The Center for Biological Diversity is reporting success at their campaign to save beaver in critical salmon and steelhead habitat. We will report more on this tomorrow but here is the gist right now:
SACRAMENTO— The federal wildlife-killing program known as Wildlife Services has agreed to stop shooting and trapping California beavers on more than 11,000 miles of river and 4 million acres of land where the killing could hurt endangered wildlife.
Native salmon, southwestern willow flycatchers and other highly imperiled animals use habitats created by beavers.
The agreement came yesterday in response to a threat of litigation from the Center for Biological Diversity.
Wildlife Services, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, also agreed to work with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service to analyze the impacts of killing beavers on threatened and endangered species.
SACRAMENTO— The federal wildlife-killing program known as Wildlife Services has agreed to stop shooting and trapping California beavers on more than 11,000 miles of river and 4 million acres of land where the killing could hurt endangered wildlife.
Native salmon, southwestern willow flycatchers and other highly imperiled animals use habitats created by beavers.
The agreement came yesterday in response to a threat of litigation from the Center for Biological Diversity.
Wildlife Services, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, also agreed to work with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service to analyze the impacts of killing beavers on threatened and endangered species.
Here’s a map outlining “Critical Habitat” which, by the way, includes Martinez.
Jimmy Taylor has to be the most pro-beaver member of Wildlife Services in the entire United States. (This might not be as much of a compliment as you think…) But this morning his lecture for Oregon Wildlife showed up on You Tube. The most exciting parts come at the end discussing what his graduate students have learned in beaver relocation studies. The beavers they relocate have radio tagged tails so they can learn about dispersal and mortality but it’s surprising how many findings from all this advanced science are consistent with what we’ve learned by just watching here in Martinez.
Keith Kubista (guest column, Oct. 24) possesses two attributes which make him challenging in the forum of public debate. He writes fairly well and he has a total disregard for the facts.
His approach to the trapping issue goes something like this: Kubista wants to trap. That’s his starting point. He then begins a long journey of fact-twisting, omission and outright lies to convince the reader that trapping is good for Montana…
Subtract the state budget estimate for maintaining FWP’s trapping division. Then subtract financial estimates for the negative impact on tourism revenue and the staggering loss of Montana groundwater due to beaver trapping.
That’s right. This is an op-ed from Montana saying that trapping beavers robs the state of its groundwater. I’m just trying to wrap my head around this, although it’s an idea whose time has come. This is from the smart non-profit ‘Foot Loose‘ which is opposed to trapping on public lands. They’ve been featured on this website before. I wrote them an excited welcome to the beaver club letter back then, but never heard anything back. Not sure whether they were too busy or too afraid that a bunch of ‘beaver huggers’ would ruin their image. Still, it’s nice to be reminded they’re out there, fighting the good fight.
And speaking of the good fight, Predator Defense launched this documentary sunday based on the work of Tom Knudson at the Sacramento Bee. If you were on the fence about Wildlife Services before, you soon will understand that there is no fence at all. I was happy to see the faces that we’ve been reading about for years. One of them is Gary Strader who you learned about on this website in 2009 when the USDA harvested wood peckers from Rossmoor. Remember that?
It’s a pretty effective but grisly documentary. Consider yourself warned and never ever ever let your city contract with Wildlife Services. Tell your friends who don’t believe the horror stories to watch it all the way through to the end, and for those of us who know better, just be happy it’s out there.
Once upon a time there was a county in the Adirondacks in New York that had the misfortune of a road washout which they thought was caused by a collapsed beaver dam. It cost the county a great deal of money and no one wanted that to happen again. All the officials sat down and tried to think of how to solve the problem. Finally one bright man from the soil and water department suggested the idea of paying trappers an extra bounty for every beaver they killed! Especially when those beavers lived by county roads! Sure more dead beavers would mean safer roads right?
What Warren County didn’t realize was that while a trapper can be required to lop off a tail to prove he has killed a beaver to collect his bounty, he cannot show a log from each dam he dismantled to prove he took it apart. So the beavers might be dead, but the dams might still be there.
More dead beavers=More untended dams=More washed out roads.
Warren County has just made themselves into a big ole pie of stupid.
That term may be a bit crass, but Warren County officials are exploring giving stipends to trappers to remove beavers whose dams and ponds threaten roads or public infrastructure.
The idea of paying trappers was one of a number of suggestions that county officials kicked around this week to try to deal with a growing problem of impoundments created by beavers that threaten municipal property.
Several beaver dam collapses in recent years have washed out roads in the region, a number of them in Warren County. That has led to county officials looking for ways to deal with a burgeoning beaver population that has grown as the number of trappers has declined.
Jim Lieberum, the Soil & Water Conservation District’s district manager, said one remedy was to try to foster more trapping, by paying licensed trappers for each beaver they take in addition to whatever they can sell pelts for. A $10 payment per beaver could be a starting point, he said.
Since our friends at Beavers: Wetlands and Wildlife are IN New York State, I can only assume they will try their beaver best to shine some light on this intenstinal darkness. Something tells me they will have their work cut out for them. Good luck team beaver!
I hope you don’t scare easy because here’s something else we need to talk about. This is the stats by county of the numbers of beavers killed by Wildlife Services in California in 2010. This doesn’t even count beavers killed by permit from CDFW.
These numbers were obtained from the FOIA request by Sacramento Bee reporter Tom Knudson. 1082 total. I’ve been thinking they needed to be a graphic to get the whole picture but I never got around to it until yesterday. What I’d like is a chart of counties colored by the numbers of beavers they killed with WS. If I ever figure out how to do that, you’ll see one of our grimmest offenders is Northeast of Mendocino – this big swath of Colusa, Butte, Plumas and Lassen counties. which is responsible for more than a quarter of all WS beaver deaths in the state. Our friends on the Klamath have their work cut out for them.
If you’re like me you need some good news after that beaver mortuary. Here’s some good cheer I received this morning from Karen Werner of San Jose. She works in Education at the Happy Hollow Zoo in San Jose.
Awesome! After four failed attempts to see wild beavers (Antelope Lake in the Sierra, San Luis Reserve by Los Banos, Guadaloupe River downtown and Lexington Reservoir in Los Gatos) we visited Martinez last night and were rewarded with three beavers, munching away, swimming about and interacting with us. After reading your recent blog entries, I’m quite confident that we saw this year’s kit, last year’s kit, and a mature adult. I took some photos (I need a longer lens!) which I’m happy to send if you’re interested.
Thanks for being a voice for the beavers! We’re not much for crowds, so we avoided the festival last weekend, but all reports say it was a triumph – congrats!
Photo by Karen WernerPhoto by Karen WernerPhoto by Karen Werner
Thanks Karen! And I’m so glad you enjoyed the show. We certainly do!
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.
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.
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 Center for Biological Diversity is reporting success at their campaign to save beaver in critical salmon and steelhead habitat. We will report more on this tomorrow but here is the gist right now:
