Tag: Thomas Knudson

Calls to end Culls

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Environmental, What's killing beavers now? February 13, 2016

The battle to grant protection to the beavers in Scotland just got big supply of ammunition. It comes in the form of a dramatic letter on their behalf from the Royal Zoological Society and the National Trust for Scotland and is rightly showcased by the BBC.

‘Urgent’ call for Scots beavers to be recognised as native species

The Royal Zoological Society of Scotland and the Scottish Wildlife Trust “strongly advocate” recognising the animals as natural residents.

The groups voiced fears about ongoing culling of wild beavers in Tayside. The Scottish government has said it will “take time to consider the issue carefully” before making a decision.

The RZSS and Scottish Wildlife Trust (SWT) have joined the National Trust for Scotland in calling for the mammals to be legitimised as a resident, native species of Scotland.

A joint statement from chief executives Chris West and Jonny Hughes said there was “particular urgency” with beavers on Tayside being culled and the need to introduce more of the animals in Knapdale to ensure long-term viability of the population.

They said: “The decision has now become urgent as animals are being indiscriminately culled on Tayside.

“The indiscriminate nature of this culling has led to well-publicised animal welfare concerns, and in the medium term, could threaten the existence of local populations.

“Scientific evidence shows that the return of the beaver will help to restore our depleted wetland ecosystems and bring a range of other social, economic and environmental benefits.

Whoo hooo! Well done RZSS and SWT! And well done trigger-happy farmers who are forcing this issue into such a painful public spotlight that the beavers are going to be safer than they would have been if you had just kept your mouths (and guns) shut. I’m imagining that what the Scottish farmers need is an old burly farmer who slaps one upside the head and cries “IDIOT! Now everyone is going to be talking about what we have a right to do on our own land!” And he’d be right. I hope this pushes the protection issue before the election. You can’t just not do your job because you’re waiting for it to be someone else’s job

Lots of excitement on our own “Culling Agency” front, with a scathing 7 page article in Harpers about the USDA and a review of it in National Georgraphic!!! If the irresponsible wildlife management reported by our friend Thomas Knudson way back in the day doesn’t get some traction NOW I would be very surprised. I didn’t actually read anything newly uncovered, becauseKnudson did such a thorough award-winning job already. There were parts, though, that the paper didn’t print but were available as supportive materials – and reading it again by new eyes is going to matter.

I hope.

The Rogue Agency

Peter DeFazio, a Democratic congressman from Oregon, has repeatedly called for a congressional investigation of Wildlife Services, describing it as a “rogue agency” that is “secretive” and “unaccountable.” He said that he considers the lethal control program a “wasteful subsidy” and has called the agency’s practices “cruel and inhumane.” DeFazio has proposed legislation to reduce government funding for lethal control, but Congress, under pressure from the livestock industry, rejected these attempts at reform.

“We have seen a host of credible leaked information from credible former employees about the inhumane practices,” DeFazio told me recently. He said he has asked Wildlife Services for “detailed numbers about finances and operations, and they won’t give us this information. I’ve served on the Homeland Security Committee, and Wildlife Services is more difficult to get information from than our intelligence agencies.”

This Government Agency’s Job Is to Kill Wildlife

Wildlife Services is a federal agency under the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and it specializes in killing wild animals that threaten livestock—especially predators such as coyotes, wolves, and cougars. Outside the ranching community, few have heard of Wildlife Services.

Since 2000, the agency has killed at least two million mammals and 15 million birds. Although it’s main focus is predator control in the West, Wildlife Services also does things like bird control nationwide at airports to prevent crashes and feral pig control in the South.

Reporter Christopher Ketcham’s investigation, out this month in Harper’s Magazine, doesn’t mince words. The article is called “The Rogue Agency: A USDA program that tortures dogs and kills endangered species.” Ketcham exposes Wildlife Service’s use of poisoned bait, neck snares, leghold traps (which are banned in 80 countries), aerial gunning, and cyanide traps to go after animals that have attacked, or allegedly attacked, livestock grazing on public lands. Ketcham’s sources—former Wildlife Services trappers—told him they’ve witnessed or participated in these practices themselves and that they go on to this day.

One final morsel of delight was sent to me yesterday without explanation by USFS Kent Woodruff. Check this out and think about how very smart we used to be.

A Full Day’s Labor…

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Beavers or Social Ambasadors, Educational, Environmental May 6, 2012

What we did today!

Yesterday was a rocket ship of explosive activity! Wild Kingdom and Cockpits and Squid Disection and Duct tape wallets and Zip Lines and Rock Walls and Scuba Diving and Girl Power and lots and lots of pink! Rows and rows of tents, many of them pink, in the fair grounds where camping was allowed. Face paint and s’mores and llamas and circuit boards and floating sharks and astronauts in spacesuits. Words fail me. In the middle of all this someone came to invite us to display at Green Kids day on the Microsoft campus and I honestly wanted to laugh, “are you kidding?”

There was a moment in this massive wave of a day where I looked at Cheryl in a panic and said “THEY JUST KEEP COMING!!!!!!!” And it seemed liked that most times, clusters of girls in matching shirts with badges and bracelets and eager faces. Most of them enormously polite with thank yous and questions, with an endless stream of exhausted moms (and a few dad’s) shepharding them to through the many booths, waiting patiently while they painted with pine needles or drew in black lighting or added wildlife to a flag.

Imagine this scene over again at least a thousand times….

Three top conversations of the day would have to be

the mom who grew up in Sonoma who said her Dad had tried to save beavers on their land 10 years ago and is going to send me a photo of him standing by tree stump they chewed.
the woman who had gone to the beaver festival and said her daughter had painted a tile and STILL HAD HER TAIL!!!!
The woman from the San Joaquin watershed council in Fresno who said that she had called fish and game many times about protecting trees and was outraged that they had never told her about wire wrapping or sand painting!

I’m sure there are others that will come back to me as the sensation creeps back to my vocal cords. In the meantime, this came when I got home. The entire issue is about beavers and wetlands.

And an excellent conclusion to Thomas Knudson’s piece on Wildlife Services this morning with information about non-lethal methods. Other than the fact that I am fiercely disappointed that it doesn’t mention flow devices to control beaver problems, its a very good read! Next time, right Tom?

APHIS – AERIAL

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Environmental April 30, 2012

Yesterday I told you about part one of Thomas Knudson’s meticulous take down of wildlife services. Today makes yesterday’s articles look like cocktail hour. I wasn’t sure how effective this reporting was going to be until I heard from my parents taking with their neighbors the upsetting reports. My dad is an 83 year old man who walks a mile to get his “Bee” every morning, and then gossips with the other residents about what’s inside all the way back. Other examples of its effectiveness? I heard from the newly formed group at beaver-killing El Dorado Hills that they bought copies for all their members and are having a meeting to discuss the news.

Stories make a difference, and this story is going to shine a lot of light on a government agency that has thrived in darkness for a long time now. You really should go to the Bee’s website to see everything yourself, because there are four new stories today and some documents from his FOIA. But a summary of what most got my attention follows.

Wildlife Services’ Deadly Force Opens Pandora’s Box of Environmental Problems

Here, in rugged terrain owned by the American public, a little-known federal agency called Wildlife Services has waged an eight-year war against predators to try to help an iconic Western big-game species: mule deer.

With rifles, snares and aerial gunning, employees have killed 967 coyotes and 45 mountain lions at a cost of about $550,000. But like a mirage, the dream of protecting deer by killing predators has not materialized.

“It didn’t make a difference,” said Kelley Stewart, a large-mammal ecologist at the University of Nevada, Reno.

The article goes on to describe in detail the vast array of devices they use to kill coyotes. From instruments invented in the dark ages to the apex of modern technology – no purse strings remain unopened and no holds are barred for the fauna-fiends at APHIS. Snares, Cyanide, aerial shoots!

Aerial gunning is the agency’s most popular predator-killing tool. Since 2001, more than 340,000 coyotes have been gunned down from planes and helicopters across 16 Western states, including California – an average of 600 a week, agency records show.

“When they take that plane up, they kill every single coyote they can,” said Strader, the former Wildlife Services hunter who worked with aerial gunning crews in Nevada. “If they come back and say, ‘We only killed three coyotes,’ they are not very happy. If they come back and say, ‘Oh, we killed a hundred coyotes,’ they’re very happy.

“Some of the gunners are real good and kill coyotes every time. And other ones wound more than they kill,” Strader said. “Who wants to see an animal get crippled and run around with its leg blown off? I saw that a lot.”

There is even a quote from the UC professor I implored for help a million years ago about our beavers. I believe his compassionate response mentioned something about hats, but that’s blood under the bridge now…

“I call it the boomerang effect,” said Wendy Keefover, a carnivore specialist with WildEarth Guardians. “The more you kill, the more you get.”

In California, researchers have found that having coyotes in the neighborhood can be good for quail, towhees and other birds. The reason? They eat skunks, house cats and raccoons that feast on birds.

“The indirect effects (of predators) are often more important than the direct effects,” said Reg Barrett, professor of wildlife ecology and management at the University of California, Berkeley. “We just don’t know enough about what’s going on.”

This follows a nice discussion of the value of predators, noting how they tend to keep a herd healthy by killing off weak or sick animals. although it’s not as nice as this:Go to 2:33 for the very best description you are ever likely to hear of why predators are important.

Part three of the series airs sunday and will focus on nonlethal devices. I’m hoping he talks about flow devices!

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.