However, the two can certainly be at odds.

Hmmm conservation and hunting are so much at odds that a senator from San Diego is introducing a bill to ban the fur trade in California entirely. She says it’s cruel.

Fur trapping was once the heart of California’s economy. A new bill could ban it.

A new bill in the California Legislature would put an end to a California industry that predates the Gold Rush. Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego, submitted a bill that would prohibit the state from issuing fur trapping licenses.

Now I’m just a retired psychologist but I’m thinking that cruelty from beaver trapping for the fur trade is the very last thing on my list of things to worry about.  i’m much more worried about giving out permits to Depredate any beaver that interferes with your property. Thousands of beavers lost their lives because of chewing the wrong tree or damming the wrong stream last year.  I’m sure not even 100 were trapped for their fur in our state.

Her bill will still get some attention from the hunting lobby I’m sure. But this discussion in American Scientist raises points that are a lot more threatening to the pass time. The author points out that we like to pride ourselves that our hunting policy is ‘science based’ and that we don’t let people take more animals than is good for the population.

But this in itself is problematic because no one is counting the population anymore.

The effects of managed exploitation might extend far beyond targeted species. The environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb has recently published a book on the ecological importance of beavers, titled Eager: The Surprising, Secret Lives of Beavers and Why They Matter. By phone from Spokane, on the heels of one of the worst wildfire seasons in history, he waxed ecologically about the myriad benefits his buck-toothed protagonists provide. They serve as keystone engineers of ecosystems across the continent, creating firebreaks that help to attenuate large-scale wildfires, providing habitat for endangered salmonids, supporting sedges eaten by one of the rarest butterflies in North America, and improving water quality by entrapping sediments, filtering agricultural runoff, and raising water tables.

Beavers also serve as textbook examples of the conflict between conservation and wildlife management objectives. The book contains slapstick scenarios of various government-led initiatives operating in direct contradiction to one another. During our phone call, Goldfarb said incredulously, “In Wyoming’s Bridger-Teton National Forest, you have the Forest Service working to reintroduce beavers into watersheds as a restoration tool. At the same time, you have the state permitting trapping of those very same beavers. There are cases of folks carefully planning and carrying out the restoration of beavers to a particular stream, only to have the phone ring with a trapper calling to say, ‘Hey, I’ve just bagged one of your ear-tagged animals!’”

Goldfarb explained how this story illustrates the contradiction between beavers viewed through a lens of conservation and beavers viewed through a lens of human interests. He also noted similar contradictions elsewhere across the country. For example, thousands of beavers are killed to address complaints such as blocked culverts and property flooding. Effective, nonlethal alternatives are used far less frequently.

YUP, that’s the world we live in. Some agencies are trying to reintroduce beavers to restore wetlands and some are issuing permits to kill them. And hey here n California they don’t even allow folks to do the first part because beavers are pests. Ya know?

Despite their pesky qualities, Ben’s remarkable book is just getting dropped into so many interesting conversations. It even found its way into the SF gate yesterday when they republished Jay Matthews article from the Washington Post about using well-told stories to teach science

“Science education focuses on doing, which is the way we’ve been teaching science for decades,” she told me. “We will continue to do so under the NGSS. Science students will spend much of their time doing experiments, studying their results, and coming to conclusions, but in a highly organized way, and now they will be asked to explain what they’ve been doing.”

“They will be missing out on science’s stories, its challenges, its heroes, its villains, and its aspirations. Knowing the narrative behind an achievement – breaking the genetic code for example – helps nail its underlying meaning and importance,” she said.

My favorite recent books have been David Quammen’s “The Tangled Tree” (molecular biology), Ben Goldfarb’s “Eager” (beavers) and Steve Brusatte’s “The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs.”

All in all, I would say the right people are talking about beavers to the right people because of Ben’s book. And that’s an awesome thing to behold. Lets finish our story of wonders with a fantastic photo from devoted bat advocate and beaver friend Jo Ellen Arnold who has missed the beaver festival for the last few years because of her wonderous eco-travels. She lives on the American River in Sacramento and often sees sights like this in her back yard.

About this photo she writes

“My friend and neighbor, Robert Sewell, got a text from another neighbor the other day reporting that there were 5 beavers basking in the sun on the north side of the American River at Sutter’s Landing. By the time he got there, he found only this one bathing beauty, but what a catch! We see evidence of beaver all along the river, and Robert says the openings to their dens are now visible since the river is so low. I’ll have to get him to show me where to look. I’ve seen them swimming at dusk, but never during the day, and never out of the water.”