Category: Beavers elsewhere

THE MISSING BEAVER PIECES

heidi08 Who's Killing Beavers Now? September 13, 2020

I heard yesterday back from one of the lawyers at the Center For Biological Diversity that has done some work on beavers in the past for California (Collette Adkinz) that the news about the mass EIR for every species likely to be impacted by APHIS was in direct response to their NEPA/CEQA litigation. I was right about it being something no one volunteers to do. They are the root canal, so to speak. She hoped Worth A Dam would be responding as well and I thought first about beaver population, which no one is studying. Because trapping beaver in a populated area means something different than trapping the only beaver in the area. The closest thing we have to an indication of population numbers is the record of their nuisance. Obviously if there aren’t enough beavers to merit even a single depredation permit, there probably aren’t very many beavers in the area.

So I spent yesterday starting to go through our UN permits – meaning all the places where a permit was never granted. It’s a long job because you have to take the record for the actual permits and discern what never happened. And my old friend that used to make these maps for me is long gone so I had to laboriously use a new tool to try it myself.

But I think this is starting to look really interesting.

First of all what this shows is that the Southern half of the state is missing plenty of beavers. And second I think this is beginning to show what a huge impact it has on all of central california when beaver are depredated. The population takes a long while to rebound. Regions at the edge like Kern or SLO take even longer to rebound. I have four more years to slog through but I think in the end the counties who have reported no beaver depredation over the time period or only 1 or two permits in 7 years should be marked as a special risk on the EIR of what is likely to happen to the population with an APHIS response.

Or hey maybe what it means is that before APHIS is allowed to trap beavers someone should you know, actually count how many there are.

THE OREGON BEAVER DEFENSE

heidi08 Beaver ecological impact, In the News, Who's Killing Beavers Now? September 13, 2020

Oregon deserves all our prayers today with 10% of the population evacuated for wildfires that are burning out of control. So I’m letting them take the reigns. On Thursday the Center for Biological Diversity petitioned the department of Fish and Wildlife to stop allowing beaver trapping on federal lands. Here’s the press release.

Oregon Urged to End Beaver Trapping, Hunting on Federal Lands

PORTLAND, Ore.— Conservation groups filed a petition today asking the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission to permanently close commercial and recreational beaver trapping and hunting on the state’s federally managed public lands and the waters that flow through them. Beavers are Oregon’s official state animal, but they can be legally hunted and trapped with few limits.

Cascadia Wildlands, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Conservation Angler, Defenders of Wildlife, Northeast Oregon Ecosystems, Umpqua Watersheds, WaterWatch of Oregon and Wetlands Conservancy filed this petition along with Dr. Suzanne Fouty, a retired hydrologist with the U.S. Forest Service, who has been studying beaver influences in the West for 25 years.

The Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission discussed this request in June as part of its review of the state’s furbearer regulations. But it was rejected then as being outside the scope of that rulemaking notice. Today’s petition initiates a new rulemaking process for the commission’s consideration.

“Federal and state agencies, watershed councils, utility companies, conservation groups, and private landowners spend countless hours and millions of dollars every year to restore Oregon’s waterways, mimicking the natural behavior of beavers,” said Nick Cady, legal director of Cascadia Wildlands. “At the same time, Oregon’s Department of Fish and Wildlife permits limitless commercial and recreational trapping of beavers and does not even monitor populations. The department’s beaver trapping and hunting regulations are outdated and directly undermine the extensive, ongoing restoration of our water resources and efforts to recover imperiled salmon populations.”

Beavers are a keystone species and offer widely recognized ecological, economic, and social benefits, today’s petition notes. Beaver-created and maintained habitat improves water quality, decreases the impacts of floods, and restores natural water flows. This benefits humans and a wide variety of fish and wildlife, including highly endangered coho salmon. Beavers therefore play an important role in improving Oregon’s water security and minimizing impacts of climate change on human and wild communities.

“Beavers are our natural allies in the fight against climate change,” said Quinn Read, Oregon policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “We live in the Beaver State, and it’s appalling that beavers are still hunted and trapped. This cruel practice favors a few people and deprives other Oregonians and endangered salmon of the benefits of beaver-created habitat.”

Few people in Oregon trap or hunt beavers. But today’s petition points out that the annual culling of the species has significant negative effects on beaver populations and their corresponding social, economic and ecological benefits. The petition’s requested changes wouldn’t affect hunting and trapping opportunities elsewhere but they would allow beavers to thrive on federally managed public lands.

“Many people don’t know just how critical beavers are to functioning watersheds that, in turn, benefit hundreds of other plants and animals, including threatened and endangered species,” said Sristi Kamal, senior northwest representative for Defenders of Wildlife. “Beaver conservation on federal lands could be key to the conservation success of such species and their ability to survive and adapt to climate change impacts.”

Beaver populations have been significantly reduced from historic levels through hunting and trapping. These ongoing practices suppress population growth and expansion into large swaths of unoccupied suitable beaver habitat.

The full Petition from the Center for Biologic Diversity is available for review and does an excellent job of pulling together the research in a compelling beaver treatise. I’m hoping it is used to inform california as well. I’ve embedded the link so just click on the title to go see for yourself. I hope you go read through it because it will really help inform your next argument persuading folk to cooperate with beavers.

*Joe Wheaton: Emerald sanctuary in Idaho firescape*

WHAT DAMAGE TO WILDLIFE DOES OUR RESPONSE TO WILDLIFE DAMAGE CAUSE?

heidi08 What's killing beavers now? September 11, 2020

You know how it is, you wake up and blearily check your inbox to see what beaver issue you’ll be writing about this morning, like a fisherman checking his line. Sometimes you get tiny little guppies and have to string together a couple to make a meal.

But sometimes you get a whale.

Report to cover wildlife damage management activities in CA

USDA, CDFA to conduct joint environmental review of agencies’ roles in wildlife damage management

WASHINGTON — The United States Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) is advising the public of the intent to prepare a Joint Environmental Impact Report and Environmental Statement (EIS) for wildlife damage management activities in California.

APHIS has entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) to develop a joint environmental review of both agencies’ roles in wildlife damage management in California. The scope of the analysis will include APHIS’s cooperative activities with Federal and State agencies, California counties, Tribes, and local municipalities managing human-wildlife conflicts caused by birds and mammals. Cooperative activities may include:

Reducing damage to agricultural resources;
Reducing damage to infrastructure and property;
Reducing wildlife strike hazards at airports;
Managing damage by invasive species;
Reducing threats to human health and safety associated with wildlife; and
Protecting threatened and endangered species

Did you hear that? Gosh did someone say beaver and salmon and wildfire? I’m sure I heard someone call my name. I know someone is calling yours.

.The Federal Register Docket will be available for viewing on September 9, 2020 here: http://www.regulations.gov/#!docketDetail;D=APHIS-2020-0081. Comments will be accepted September 10-November 10. Two virtual public meetings will be held during the scoping period on October 13 and October 27, 2020. Details for participation in these meetings can be found at www.CaliforniaWDM.org

–USDA APHIS

Hmmm. Hmmm. Of course I rushed to the website to see what I could find. It is very interesting to me that USDA & CDFA would enter a MOU to prepare and EIS about potential effects on wildlife. Why? Usually EIRs are things you submit after kicking and dragging your heels for a very long time. They are what people the courts make you submit when you’ve exhausted all other options or have lost the argument.

An EIR is like a root canal. Very useful when needed. but nothing you’d volunteer for.

For context, the huge lawsuit won at the appellate level in Riverside against CDFG and LA waterand LA water was ONLY requesting that they do an EIR before trapping beaver. It turned out to be a nuclear weapon that to my knowledge has never been used again.

The California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) and Wildlife Services (WS-California), a state office within the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal Plant and Health Inspection Service (APHIS), intend to prepare a joint Environmental Impact Report and Environmental Impact Statement (EIR/EIS) to provide a robust and comprehensive environmental analysis of current and proposed future wildlife damage management activities undertaken across California. The EIR/EIS will evaluate impacts associated with wildlife damage management activities performed by CDFA and California Counties under CDFA’s proposed Wildlife Damage Management Program (WDMP) as required by the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), and by WS-California as required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). These activities would be undertaken in a collaborative effort between WS-California, CDFA, and California Counties to prevent damage to agricultural resources and infrastructure, protect natural resources and promote human health and safety. Additional information about the proposed WDMP and WS-California’s current wildlife damage management activities is provided be low.

Doesn’t it strike as odd that they are creating a impact report in advance of any action they are going to take for the year? I mean let’s say that there is an extreme unexpected drought that suddenly threatens all the wildlife in southern california. Wouldn’t the impact of any previously approved action vary according to current environmental conditions?

Maybe it’s something akin to the police damage waivers unions require cities sign. We’ve weighed the possible consequences and whatever outcome happens we pre-approved the risk. We are no longer liable for the results.

It’s the last one on the list that I think touches us most closely. Watercourses. protected species. and natural habitats means beaver if anything in the world does. It is practically their middle name.

They will accept 60 days of public comment on their proposal and there will be a public virtual meeting in October. I’m assuming that thy are planning to create an EIS for the impact of every species in every region of the state. That’s a bizarrely broad undertaking, but we can certainly give them an earful.

Anyway, we’ve all got a lot of reading to do. All the info can be found on the WDM page. It’s just a hunch, but I’m pretty sure that when they say “wildlife damage” they mean the damage wildlife does to YOU not the damage they do every day to wildlife.

INTERNATIONAL COURT, COPYRIGHT LAW, AND BEAVERS

heidi08 Who's Killing Beavers Now?, Who's stealing photos now? September 7, 2020

You may recall that there are two sets of beavers in Scotland. One ‘official trial’ in Knapdale in a landmass they can basically never escape, and one “unofficial” in the Tayside where our friends the Ramsays live. And after much hemming and hawing they were both granted permission to stay in the country. But there was a catch. They could only stay if there could be a legal permitted way to kill them when they caused issues for farmers. Scottish National Heritage was put in charge of the process.

There has been a massive scandal in recent days as a hardworking reporter from the Ferret, Rob Edwards obtained a copy of the training slides Scottish National Heritage used to educate the chosen few. The slideshow so horrified thousands of countrymen that there have been more than 15000 signatures to a petition to stop the killing. Remember Scotland is a small country. They haven’t ever had that many people sign anything.

This is from the final slide and partially explains the alarm.

It took all my breath when I first saw it. Not because of the dead beaver, lord knows we’ve seen enough of them over the years. But because of the joyful children in juxtaposition. Obviously having a fun day out with Dad. Killing funny things with flat tails,

And when you’re a child and your dad is a racist or a trapper or a terrorist, you don’t know any better. How could you? When I was a child and my father used to spray chemicals into the elm tree to avert dutch elm disease. I didn’t know any better. I would sit on the stairs and collect all the dying caterpillars that dropped out in a little container with leaves, hoping to keep them as pets. Every year I was surprised that they stopped moving within hours. And I didn’t understand until much later that my father spraying chemicals had killed them.

So I went though the slide show grimly reading how to kill beavers by catching them where they lived or worked and getting entire family groups. I downloaded it for your education if your stomach is strong enough But it was the third slide that REALLY got my attention. Maybe you’ll see why.

If that picture in the lower right corner looks familiar it should. Because its the photo of one Cheryl Reynolds taken of our kit and dad beaver in 2013 in Martinez California.

Our beavers used to teach snipers how to shoot family groups.

Of course I was beyond incensed. I contacted the reporter who said that the slideshow was prepared by the Scottish government and that he would find out how they got our photo. In the meantime he was willing to mark it as stolen on their website where I found it. Even though for him it was the middle of the night.

I believe this entire slideshow and decision to train authorized beaver killers was, what we candidly would call in America, a royal clusterfuck. The idea that some perky intern sat down on their laptop and made a power point about how to kill every last beaver (don’t forget the little ones) is beyond horrific. And the idea that they would browse the internet(s) like looters and choose photos from OUR WEBSITE where we teach how to NOT kill beavers is outrageous.

I wrote the board of the Scottish Natural Heritage as much and will let you know if I or the reporter hear back. If they wanted to do this right they could have used any of the thinly respectable trappers organization or even the USDA. Obviously they didn’t take this job seriously or they would have been more careful in how it was presented and not finished with a photo of two little girls having a dead beaver tea party

Stay tuned. I think there will be more to this story.

BEAVERS IN SANTA BARBARA: AN ORIGIN STORY

heidi08 History, Who's saving beavers now? September 5, 2020

Okay, there is a sweet local article this morning about the little baby beaver at Suisun Wildlife Rescue but we are indulging me because I’m doing the typing. This article from Edible is actually in the perfect location to care enough to report this right. And I just have to share it.

Dammed If They Don’t

Could a creature left out of Southern California history revive its waterways?

This piece was supported by a Society of Environmental Journalists funding award, underwritten by The Hewlett Foundation, The Wilderness Society, The Pew Charitable Trusts and others.

And Leslie’s article is worth EVERY PENNY. I tell you.

Parts of Ventura County’s Sespe Creek are nearly as wild today as they were in the early 1900s, when Joseph Grinnell first caught wind of the “unexpected find” there. It’s hard not to wonder what might still lay hidden among its rugged terrain.

If you know what to look for, you can still make unexpected finds of your own: old chewed up sticks or, via satellite, structures bearing the characteristic signature of the creatures’ engineering feats.

Where did the beaver come from, are they still here, and do they belong here? “It’s like a Sherlock Holmes mystery,” said Rick Bisaccia, Ojai Valley Land Conservancy’s former stewardship director, of the 100-year-old hunt for answers. And the answers could point the way out of many of Southern California’s ecological quandaries.

Oooh ooh call on me! I know!

In 1937, Joseph Grinnell, the first director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at Berkeley, answered that question in a hefty treatise on California’s fur-bearing mammals: no. Or rather: no, but…. On his California beaver range map stood a lone question mark far south and west of any other native population. Grinnell was apparently unconvinced of what had been found there. The mark was right atop Sespe Creek.

Fifty years later, Rick Lanman looked behind his Bay Area home and wondered why a stream that used to flow year-round until the 1950s was now dry half the year.

Oh I know this story! YOU know this story. We like this story.

“One of my theories was maybe beaver perennialized it,” said Lanman, who is a physician, researcher, self-proclaimed serial biotech entrepreneur and founder of The Institute for Historical Ecology. Beavers’ heavy ponds push water into the ground during wet times. Then, in dry times, the replenished groundwater feeds the stream.

But according to the ghost of Grinnell, who continued to haunt official beaver range maps, the Bay Area was also a beaver desert. “Which doesn’t make any sense,” Lanman said. The animal thrives in both the Canadian tundra and the deserts of northern Mexico. Why not coastal California? Lanman and his colleagues went digging for answers.

Oh I’m I feel like I’m back in kindergarten sitting criss-cross applesauce on the teachers rug and listening to my favorite story told over again. Aren’t you?

Luckily, history is written all around us and in 2013 Lanman and his co-authors published their results. All over California, they found beaver evidence in old newspapers, ships’ logs, fur trapper journals and place names. Local Chumash references included words for beaver, a beaver dance, a shaman’s beaver-skin rainmaking kit and perhaps even a beaver pictograph. It appeared the once-widespread creature had been hunted—in some places to near extinction—by the time Grinnell examined their range.

These were clues, but in science direct physical evidence outweighs words. A skull specimen and carbon-dated dam remains settled the case in the Bay Area and the Sierras respectively. What about Southern California?

What Grinnell had symbolized on the map with his Sespe question mark was, in life, the origin of a beaver skull specimen. And when Lanman uncovered letters between Grinnell and the skull’s collector, zoologist John Hornung, the Sespe question finally got its answer:

On May 19, 1906, Hornung chanced upon the dying beaver near Hartman Cold Springs Ranch in the Sespe. An “unexpected find,” he called it. Perhaps, though not too unexpected. “There are still quite a few beaver in Southern California,” he added.

“What Grinnell… had failed to account for,” wrote Goldfarb, “was history.”

How Lucky can you get. A reporter who contacts Rick Lanman, and Emily Fairfax, AND reads Ben Goldfarb’s book. Now I’m not stupid. I knew this day would come. But I truly never thought it would come from Edible magazine in Ventura County!

California beaver work remains complicated by its history. For example, policy remnants prohibit beaver relocation, says Fairfax. And, according to 2016 WATER Institute report, Beaver in California, no CDFW codes promote beaver stewardship or restoration.

Public perception can also complicate the matter. Though Fairfax’s work details how beaver activity can act as a fire break and drought buffer, beavers have their own agenda.

“Beavers are absolutely an agent for good in the environment, but…sometimes they will conflict with humans,” she says. A dam-induced flood enriches soil and improves water quality and availability in the future, but it’s hard to stomach a flooded farm crop to get there.

Luckily, beaver experts are also innovators. Inventions such as “beaver deceivers” give humans influence over pond levels or dam locations and simple trunk treatments can discourage the gnawing of a prized tree. Beavers and humans won’t be able to coexist in every situation, Fairfax cautions, but she encourages “taking that extra minute to stop and think: If there is a beaver, how can I interact with it in the neutral way, instead of trying to control it?

And perhaps, in the end, relinquishing a bit of control is the moral of the California beaver story. In an increasingly dynamic climate, we humans still think and build statically, encasing our rivers in concrete. Beavers, however, build for flux, for generations and for an interspecies community.

“The beaver is the story of someone who is working hard and they’re trying to make the environment a better place… for their families and for the future,” says Fairfax.

Yes, beavers belong here because they benefit us and other creatures. But mostly, one might point out, they belong here because they always have.

Oh my goodness. I could read hear this story over and over. Thank you so much Leslie for this retelling. It is the best one I can ever remember.

Leslie Baehr is a science writer and content strategist who works with media outlets, research institutions, not-for-profits, and companies. An alumna of MIT’s Graduate Program in Science writing, she enjoys exploring the interplay between science and ideas.