In August of last year I sent a letter the California Department of Fish and Wildlife with a formal request for copies of all the permits issued for depredating beaver in the state in 2016. Under the Public Records Act they have 90 days to respond, and at about day 95 they wrote back saying they couldn’t find any relevant records to send.
I figured they didn’t understand or had misfiled my letter so wrote again saying I wanted copies of all the permits issued for beaver depredation in the state and surely some beavers were allowed to be trapped in 2016. They forwarded my letter to their attorney who called back and said. Oh, those records! We’ll get those out right away.
But they didn’t get them out right away or even after another 90 days, so I recently followed up with a third letter saying it had now been nearly 8 months since my original request and I still wanted copies of all the depredation permits issued for beavers in California.
And 8 hours later I received a massive set of emails from the attorney.
There are about 150 records, folks asking for permission to kill beavers all over our golden state. I am about half way through indexing them by location, complaint, and permitted take, and can see that one difference is that they are no longer issuing “unlimited” permits like they did years ago when Robin Ellison and I first did this in 2013. Although they’re still averaging about 150 permits a year they’re maxing the take at 99 beavers,which must be pretty near the same thing, (because I’m very sure no one counts or keeps a tally mark on the barn door every time there is a kill.)
So far according to my tallies there have been permits issued for the deaths of 1935 beavers. And,as I’ve said, I’m half way through. This is a significant (50%) leap from 2015 and prior years. I imagine because of slowly getting rid of unlimited beavers. As you can see below, as the number of unlimiteds drop the numbers of beavers permitted climbs, Which makes sense in a horrible sort of way.
Reading through them is as usual grim and tedious with few surprises. The part that catches my attention the most at the moment is the part where the permittee is supposed to list all the things they tried to solve the problem before asking to trap. You and I, and other reasonable humans would of course say things like “Tried wrapping trees, fencing the culvert or installing a flow device”,
But of course that is not what these landowners say.
It is beyond belief how often they say HAZING or CLEARED DAM or REMOVED DEBRIS. As if any one of those things would discourage a beaver from building a dam. There are some who feel they need to defend their behavior so little they say nothing at all or only that they got a prior permit. There seems to be no clear understanding that they should explain what they tried before hand to fix the problem be resorting to trapping. Many just list what the problem forced them to do to maintain conditions.
“I had to drain the runoff/remove debris every morning!” Which of course isn’t about stopping the beavers at all. I think of being in divorce court and the judge asking “What did you do to save your marriage” and the man answers “Her cooking was so lousy I had to eat at the bar every night!” After reading through some 75 of these things I keep expecting them to list irrelevant chores as well…like “I had to put gas in my car and buy milk from the grocery store!” Because it would make nearly as much sense.
Except for one permit that quite touched my heart. It was from a cattle rancher in Siskiyou county and it was one of the very few that were issued for a whopping 2 beavers. In the list of things he tried before resorting to getting a permit to trap he said he attempted:
“repeated removal of dams, mylar flagging as deterrent”
In five years of reviewing permits I have never seen any person mention they tried “mylar flagging” as a deterrent. I know of course people use mylar tape to discourage birds from smacking into windows or eating strawberries, but I’ve never heard of it being used to keep away beavers. Of course one of its repellent properties is the reflection it causes, which we would expect is highly unlikely to happen at night, when the dam-building beavers are actually there.
But still, going through these permits is so horrific one looks for cheer where one can find it. I think it’s kind of adorable. I’m imagining he just used an old balloon.
