Do you remember the story last November about the city of Oshawa that said it was going to ‘relocate’ some beavers and the residents found out it was actually killing them? Six Furry Lies (To be fair, I guess death’s a kind of relocation…”the undiscovered country, from whose bourne no traveler returns…“) But it was a pretty bad lie, even as cities go, and there was a lot of red-faced finger-pointing from those who had made it, saying they hadn’t known the trapper was going to kill them.
(I am reminded of the old joke about the man who finds a tiger in his garden and is told by a neighbor to take it to the zoo. The next day the neighbor sees the same tiger in the yard and asks what happened. The man replies, ‘Of course I took it to the zoo like you suggested! We had such a great time that tomorrow I’m taking it to the aquarium!” Ba-dum-dum)
Back to our less charming story. At the time resident Joyce Schnegg had just found out that they hadn’t killed ‘all’ the beavers and there were still four left. (Because even their cruelty is incompetent.) The mayor promised to bring in an expert to find solutions to the problem. The reporter of the story wrote me back and visited the website. It looked like there was going to be a kind of progress. “The arc of environmentalism is long but it bends towards beavers.“
Turns out the ‘expert’ the city brought in was this company, Beacon Environmental, a regular hire of the city of Oshawa and especially dedicated to assessing things like bird hazards at airports. They cashed their check from the taxpayers of Oshawa and said there were three basic options: install a beaver baffler (cutting-edge beaver management when Reagan was president), move the beavers or kill them.
In a June 22 memo to the City, Beacon Environmental said there are three options for beaver management: using a “beaver baffle” — a device that regulates water levels in the pond while allowing beavers to remain — removing the beaver dam, or leaving the status quo. In its report, engineering firm Greck and Associates recommends removing the dam, saying it could “increase peak storm flows, increase downstream flood elevations and reduce storage and discharge capacities.”
A subsequent City report makes no mention of the beaver baffle, instead laying out three possibilities for removing the dam: live trapping and releasing the beavers, lethal trapping or repeatedly breaking apart the dam until the beavers get frustrated and leave. Beacon Environmental ecologist Brian Henshaw says lethal trapping is the most humane route if the City is set on removal.
“We don’t make that recommendation lightly,” he said. “But it’s not fair to move an animal to a place it doesn’t know, where it can’t set up a lodge and get a food store in place before November. That could result in death by starvation.”
Three choices. Guess which one the city picked?
So about 50 residents gathered on the corner to protest the decision to kill the beavers, including 2 council members. One advocated the use of a beaver deceiver (which the paper reported tricked the beavers into thinking the water flowed the opposite direction.) (!) and both shuddered at the traps brought by a resident from the dam to show how they worked. 50 people is a pretty nice number for a beaver protest. Check out their facebook page.
The two protesting council members were able to get actions slowed enough to manage a temporary ‘stay’ on the execution. There will be a ‘last chance ever -and I mean it this time’ meeting next week to discuss options. Clearly the mayor had 8 months to do something productive and used it to apply taxpayer money to find a firm that would say exactly what he wanted to hear and take the blame. (See “Cal Engineering report on the wall behind the beaver lodge for an example) I’m sure Martinez understands that civic decision well enough. Apparently, it’s just a language barrier. When Oshawa said last year that ‘the beavers were going to be relocated’ they didn’t mean they going to be alive when they were relocated, and when the mayor told the press they were looking for solutions they didn’t mean they actually wanted to solve the problem.
Drop a note to the Mayor and the Council so they know that there are options and lots of reasons to use them.
