Happy Independence day! You know, that important celebration of our country’s birth that came when we severed all ties with the tyrant that cruelly ruled us with his constant barbaric tweeting and insistence on locking up babies. Oops! Wrong tyrant! (You gotta admit, the pirates we have now make the tea tax seem pretty quaint by comparison).
I’ve been hard at work finishing up silent auction items and trying to fix the website, which seems to have lost its cool little share-on-facebook gizmo on July 1st. All I can think is that the since the gizmo upgraded that day, it can no longer talk to our existing website, so it doesn’t work like it used to. I’m still hoping for a fix any time soon.
I don’t know in what kind of beaver-saving bubble you’ve been since the festival. but I woke up today with three emails in my inbox from a homeowner in Nevada I wrote about at the end of 2016. The emails were titled “Your Ignorant Post” so of course they peaked my curiosity because I was eager to see to which of my ignorant posts she was referring.
Turns out it was the one where I commented that beavers were saving water against the will of the homeowner and NDOW gave her a permit to trap them.
Given her worries we’re surprised by nothing in this article but THIS:
Jessica Heitt, the Nevada Department of Wildlife Urban Wildlife Coordinator, said the only option to remove beavers is to hire a professional to trap them. It’s open season from Oct. 1 through April 30.
“If it’s outside of the season they have to apply for a depredation permit,” Heitt said.
“We would usually go out and investigate the area and go and make sure there’s a significant amount of damage before we ever issue a permit.”
Can that possibly be true? Did Jessica make a mistake? Does Napa REALLY send a NDOW worker out to see whether a depredation permit is warranted? How oh how did that policy get started and when can California adopt it please? I’m pretty sure all you have to do to get a depredation permit in California is check a box or pick up the phone. Could nevada really go out for every request?
It’s true I wrote a few lines at the beginning about the homeowner, but the real point of this post was the fact that NDOW sends someone out to SEE if a depredation permit is needed. I was fully impressed and wondered how we could implement such a practice in California.
Let’s just say the home owner wasn’t impressed with my impression, and wrote me that they had been infested by mosquitoes and the trapper had taken out 300 beavers from her little creek. And my type really makes her sick, You can imagine the rest. This isn’t out first rodeo..
Since hoards of angry animal rights activists are not in fact reading this site every day or standing by with torches and pitchforks awaiting their marching orders, the nearest I can think is that her story was also on the local news, (which is how I learned about it) and riled some folks. I guess she is still getting glared at in the grocery store because of it to this day.
Really, when you think about it, it’s kind of sweet that she thinks I did that. And that I’m a ‘type’ at all. Wouldn’t it be awesome if there were more of me?
I’m working on it.
