I have a Chinese figurine of a woman crouching under a broad hat that’s supposedly titled ‘protection’. She looks braced for whatever ills might come her way, and fully devoted to her survival. Her eyes peep out from under the hat and scan for danger. You don’t need to be a psychologist to observe that when we’re huddled for protection we’re not exactly receptive, comfortable or inviting. The woman isn’t ready to laugh or fight or fall in love or make new friends. She’s ready to withstand danger, and that’s all. And sometimes that’s enough.
And sometimes it’s not.
I bring this up because there’s been discussion since the conference of the idea of using a public beaver mapping tool. If everyone could locate the colony in their region we’d have a much better sense of their prevalence and a more accessible way to study populations. We could easily identify the ‘beaver nearest you’ and keep track of their whereabouts.
But there are worries about safety. If such a website was public would the beavers be in danger? Would it become a tool for putting them in harms way? Stan wrote this morning about a news article in Oregon identifying the tallest pine tree in the state. This recognition prompted someone to go out and girdle it with a chainsaw. Would a public beaver forum produce the same response?
I have a great deal of respect for these debates. They are motivated on both sides by compassion, and I admire the voices that wage them. Still, my feelings about them haven’t wavered. There is no mistaking the fact that our beavers have been safe precisely because everyone knows where they are. They’ve been safe because they’re seen, and everyone who sees them is seen. The opposite is also true. No one could argue that if our beavers hadn’t been visible the city wouldn’t have killed them long ago.
I wrote before, that their visibility has been the ‘opposite of camoflauge‘.
I realize not every town has the energy or opportunity to be like Martinez. Not every community has people in it who can be bothered to protect beavers, and some communities might have many more that are interested in harming them. Still, I come back to this point over and over again. No one needs a website or a mapping tool to do harm. It might be hard to find the tallest pine tree, but no one needs a news camera to come point out the closest colony for killing. Trappers and shooters find their targets all by themselves. The beaver-slayers of the world do just fine without these tools.
Beaver damming, chewing and digging produce enough evidence of their existence that someone always finds out when they’ need killing’. Always. Beavers don’t make a secret of their existence. Miles down the watershed landowners notice the difference in flow from a washout or a new dam. Those motivated to take action against beavers have all the clues they need.
The mapping tool would help the people find out who might think they need saving. One for the good guys.
If beavers were more secretive, their advocates could afford to be more secretive too. But beavers broadcast their existence and we have to use a platform and a megaphone just to keep up. There are specific areas where, for example, there are large public properties that have biologists on staff that know about ‘secret beavers’ and know their bosses wouldn’t approve, so the tool should have the capacity for privacy. But even I can’t imagine gangs of unruly beaver-shooters getting together on friday night to download the location of the nearest colony. They already know where the nearest colony is, because the beavers told them themselves.
Since we can’t protect them with secrecy, I say ‘hats off.’
