Yesterday Robin got a clump of depredation permit records from her PRA for Placer County 2015. (Fridays are always document dump days.) I went through and spread-sheeted their gory details. 14 permits good for the death of 307 beavers. Not much improvement after our meeting with them last November. Property owners still excused their behavior saying useless things like they tried ripping out dams or “hazing” first but since that surprisingly didn’t work they needed to trap.
But there was one big difference.
One of the most unique things about Placer County that struck us in our initial review was the number of permits they issued for an “unlimited number of beavers”. They were the only place in the state that did it. In our 2 year review there were 51 permits issued for unlimited beaver. Meaning however many you kill that’s fine with us. One of things we talked about at the powow meeting was how unique this was, and how unnecessary. I also wrote it in my letter to the head of fish and wildlife and tried to rattle as many cages as I could.
Flash forward to spring and the discovery of the piebald beaver in Winters. I contacted the folks we had talked to in Placer and they directed me to the representative for Winters. Jason Holley, who was a nice guy and willing to chat by phone. Fresh from the horrors I mentioned something about unlimited trapping and he corrected me and said they weren’t allowed to do that. Since I had just reviewed 51 times where they had done just that I challenged his assertion and he defended by saying that there had JUST BEEN A BIG MEETING and they weren’t allowed to do that anymore.
Then he stopped for a moment and seemed to calculate things. “Maybe it was you?” he wondered.
Which of course was a lovely thought but not one I believed for a moment until yesterday when I saw this. I spoke to Jason in early April so their big meeting would have happened late March.
March 19 was the last permit issued for an unlimited number of beavers all the way through last month. Which I have to think is a kind of victory, however small. It means that sometimes when you poke hard enough you make a dent. Something about my yammering must have at least drawn attention to their time-saving procedure of issuing permits without borders. Someone said just ‘stop it’ and they apparently did.
They are still authorizing the kill of many more beavers than they could possibly have, though. With two permits good for 50 beavers and one for a staggering 99. 99? Is placer county a beaver factory? To explain, the 99 was issued to all county parks in Placer, of which there are 66. I went through and checked how many were had water. Around 27 contained a lake, a stream or a river. Remember, the upper left half of Lake Tahoe is in Placer county.
Griff Creek, the death camp featured in yesterday’s article where pointless beaver slaughter near a daycare started the Sierra Wildlife Coalition, is a Placer county park. Small world.
So all the county parks were issue a single permit good for any problem that might arise over the coming year, with authorization to kill 99 beavers or around 3.8 per water-containing park. That sure seems like a sneaky time-saving device to me. This kind of mass issue didn’t show up in our last review, I wonder if it’s a new invention? It’s sort of like getting a depredation permit for Contra Costa County, and any beaver that shows up from Antioch to San Ramon can be dispatched without the burden of paperwork.
One thing it made me realize is that all those little aspen-lined clear mountain streams pouring into Tahoe are actually a death trap for beavers, I mean people assume Martinez is a terrible place for a beaver to be, and think the beavers in the sierras are lucky- but that just isn’t true. Any beaver showing in any county park in the entire green section of this map can now be reliably dispatched without even the minor inconvenience of getting a permit – because a kill-beaver wildlcard has already been issued and can be used everywhere it’s needed.
