Early this morning (5:30) stalwart beaver defender Jon Ridler saw two kits together, one who ducked under to go in the bank hole just downstream of the primary dam, and one who went back to the hole next to the footbridge. I’m as happy as I can be to know that there are at least two members of our favorite team around.Hopefully there are more than two, but this is encouraging. Now if they could just start the heavy lifting!
On a much less happy note there is sad news from Scotland yesterday where the Edinburgh Zoo announced that their lone captured beaver “Erica” had died. Remember that Scottish National Heritage had decided that the ‘free beavers’ of the river Tay should be called the “Feral beavers” and captured to protect the ‘official’ beaver trial. Erica was the first and only capture of their grand campaign and was never displayed or even much discussed in captivity. A Back-flipping truth-as-pretzle BBC article about the news has even invented the word ‘re-homed’ to avoid saying “captured” when discussing the death.
Re-homed? Really? Have you suggested that term to the Scottish Prison Service because it’s a winner! (I would have gone with ‘kit-napped’ myself, but I’m a traditionalist). I guess dying in captivity is another kind of “Re-Homing”….re-final-homing….No mention of that fact that since beavers are inherently social animals stealing one child from the family and locking it alone in concrete with no other beavers was pretty much a death sentence anyway. A few days before the death was announced (god knows when it happened, January?) SNH announced that they were done playing beaver re-homers for now, and the ‘trial’ had been a success. Remember the 20 beavers they said they were going to catch when this started, and the 50 they were afraid eventually they wouldn’t have room for, I guess I’d call it a success to. If they only capture one at a time, keep them in isolation for 6 months, and let them die, they won’t ever run out of re-homing space.
I made this for Erica yesterday, and I truly hope the dark furry stain of this story will halt any plans SNH might have for this in the future.
I was pretty pleased with my ‘death and the beavers’ so I sent it around to the usual places, including to the chief executive of the Scottish National Heritage who’s authorizing the exciting beaver-capture on the Tay. Believe it or not I hesitated. I figured this kind of poking the dragon could result in some serious scalding, (or at least scolding). In the end, I was too proud of the evocative image to avoid sharing.
I added the message,“Still waiting for Scotland to do the right thing. This is an opportunity for study, not stealth. Any country smarter than a beaver can keep beavers in the wild. I believe at some point you will decide this is easier to do well than allow to be done badly. We’d be happy to connect you with real solutions if you need them.”
I absolutely agree it is important to do reintroductions well rather than badly. Indeed that is precisely my point. I think you maybe need to know what is actually happening in Scotland before making your mind up. In Scotland there is a legal, licensed, monitored experimental reintroduction of beavers going on in Argyll. The licensees are the Scottish Wildlife Trust and the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland – people who I think are both smart and know a bit about zoology. I would have hoped the whole Scottish conservation movement would have got behind them, but apparently there are some who won’t. Wonder why? The Argyll project complies with Scottish law, European law and IUCN guidelines. I hope it will be successful. To my mind that is what ‘doing it properly’ involves. Why not come across and see, or speak to SWT and RZSS and find out? Compared to this I can’t see that illegally allowing a few captive beavers of uncertain origin to escape is anyone’s idea of the right thing!
Dr Ian Jardine
Hmmm. No scolding. An attitude of reason. Obviously, he wants to appeal to a ‘colleague’. He clearly thinks he’s doing the right thing, and is going to need help finding the tools for redefining ‘right’. Of course I would change the words “uncertain origin to escape’ to “uncertain origin to exist” but that’s not worth writing back yet. I wrote
Dr. Jardine, thanks so much for taking the time to write back. I appreciate your efforts to protect the trial and its value and I respect your thoughtfulness regarding your role. My primary concern is the razor-thin footbridge of public trust you have secured for this effort – threatened on all sides by anglers who don’t believe the research proving that beavers help salmon, and farmers who are suspicious about beavers raising the water table and can’t ‘see the forest for their missing trees’….
The question I would ask myself is whether trapping ‘feral’ beavers broadens or narrows that footbridge. Without faith in SNH, the official beaver trial is functionally useless – even if it produces good data no one will respect it and ultimately no one will believe it. You have the science and data squarely behind you but the truth is that public good will is the only real tool you have for learning about reintroducing beavers in Scotland, and I would ask yourself seriously whether trapping ‘the wrong beavers’ hurts or helps that.
You can probably guess what I think already.
Heidi
Footbridge of public trust. I like that image. Maybe, just maybe I could nudge him towards the realization that the The Scottish beaver Trial isn’t trying out how beavers will do in scotland – we have the Crannogs of history to tell us they’ll do just fine (thank you very much). It’s to see how beavers will do in the attitudes of the Scottish people. How will people do sharing their land and waterways with beavers? Wouldn’t some citizen science be helpful in that? Maybe a watchdog group that runs parallel to the formal beaver trial? Say a group recording progress of the untagged free Tay beavers?
Dear Heidi
Thanks for this. As you say it’s a tricky one and it comes down to judgements about science, politics and public perception and mood.
My judgment is that public opinion is behind the beavers at the moment. What I don’t want is a section of society getting a toe hold to say ‘you said you would do this properly but you’ve broken your promises’. On balance I see that as a bigger political risk – remember our last Government refused a trial introduction so this one gave promises to justify changing that decision. We may not agree on this one, but I think we’re on the same side in the long run!
Ian
On the side of beavers. (Excellent book title.) Not exactly accurate here though. We might both be on the side of ‘beaver-kind’ being a benefit to the watershed, and I’m really grateful for that, but Its hard for me to see how being on the side of beavers means trapping and separating family members and sending them to live in zoos. I think we’re on different sides for as long as these beavers lives run, lets say the next ten years under ideal conditions.
I’m glad for the contact. He sounds fairly set in his thinking that getting rid of the extraneous beavers will protect the good name of the study, which, btw, was pretty much my point in the graphic. I’m fairly certain that this is going to look like a necessary evil to Ian until it becomes an impossibly bad idea in the public eye, and that’s unfortunate. In protecting the ‘good study’ by getting rid of the ‘bad beavers’ SNH will ultimately tarnish the reputation of the good ones as well, and beavers will pay the price for it.
Sigh.
If you need a little good cheer after that exchange, I’m posting a photo of a nighttime visitor from my friend in England. Is that the cutest non-beaver face you ever saw?
ERIC the Ericht beaver has gained a worldwide following from people opposed to the trapping by Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) who have resumed operations after the big freeze.
Heidi Perryman, president and founder of Worth a Dam, a beaver lobby group in California USA, contacted the Blairie after reading the article two weeks ago on the possibility of there being limited accomodation for the wild beaver population once they have been rounded up.
She said from her experience in the States, rehoming has proved problematic.
I’m a lobbyist! So far so good, (if by “experience” you mean: never doing it myself but listening appreciatively to other people who actually DO it) Unfortunately the reporter then proceeds to quote the article I quoted to him as if it were me saying it. I sent him the article “Management by Assertion” by Longcore, Rich & Muller-Swarze, and highlighted my favorite quote about relocation.
“Thirteen beavers were trapped live and removed, one died struggling in a snare, and one was killed by a predator while held in a snare.. Virtually all mortality could have been avoided if Hancock traps had been used (and properly deployed).The end result was not satisfactory to the majority of opponents because of the Reserve’s failure to engage the underlying scientific questions, the mortality during trapping, and philosophical opposition to the exploitative placement of the relocated animals. Six beavers were confined in zoos or other captive display facilities (one beaver subsequently died in a fight resulting from inappropriately co-housing two males), four were relocated to a reserve in Texas, and three went to a movie production company.1
1Management by Assertion: Beavers and Songbirds at Lake Skinner (Riverside County, California)Travis Longcore Æ Catherine Rich Æ Dietland Mu ller-Schwarze (2007) Environmental Management Volume 39, Number 4, 460-471, DOI: 10.1007/s00267-005-0204-4
So now in addition to being a lobbyist and a ‘Mrs.’, (which I can live with), it looks like I’m a plagiarist in (at least) two countries. Sorry about that. I wanted to make sure everyone read that quote because sometimes the term ‘relocation’ makes people think everything will be all right and then they stop caring. Well if my precariously preserved good name’s tarnish can help keep free beavers in the river Tay I guess its worth it. I wrote the reporter to clarify and the authors to apologize, but in the mean time its pretty remarkable that Worth A Dam shows up in Scotland, don’t you think? Go read the whole thing and if you haven’t sent Eric your new years wishes yet there’s still time!
Now on to Germany! Where beavers are willfully preventing themselves from drowning on the Odin River in Germany. Their selfish attempt to live by seeking higher ground during flooding has caused the dikes to erode. (Is anyone else having flashbacks ?) Our Northern cousins with the excellent back to their nickle covered the story this week, on CBC the Current interviewing Mike Callahan about options and impact. Enjoy.
The rascally ‘escaped’ Scottish beavers continue to divide the wildlife community. Scottish National Heritage (Independent monitors of the official beaver trial) was responsible for the original idea. But trapping the free beavers is rapidly becoming one of those decisions that no one wants to be associated with. Scottish Wildlife Trust (who’s running the beaver trial) has been trying very hard not to offer an opinion, but several of its workers are open opposed to it and see the wisdom in studying and observing the free colonies as well as the million dollar colonies. The buck is being passed all around and now that they have caught the first beaver they are dangerously close to admitting that there probably isn’t space for all the others in zoos and they might need to be killed.
ERIC the Ericht Beaver is “doing well” according to keepers at Edinburgh Zoo but there is confusion as to the future of his relatives with a prominent environmentalist disputing Scottish Natural Heritage’s claim to be capturing and rehoming the outlawed species. SNH has stated that the only acceptable introduction is one sanctioned by Government. Leaving these animals in the wild, it says, “would mean choosing to ignore well-established wildlife legislation… not something SNH, or any other Government organisation, can do”.
So Eric is spending the new year alone in quarantine in some back bin of the Edinburgh Zoo and SNH is spending it likewise alone, busily scrubbing the logos off their vehicles and cocktail napkins to avoid worse press. Paul Ramsay, one of the beavers’ staunchest advocates and owner of the beaver-famous state house in Bamff is coming halfway around the world to attend the State of the Beaver conference to get more information and meet some like minds across the pond. I can’t wait to meet him. You are invited to send Eric some good cheer. Heck, have your 3rd grader or your grandson draw something for him and mail it off. I’m sure if the zoo gets BAGS of mail SNH will be so humiliated that they’ll magically think of a better idea.
In the mean time, the paper is interested in your opinion about what should happen, so go Vote Here tell them that trapping these hardy beavers is ridiculous and a waste of an excellent opportunity to observe the natural effects of reintroduction. And while you’re at it tell them that a single beaver alone without a colony is truly less than HALF A BEE-aver.
News of a Friends Fundraiser: Anne Mobley of White Rabbit sends this press release
Martinez Downtown Retailers Focus Group Raised $1,048 For the Martinez Early Childhood Center
The Downtown Retailers Focus Group had its Second Annual Downtown Christmas Party Fundraiser on Sunday, December 19 at the new Ferry Street Station and this year it was to benefit the Martinez Early Childhood Center (MECC). One Thousand Forty Eight Dollars ($1,048) was raised from the dinner and silent auction.
Big thanks to Tony LoForte of Zio Fraedo’s Restaurant in Pleasant Hill for providing the delicious main meal of Chicken Cordon Bleu, Hal Logan and Holly Burgess for salad and dessert, and the following for donating items for the silent auction: Joyce Cid, Eloise Cotton, Pat Corr, Worth A Dam (Heidi Perryman), Mary Ann Stites (Ambiance Boutique), White Rabbit Boutique, Karen Van Tyle (Wellness 101), Gay Gerlack, Liz Sandovalm & Marty Flores, Hal Logan, Catherine of Beauty Source, and Bill Edgers.
The Martinez Early Childhood Center has been offering quality child care and development since 1974 and serves low-income families with quality, full time child care and development. Parents must be working or in vocational training and are subject to fees according to their income and number of family members. The Center is concerned with meeting the needs of each individual child and their program offers enriched developmentally appropriate curriculum to prepare children for Kindergarten. The program is accredited by the National Association of the Education of Young Children
Worth A Dam donated a ‘his and hers’ tee shirt and bumper sticker to the auction. As a “My God, you live in a small town” aside, I started volunteering at MECC on July 3, 1979 when I was 13. I was hired as soon as I was legal and worked there every day after High School, every long hot summer and during undergraduate. My ten years experience at MECC got me into graduate school and planned much of my life. If the blond woman in the bus doorway looks familiar, it should. That’s Cassie Campbell, now the director, who wore the kilt to help the bagpiper with the children’s procession at the Beaver Festival two years ago. Her husband is the string base player in the Alhambra Valley Band that’s appeared every year. Cassie used to be the director of the infant-toddler program. The second Martinez Beaver story I ever read in the Gazette a million years ago was about her entire class inviting the mayor for a visit to see the beaver lodges children had made out of paper mache. They wore their beaver hats and paper tails, and sang him the beaver chant while thanking him for working hard to save the beavers. Mind you this was before Worth A Dam, before I was involved, and before the November 7, 2007 meeting. It was, I like to think, the beginning of the end for the ‘beaver kill campaign’.
Is it me or does that beaver sound vaguely Scottish? On a related note Louise Ramsay of the Tay Beaver Bruhaha offers this excellent read…
Here is an article by Jim Crumley in the Dundee Courier today. It is very entertainly written and highly recommended if you have a moment.
Jim Crumley
I SUPPOSE I should really know better by now, but I have been trying to fathom the logic that underpins the thought processes of the denizens of that strange and faraway land known as Scottish Natural Heritage.
“Oh, what now?” I hear you ask, the answer to which is,“Beavers.”
It seems that SNH has commissioned the services of SASA, that’s the Scottish Agricultural Sciences Agency since you ask, and no, I’d never heard of it either, but I do lead a rather sheltered life, and have never had cause to prompt an investigation of potato blight, which I gather is the agency’s stock-in-trade. But SASA has another arrow in its quiver, which is to go Pied-Piper-like around the land ridding it of vertebrate pests – rabbits, mink, rats, that kind of thing – a skill that SNH has called on in an attempt to rid Tayside of its beavers.
“Hold on,” I hear you say, you being of a thoughtful turn of mind, “surely SNH wants to establish a beaver population in Scotland? Didn’t it fund a reintroduction scheme in Argyll?”
You see, I knew I could count on you to ask intelligent questions. Yes is the answer to both questions. You may be surprised to learn (I know I was pretty astounded), that putting a handful of beavers back in to Argyll has cost £2million, which seems to my o-level arithmetic to work out at rather more than £100,000 a beaver.
The figure is all the more astounding when you consider that the Tayside population has established itself free of charge and is apparently self-sustaining, a state of affairs which poses a number of problems for SNH.
Firstly, the Argyll project begins to look like not very good value for money.
Secondly, the Tayside population seems to suggest that allowing nature to manage nature is a better idea than allowing people to do it, which is embarrassing at the very least for SNH, the Scottish Government’s advisor on conservation. Reading between the lines, it is fairly safe to assume that SNH feels that its Argyll project is threatened by the Tayside beavers. As the government scours the public sector for every unnecessary scrap of spending it can strike from the record as if it has never been, there must already be mutterings in dark corners that if we can have beavers on Tayside for nothing, why don’t we do away with the £100,000-a-head beavers in Argyll?
Hence the involvement of SASA whose role in all this will be to trap the Tayside beavers and either send them off to sundry zoos or otherwise dispose of them, which means killing them. They are, after all…wait for it, wait for it…the wrong kind of beavers.
The £100,000-a-head beavers are from Norway, and are thought to be genetically more or less identical to the long-extinct Scottish population. The problem with them is that they come from a localised Norwegian population and they have brought with them some of the obvious defects of sustained in-breeding. Several have died as a result.
The free Tayside beavers are from Bavaria. Actually they’re from Perthshire, which is where the origins of the population are thought to have escaped from a wildlife park, and where they seem to have established a breeding population in 2001, and from that small beginning they have migrated up into Angus and other parts of east Perthshire No-one knows how many there are and estimates seem to vary between about 30 and about 100.
So they seem to be prospering, and the slightly hybridised nature of the Eurasian beavers of Bavaria has none of the defects of the genetically pure but inbred European beavers from Norway. In other words, those animals defined as the wrong kind of beavers seem to be the right kind if the object of the exercise is to establish a wild population of breeding beavers.
And here is where the logic starts to fall apart at the seams. Instead of studying the Tayside animals to learn more about them from nature, SNH’s response has been to take nature out of the equation so that the only beaver study in the land is the one it has spent £2million on. Of course, studying the Argyll beavers is made simple by the fact that every beaver is radio-collared and micro-chipped and generally equipped with enough technology to make it worthwhile establishing a new branch of PC World in Oban. The Tayside animals have none of these things, and the only way you can watch is to practise stealth and patience and get cold and sit still and just watch them when they turn up.
When you watch their behaviour patterns represented as meandering lines on a graph on a laptop screen, you have achieved little more than reducing a wild animal to a computer game, which is hardly an accomplishment to be proud of. When you sit still outside in their world and watch their behaviour patterns unfold before your very eyes, you pay them the compliment of allowing them their mystery. They may or may not reveal their mysteries to what they judge to be the right kind of watching eyes.
And what is more valuable in terms of our understanding of this animal we have invited back into the land that once extinguished it: to watch it hamstrung with technology and fankled by bureaucracy, or to watch it on its own terms, as nature intended?
And here is another question I feel certain you are about to ask as the SASA people confront their task of capturing and quite possibly killing wild beavers: is that legal?
We may not have got around to a specific beaver protection law in Scotland yet: the introduction project is still officially a trial, which may yet be abandoned. But the EU species and habitats directive of 1992 requires member governments to look at ways of re-introducing lost mammal species, and the beaver is one of these, and whether it is Norwegian or Bavarian should not affect its right to protection within the reintroduction process.
In the same way, a sea eagle that wandered across the North Sea from mainland Europe would be given the same level of protection here as a sea eagle raised from the egg at a Scottish nest.
So it seems to me that nature is trying to tell us something with its Tayside beaver colony. We spend so much of our time and energy and resources trying to persuade nature to do our bidding, to operate within conditions we impose on it. Here is an all too rare opportunity to bear witness as nature unfolds the direct opposite of that process, as nature imposes new conditions on us. We should watch and learn and delight in the possibilities that will flow whenever we are willing to give nature its head.”
