Massachusetts has felt very badly ever since those pesky voters in ’96 took away their right to use certain kind of traps and selfishly demanded that beavers be humanely killed. Now we are treated with alarming regularity to civic hand-wringing about this woeful and crippling legislation and the ensuing beaver population explosion. Of course since they changed the laws they can statistically prove that people get permits to kill beavers LESS OFTEN since the passage of said laws,
but that doesn’t necessarily mean there beavers get KILLED any less often or that there are more beavers because of this fact.You do know that people don’t always get permits, right?
No one can be bothered to count the beaver population or even to compare the number of complaints to a neighboring state without similar trapping restrictions. Instead they spend their mournful afternoons at the State house looking for legislative friends and finally Mr. Bergquist and those trap-happy folks in the bay state have hit upon a solution.
If state laws are too restrictive, bring in the feds!
So Massachusetts has adeal with Wildlife Services on the table to take care of “LARGE RODENT DAMAGE”. The plan is online here and is open for public comment until the end of June. I will be wading through its lavishly overwritten and information-obscuring pages this weekend. It is absolutely stunning to me that even after the horror of Thomas Knudson’s reporting on WS in the Sacramento Bee, which ran in McClatchy papers across the nation, describing the alarming numbers of ‘accidental’ otter kills in beaver traps, the shocking rate of house pets killed by mistake, and the reports of WS employees being told to remove and bury dog and cat collars and never tell the owners—-even after two congressmen are calling for a bipartisan investigation of the agency, Massachusetts looked closely at their blood-thirsty, species-indifferent killing fields and thought, now THAT’s just what we need around here! Wildlife Services!
The money quote so far
Conibear traps are allowed for controlling beaver and muskrat to protect human health and safety. However, the MDFW acknowledges that this restriction does not apply to WS activities on federal lands (see Appendix E; W. MacCallum, MDFW pers. comm. 2010).
A coyote hunts rodents in the Sierra Valley north of Truckee. The animals generally pose little danger to cattle.
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We interrupt this beaver broadcast for the new alarming tale of Wildlife Services from reporter Thomas Knudson, who contacted me before last year’s beaver festival and wanted to talk about APHIS statistics on beaver killing. He sent several FOIA reports he had obtained and wanted to talk about the parts of California where the most beaver are recourringly trapped. Later he visited Mary and Sherry of the Sierra Wildlife Coalition to talk about bears! Then he toured Elk Grove and learned all about their beaver contracts, which prompted this oblique article when I was dying to be able to talk about his discoveries. Without further ado, let’s go grimly onto the first of Knudson’s three part article.
Since 2000, its employees have killed nearly a million coyotes, mostly in the West. They have destroyed millions of birds, from nonnative starlings to migratory shorebirds, along with a colorful menagerie of more than 300 other species, including black bears, beavers, porcupines, river otters, mountain lions and wolves.
And in most cases, they have officially revealed little or no detail about where the creatures were killed, or why. But a Bee investigation has found the agency’s practices to be indiscriminate, at odds with science, inhumane and sometimes illegal.
Got your attention? Good, it should. Go read the entire, chilling article and brace yourselves for part two and three. One of the things that most interested Tom in our discussions was the ‘accidental’ killing of otter that occurs by the thousands when placing traps for killing beavers ‘on purpose’. I connected him with our new friends at the River Otter Ecology Project to chat about its implications.
“We pride ourselves on our ability to go in and get the job done quietly without many people knowing about it,” said Dennis Orthmeyer, acting state director of Wildlife Services in California.
Basic facts are tightly guarded. “This information is Not intended for indiscriminate distribution!!!” wrote one Wildlife Services manager in an email to a municipal worker in Elk Grove about the number of beavers killed there.
Just ONE of the many comments that got my attention in the paperwork he sent me. I’m sure there were memos of a similar nature circulated in our city, lo these many years ago. Probably circulated still with a big red underline when some yearling turns up in a tributary nearby.
Armadillos, badgers, great-horned owls, hog-nosed skunks, javelina, pronghorn antelope, porcupines, great blue herons, ruddy ducks, snapping turtles, turkey vultures, long-tailed weasels, marmots, mourning doves, red-tailed hawks, sandhill cranes and ringtails. Many are off-limits to hunters and trappers. And some species, including swift foxes, kit foxes and river otter, are the focus of conservation and restoration efforts.
“The irony is state governments and the federal government are spending millions of dollars to preserve species and then … (you have) Wildlife Services out there killing the same animals,” said Michael Mares, president of the American Society of Mammalogists. “It boggles the mind.”
One critical loss occurred two years ago when a wolverine, one of the rarest mammals in America, stepped into a Wildlife Services leg-hold trap in Payette National Forest in Idaho. It was the third wolverine captured in agency traps since 2004 (the other two were released alive.) “Shot wolverine due to bad foot,” the trapper wrote in his field diary, which The Bee obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
“Oh my God, that is unbelievable,” said Wendy Keefover, a carnivore specialist with WildEarth Guardians, an environmental group in Colorado. “Wolverines are a highly endangered mammal. There are very few left. Each individual is important.”
Goodness, go read the whole article, including the accidental trapping of pets and the instructions to remove collars from dogs in cities and bury them quietly. Then plan on getting very, very angry. Jimbob, Bubba and Vern obviously knew his article was coming because they commented on its liberal ‘everything hugger’ elements early on. Add your informed comments to the mix, because we saw what happened in elk grove and we know what happened to the acorn woodpeckers at Rossmoor. Oh, and in your travels, don’t forget to check out the amazing interactive map.
No podcast today either, as my sadly limited time to keep prompting interviewees (who have agreed to do it but just keep postponing) has offically dried up. There are three more interviews I wish I could still do, and if they work out you’ll be the first to hear. But we’re in alarming beaver festival preparation season now and we have an event with 20,000 girl scouts coming up next week so lucrative radio career will have to wait.
Sometimes I like to play a little game in my mind. I pretend that every city knew already that beavers exist, and that if you kill some more will just come back. I fantasize that everyone knows that beavers are good for fish, and birds and wildlife and water quality and recognize that taking care of culvert problems is best done in a proactive way that takes all those things into account. I try to imagine that every culvert built under every road and every street in the entire state came equipped with a beaver deceiver. It’s not impossible. There are standards already in place that say how narrow the opening can be and what materials they have to use. There are standards in some states that say even that a culvert has to be the same width of the body of water it’s carrying. What if there were a state standard that says EITHER the culvert has to match the width of the stream OR a beaver deceiver needs to be installed?
In my fantasy world beavers would never block culverts or need to be trapped, we’d have more fish and more ducks and more otters and roads would never flood because of blocked culverts and our streets and cities would be safer and government wouldn’t have to keep paying for things that never work.
State Rep. Bob Evans, D-Monticello, said he is familiar with what beavers are capable of. “I grew up in the county and I know what kind of damage beavers can do,” said Evans. “It can be severe.” Rep. Bobby Moak, D-Bogue Chitto, agrees that beavers can be a problem.
“I know we do have a beaver control program that we always put money in because beavers causes landowners problems and wash out bridges,” said Moak. But possible budget cuts could affect the funding for beaver control programs, something Williamson says would only worsen the beaver problem.
“For me, if any bill comes through the House to assist in this program, you don’t have to be a CPA to tell that a little money spent through a beaver control program is much less than fixing bridges or roadways,” said Evans.
What’s that called when someone gets you to pay a little bit of money all the time because of a bigger threat coming down the road that would cost you everything? And because of the importance of the threat you never, ever question the payment, just fork over the cash, and you make provisions for the future to keep providing it, and never consider NOT paying it?
While saving money may sound like a great thing, the programs that are cut could lead to severe consequences. Moak said it isn’t normally clear where the funding for programs will end up, but beaver control is normally safe.
“Beaver control money is always up in the air before the end of the session where we know what we’re going to have,” said Moak. “I think we’ve always funded it except for in a few cases.”
Evans said in this legislative session money has mainly gone to big projects. “Most of the money appropriated this year, that’s ‘new’ money has been for big corporations,” said Evans. Evans said it doesn’t take a person with an accounting background to understand that using some money to fund beaver control would save money in the long run.
“For me, if any bill comes through the House to assist in this program, you don’t have to be a CPA to tell that a little money spent through a beaver control program is much less than fixing bridges or roadways,” said Evans.
“It’s all about funding,” Moak said. “It’s the federal government that puts money forward, the state always puts some, but it’s one of those things that takes a back seat when you just don’t have the funds.”
Williamson reiterated the importance of doing something to protect the roads, bridges and private property in Lincoln County and elsewhere.
“It’s very important to do something about the beaver problem,” he said. “The people we have are good, but it’s just too much ground for them to cover.”
So that’s it. Keep the trappers in beer money or deal with millions in repairs. Obviously there’s no alternative. I’m imagining this big bruiser of a trapper looking out into the entire voting block of the Mississippi budget committee and saying…”Pay me now, or this road GETS it!!!!”
A beaver gathers branchs in a lake near Kremlin. Residents and officials in Hill County are now debating how to best manage beavers in Beaver Creek County Park. COURTESY HAVRE DAILY NEWS/NIKKI CARLSON
When the name of the recreation area is Beaver Creek Park, exactly how many beavers are too many? According to Steve Mariani, Hill County Park Board chairman, the answer to that question depends on who you talk to.
“There’s a segment of people who think there’s way too many beavers in the park, and then there are people who don’t like trapping at all,” Mariani noted. “Certainly there are beaver in the park, there always have been and there always will be. You certainly want to get them before they do become a big problem, but they’ve been there forever. Sometimes you just can’t make everybody happy. There’s always going to be opposing opinions
Too many beavers at beaver creek? Are you kidding me? (Is Montana being ironic or obtuse? Sometimes the difference is too subtle to detect.) Apparently the creek stretches for 17 miles where people can enjoy fishing and camping. I guess a few charmers would like to add trapping to the list.
“My main concern is to stop the damage before it gets into these campgrounds,” trapping proponent Shawn Keely was reported as saying. “My solution is; we need more people trapping.”
Raise your hand if you think Mr. Keely might be a trapper or the brother of a trapper? Beaver Creek is in the far north reaches of Montana, less than an hour drive from the Canadian border. They also are about 500 miles from the Lands Council in Washington, so we can assume there are at least some people in the state who know better.
However, Mariani said he is unconvinced that beavers are the main source of damage to Beaver Creek Park. Mariani noted that an incredible amount of destruction in the area was caused by flooding.
“I think way more of our problem is from floods then from the natural order of the beaver,” he said. “We had two terrible flood years that just blew everything out along the creek. I think what we’ve got now is a lot of displaced beavers. People might not have noticed them as much in the past because they had their own little areas they kept to. Now they’re trying to replace everything that was destroyed by the floods, and every time people see a big tree that’s been downed by beavers, their first response is — ‘oh my gosh.’ But when you really take a hard look, I don’t think we have more beavers than we’ve had in the past, I just think they’re trying to set up camp again.”
Hmm, Mr. Mariani sounds like a potential friend. I think we’d better make sure he visits this website. Remember my theory that beaver wisdom on the west coast seeps out from Washington state so Montana must be soaking up a little. Check this out:
Mariani added that some of the beaver controversy is probably related to a desire on the part of local trappers to access trapping opportunities in the park. For several years a single area trapper, John Holmes, has been the only individual authorized to take beavers in Beaver Creek Park.
Got that? The park has a single contract and Shawn, Bob and Eddie want access so they get to kill beavers too! Why should Mr. Holmes get all the fun? The fellas can all pretend that there is a beaver population explosion so we can trap our piece of the pie!
Well, if the park follows the creek for 17 miles and beaver territory usually extends about two miles in each direction we can assume you have about four or 5 colonies at most. Lets say each colony has 2 adults, 2 yearlings and 2 kits so that leaves you with somewhere between 24 and 30 beavers in the entire park. Because its spring we have to assume that yearlings are dispersing and finding their own territory and this could cause quite a shuffle. Still, I’d be very surprised if you had more than 35 beavers in the area.
Which an open trapping season could quickly dispatch.
Just remember that if you allow Shawn and his friends to trap out your 30 beavers you will end up with broken dams that support fewer fish, less ducks and less otter and mink too. I’m not sure how your park goers will feel about that?
Roseville resident Cynthia Schiada photographed the pond that developed behind Woodcreek High School in 2006. The pond dried up about two years ago, after the city had a beaver dam removed.
Roseville resident Cynthia Schiada photographed the pond that developed behind Woodcreek High School in 2006. The pond dried up about two years ago, after the city had a beaver dam removed.
A few years ago, a pond existed behind Woodcreek High School to the delight of Roseville residents.
And who did they have to thank? The Roseville beaver population. But these creatures often wreak havoc on the natural ecosystem, or go against city planning, by building dams.
Excuses people make for killing beavers: #21,936.
I thought I’d seen everything in my five years as beaver crossing guard. I mean I’ve seen people say they need to kill beavers to protect trees, protect roads, protect salmon, protect nesting birds, and protect water quality, protect erosion and protect banks. But I’ve never seen this before. Roseville has risen to a new level on the beaver-phobic meter.
“The dam (in Kaseberg Creek) went unchecked for some time and the area was inundated with water,” Castelluccio said. “As a pond formed it began to hinder vernal pools in the area.”
Mr. Castelluccio is doing something very special here and I feel we should all take a moment to appreciate his work for the open spaces of Roseville. By using the term “vernal pools” he is employing a principal strategy in crowd management: “appearicus intelligentiusobscura” in which the speaker invokes some word or phase the listeners will not understand to give the appearance of explaining his behavior. Nice work!
But beyond this initial obfuscation, Mr. Castelluccio is in fact waging a second battle intended for the more informed citizens of Roseville. Initially outlined by the famous case of EPA v Everything, the principal of this technique is to claim that something wild and inconvenient interferes with something else that’s more important but slightly less inconvenient, thus trumping the need to protect nature by promoting the obvious need to destroy it.
Vernal pools are ephemeral puddles of water during the winter and spring collected over hard substrate that won’t allow moisture to seep in. Since they are spontaneous, unconnected and temporary, they do not have fish, which makes them a fairly excellent place for certain frogs and salamanders to lay their eggs. Later when they dry up they become fertile patches of rare wild flowers or plants that are unique on the terrain.
They are a real thing, and an unique ecosystem with their own defenders, such as Vernalpools.org which explains their role and will even lead you on a tour of some better examples. They are a rapidly shrinking resource in California and their dwindling numbers have been repeatedly litigated and the subject of much alarm. By invoking this precious resource that an open space manager is charged to protect, Brian justifies removal of the beaver pond with “spotted owl” alacrity.
Never mind that the city of Roseville has probably bulldozed over half dozen vernal pools in the last 30 minutes – never mind that beaver ponds are essential to thousands of species, many of them rare or endangered — never mind even that raising the watertable could theoretically cause more and different Vernal Pools to be formed. I am reminded of the very special beaver shooting at a local reservoir in which they said the killing was necessary to protect the ‘red-legged frogs’.
Put two environmental groups in a jar, shake the jar, and keep them busy fighting each other while you build another parking lot.
Well, Roseville I hope your calculators are working. Because I want you to count every species in that beaver pond and assign a numerical weight to its value that takes into account both its rare nature, its relative importance to other species, and its visibility factor that allows it to be appreciated and enjoyed by residents – all times 4 because beaver ponds are there every season. And then do the same thing for your rare fairy shrimp or marsh grass and sit down at a city council meeting and say these are our choices. Because supporting one ephemeral aspect of nature does not prevent you from being responsible for the less temporary parts.
Roseville has begun to monitor beaver dams with GPS to determine if the animals return to prime locations. There are 70 miles of creeks in the city and 2,000 acres of preserves. When determining whether to remove a dam, the city looks at potential problems. Do they flood bike trails or roads, cause erosion of bridges or harm infrastructure? Do they pool up water causing oak trees to go underwater and die?
“In an urban environment, we take all those things into consideration,” Castelluccio said.
