Yesterday was an oddly urgent day. In the morning I got an email from a wise beaver friend who was unhappy about the article I had written back in January saying the suit on Wildlife Services to protect salmon wasn’t going to help beavers much. I was surprised he’d read it and offered to let him counter the argument on the website. Then out of the blue I received (what I assumed was an) unrelated note from the editor of High Country News that they were interested in publishing one of Cheryl’s photos for an article they expected to publish soon. I called Cheryl, got her permission, and them saw this appear on the front page.
Of course I was eager to read more. Which is when I found out it was written by our good friend Ben Goldfarb, who is writing the upcoming book on beavers. and was coming to our festival this summer to promote it and read excerpts aloud.
Can the ‘Beaver State’ learn to love beavers?
When [one landowner] called for a trapper this time, though, she never heard back. She isn’t sure why her pleas went unanswered. But it’s likely she’d become caught in the middle of an unusual legal battle, one that could upend how the West’s wildlife agencies manage the region’s most influential rodent.
The case revolves around Wildlife Services, the branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture tasked with managing problematic animals. It killed more than 21,000 beavers nationwide last year, including 319 in Oregon.
Among Wildlife Services’ fiercest antagonists is the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity. The center has sued the agency in Idaho, California, Colorado and other states, accusing of it failure to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act, the law that requires federal agencies to assess the environmental impacts of their actions. So it shouldn’t have been surprising when the center, along with the Western Environmental Law Center and Northwest Environmental Advocates, notified Wildlife Services this November that it planned to take it to court over its Oregon beaver-killing. But this time, rather than citing NEPA, the center was wielding a much tougher law, the Endangered Species Act.
Ben was writing about the legal threat to Wildlife Services because of endangered salmon, Just like the comments made earlier in the day from my friend. I figured it wasn’t a coincidence, and waited for the mystery to unfold itself.
This case, however, hinges on Castor canadensis’s unique environmental influence. Beavers are a “keystone species,” an organism whose pond-creating powers support entire biological communities. In Oregon, a host of threatened and endangered salmon and steelhead runs depend on them. By killing beavers without accounting for the destruction of rodent-built critical habitat, the environmental groups argue, Wildlife Services risks jeopardizing federally protected fish
.This case, however, hinges on Castor canadensis’s unique environmental influence. Beavers are a “keystone species,” an organism whose pond-creating powers support entire biological communities. In Oregon, a host of threatened and endangered salmon and steelhead runs depend on them. By killing beavers without accounting for the destruction of rodent-built critical habitat, the environmental groups argue, Wildlife Services risks jeopardizing federally protected fish.
The article goes on to describe how there’s so much science behind the “beavers-key-to-salmon” argument that Wildlife Services immediately agreed to suspend trapping of all aquatic mammals until the issue could be reviewed by fish experts – their report is due to be released at the end of this month. Just for comparison a similar process in Washington determined that beavers were so important to salmon that WS would only trap them in agriculture drainage channels.
This is where it gets really interesting.
Whatever happens, the case’s symbolic significance is hard to miss. Around the West, a burgeoning coalition of “Beaver Believers” is relocating, conserving, or imitating beavers to improve sage grouse habitat, build wetlands for swans, store groundwater, boost cattle forage and repair eroded streams. Although Wildlife Services has been a powerful headwind in the face of that momentum, its willingness to consult in Oregon hints that the agency is capable of viewing beavers as boons as well as pests. And further legal action seems likely: “We’re talking to all of our partners about beavers,” says Andrew Hawley, staff attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center, “and what we can be doing to help change how they’re managed throughout the West.”
The next paragraph discusses how some ridiculous beaver-crazed advocates aren’t sure that the suit will make much difference, because beavers will just get killed some other way anyhow. Who in the hell would say something stupid like that?
Oh right, it was me. In the January column the article links to next.
Some advocates worry that, if Wildlife Services’ ability to control beavers is curtailed, the agency’s “cooperators” — the counties and other land managers with whom it contracts — will simply hire private trappers, increasing undocumented killings. Beaver removal could continue unabated, but without the government tracking kills: a data-deficient free-for-all.
Adkins, though, is more optimistic. Because it’s a federal agency, she points out, Wildlife Services offers services to cooperators at prices that private trappers can’t match. By limiting federally subsidized trapping on salmon streams, conservationists hope to spur land managers to seek less deadly solutions. “Lethal management will probably never be taken off the books,” says Leonard Houston, a Douglas County resident who has live-trapped and relocated dozens of beavers under the auspices of the South Umpqua Rural Community Parnership, “but our hope is that this will make it a last option.”
Hmm. So their response is that WS trapping is cheaper because the federal government helps pick up the bill, and when the service costs more folks might be slower to kill them outright. Like imposing taxes on cigarettes, Interesting. The article goes on to describe the landowner from opening paragraph who had a flow device installed on her land at no cost to her through the good work of Jakob Shockley and Leonard Houston, and ends thusly:
After Susan Sherosick’s trapping requests went unanswered, she contacted Houston, whose name she’d seen in the newspaper. One Tuesday in January, Houston and Jakob Shockey, the founder of a company called Beaver State Wildlife Solutions, visited Sherosick’s land to install a flow device, a pipe-and-fence contraption designed to lower beaver ponds, thereby sparing both property and the animals’ lives. When I spoke with her several days later, she seemed cautiously optimistic about her ability to cohabitate with her buck-toothed neighbors. “The water’s down far enough now that it’s not hurting anything,” she said. “I’m waiting to see how it works out. It’s only been a week.”
Ben Goldfarb is the author of the forthcoming book Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter (Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2018).
Excellent article, and it makes me tingle with anticipation as to what will happen next week. I understand how this action is the first rung of a ladder that might force the federal government to think about beavers differently.
But can I just say how, since I inherited this website in 2008 and have written exactly 3859 articles on behalf of them every single dam morning of every single day spanning an entire decade, I’m not exactly sure that the ONE column I’d want to be featured in a national periodical would be the controversial APHIS defending one!!!
Sheesh.
Well at least it doesn’t have too many typos.
