festival-release

Environmental Writer (and beaver friend) gets award

heidi08 Friends of Martinez Beavers, In the News, Why We Care November 9, 2013

Exposé of federal predator control overkill wins Knight-Risser journalism prize

Thomas Knudson is the author of the hard-hitting series of articles in the Sacramento Bee last year “The killing agency: Wildlife Services’ brutal methods leave a trail of animal death.” It started with a mountain of FOIA requests and long conversations with folks who knew all about it. Including an hour conversation with me and a visit to Elk Grove where he learned that they had spent a bucket of money on the re-education campaign to teach children that “beavers are bad.”

He also traveled to Tahoe to visit mutual beaver friend Sherri Guzzy when our Sierra beaver nativity article launched and they removed some beaver dams so the (introduced) salmon could get around and enjoy their festival.

The 2012 Wildlife Services project, in articles, slideshows, video and interactive graphics, focuses on a little-known U.S. Department of Agriculture agency whose strategy for controlling animals deemed of risk to livestock and the public has killed millions of predators and other species across the West, often in ways that are inhumane, excessive and at odds with science.

It shows how the wide-scale killing of coyotes has proven ineffective and can backfire biologically by contributing to population explosions of prey species, such as rabbits and rodents. And it describes the indiscriminate nature of the agency’s traps, snares and poison, which have caused the often tortuous deaths of many thousands of non-target animals over the decades, including family pets and such rare, protected species as bald and golden eagles.

When the original report launched, readers were so shocked and outraged that the country folk living on my parents lane in the foothills gathered together to pour over the new issue when they met at the paper box to get their paper. It made a big impression from coast to coast. The well-deserved prize brings with it 5000 dollars, lots of recognition for his hard work, a reminder to newspapers to do real journalism and a nudge for all the other reporters to move in the same direction. I couldn’t be happier for Tom, who is a concerned, respectful nice guy that has made a huge difference in how we think about “the killing agency”.

Tom writes for the Sacramento Bee, the flagship of the McClatchy newspapers which (for my money) does some of the only real reporting across the country. Congratulations Tom! Now for the next award-winning series about beavers and salmon? Beavers and drought? Beavers and biodiversity? California is spending money every day to get rid of a solution that would save them millions.

That sounds like an expose just waiting to happen.

The Beaver Revolution Will Be Interrupted…

heidi08 Beavers, Educational, Environmental, Who's Killing Beavers Now? April 29, 2012

A coyote hunts rodents in the Sierra Valley north of Truckee. The animals generally pose little danger to cattle.

We interrupt this beaver broadcast for the new alarming tale of Wildlife Services from reporter Thomas Knudson, who contacted me before last year’s beaver festival and wanted to talk about APHIS statistics on beaver killing. He sent several FOIA reports he had obtained and wanted to talk about the parts of California where the most beaver are recourringly trapped. Later he visited Mary and Sherry of the Sierra Wildlife Coalition to talk about bears! Then he toured Elk Grove and learned all about their beaver contracts, which prompted this oblique article when I was dying to be able to talk about his discoveries. Without further ado, let’s go grimly onto the first of Knudson’s three part article.

Since 2000, its employees have killed nearly a million coyotes, mostly in the West. They have destroyed millions of birds, from nonnative starlings to migratory shorebirds, along with a colorful menagerie of more than 300 other species, including black bears, beavers, porcupines, river otters, mountain lions and wolves.

And in most cases, they have officially revealed little or no detail about where the creatures were killed, or why. But a Bee investigation has found the agency’s practices to be indiscriminate, at odds with science, inhumane and sometimes illegal.

Got your attention? Good, it should. Go read the entire, chilling article and brace yourselves for part two and three. One of the things that most interested Tom in our discussions was the ‘accidental’ killing of otter that occurs by the thousands when placing traps for killing beavers ‘on purpose’. I connected him with our new friends at the River Otter Ecology Project to chat about its implications.

“We pride ourselves on our ability to go in and get the job done quietly without many people knowing about it,” said Dennis Orthmeyer, acting state director of Wildlife Services in California.

Basic facts are tightly guarded. “This information is Not intended for indiscriminate distribution!!!” wrote one Wildlife Services manager in an email to a municipal worker in Elk Grove about the number of beavers killed there.

Just ONE of the many comments that got my attention in the paperwork he sent me. I’m sure there were memos of a similar nature circulated in our city, lo these many years ago. Probably circulated still with a big red underline when some yearling turns up in a tributary nearby.

Armadillos, badgers, great-horned owls, hog-nosed skunks, javelina, pronghorn antelope, porcupines, great blue herons, ruddy ducks, snapping turtles, turkey vultures, long-tailed weasels, marmots, mourning doves, red-tailed hawks, sandhill cranes and ringtails. Many are off-limits to hunters and trappers. And some species, including swift foxes, kit foxes and river otter, are the focus of conservation and restoration efforts.

“The irony is state governments and the federal government are spending millions of dollars to preserve species and then … (you have) Wildlife Services out there killing the same animals,” said Michael Mares, president of the American Society of Mammalogists. “It boggles the mind.”

One critical loss occurred two years ago when a wolverine, one of the rarest mammals in America, stepped into a Wildlife Services leg-hold trap in Payette National Forest in Idaho. It was the third wolverine captured in agency traps since 2004 (the other two were released alive.) “Shot wolverine due to bad foot,” the trapper wrote in his field diary, which The Bee obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

“Oh my God, that is unbelievable,” said Wendy Keefover, a carnivore specialist with WildEarth Guardians, an environmental group in Colorado. “Wolverines are a highly endangered mammal. There are very few left. Each individual is important.”

Goodness, go read the whole article, including the accidental trapping of pets and the instructions to remove collars from dogs in cities and bury them quietly. Then plan on getting very, very angry. Jimbob, Bubba and Vern obviously knew his article was coming because they commented on its liberal ‘everything hugger’ elements early on. Add your informed comments to the mix, because we saw what happened in elk grove and we know what happened to the acorn woodpeckers at Rossmoor. Oh, and in your travels, don’t forget to check out the amazing interactive map.

Don’t forget Part B of the article about all the otters that are accidentally killed in beaver traps! I can think of a GREAT way to make sure that never happens again!

No podcast today either, as my sadly limited time to keep prompting interviewees (who have agreed to do it but just keep postponing) has offically dried up. There are three more interviews I wish I could still do, and if they work out you’ll be the first to hear. But we’re in alarming beaver festival preparation season now and we have an event with 20,000 girl scouts coming up next week so lucrative radio career will have to wait.

Garden Discrimination

heidi08 Educational, Environmental, New Species July 19, 2009

So I was sitting at my parents’ table after a recent camping trip and noticed the Sacramento Bee’s Carlos Acala was having a poetry contest about gardening and asking for submissions. Winners would be published July 18th. Of course he would expect the usual complaints about moles and slugs, and a few fruit stealing incidents in literary form. I had a vision though. I wanted something different. I wanted to be the Upton Sinclair of horticulture. I wanted to be the “Silkwood” of the gardening industry. I wanted to rock their world.

Devoted gardeners everywhere will instantly recognize this avaricious visitor. The Horn worm, or tomato worm, is much despised in the agricultural world. He is famed for eating through your tomato leaves at the rate of a whole plant in a single night. Certainly there could be absolutely no reasonable value in letting him stick around. Except for this:

[youtube:http://youtube.com/watch?v=toNUsuYAZiw]

Have you ever seen one of these? This is the Hummingbird, Hawk, or Sphinx Moth. They come to your flowers to take nectar and their heavy bodies move as if they were flying underwater. I first saw one when I was camping on the Russian River. It was twilight, and the strange evening hummingbird appeared to visit the flowers but didn’t fly away when we went to investigate. I couldn’t imagine what it could be and called the park ranger in the morning. He hadn’t seen one either, and had to call three friends, but we eventually solved the mystery. They are nearly as big as your fist, and there are many variations in coloring. I have only seen three in my lifetime, but I remember each precious glimpse.

It is stunning to me that considering all the gruesome detail with which we are warned against tomato worms, we aren’t at least given a mention of what they grow up to be. It’s almost an illicit secret, suppressed by the Ortho lobby or the Tomato Growers Association of America or something. With the weighty moral compass of a woman who had helped save beavers, I figured that my entry to the garden verse contest would have to address this prejudicial silence. I rolled up my sleeves and went to work.

Make friends with the Pest and Potato
Cultivate Peace: Garden NATO
No moth, me thinks
can rival the sphinx
She just needs a little Tomato!

I was proud of myself. A limerick, more accessible than the lofty sonnet, and how many women can rhyme sphinx? Garden descriminations being what they are, I, sadly, didn’t win, although I was contacted by the columnist running the contest who cleverly remarked that he would garden NATO but he didn’t know “where to get the seeds”. Aha! Suppressed by a Burpee and an Ortho lobby! It’s a green consipiracy.

Here is the fully-expected tomato poem that contained adequate prejudice to win.

The Tomato Worm

If I had to pick my garden’s number one pest I think that the Tomato Worm stands above the rest It can devour a tomato plan almost overnight To see the devastation is quite a fright It’s voracious appetite one must stop Left uncontrolled and you’ll have no crop In addition to all this, it’s such an ugly worm Just the sight of them always makes me squirm

— Craig Wahl, Sacramento

Ahh Craig, you’re sooo establishment. You can read the other stepford-gardener-entries here. They’re a lot of fun, and the Bee’s garden section is one of the best around. But its missing a poem about sphinx moths. The gaping hole is obvious. Sigh.

I’m just curious. What if they grew up to be puppies? or unicorns? would gardeners still routinely kill them?