I heard yesterday back from one of the lawyers at the Center For Biological Diversity that has done some work on beavers in the past for California (Collette Adkinz) that the news about the mass EIR for every species likely to be impacted by APHIS was in direct response to their NEPA/CEQA litigation. I was right about it being something no one volunteers to do. They are the root canal, so to speak. She hoped Worth A Dam would be responding as well and I thought first about beaver population, which no one is studying. Because trapping beaver in a populated area means something different than trapping the only beaver in the area. The closest thing we have to an indication of population numbers is the record of their nuisance. Obviously if there aren’t enough beavers to merit even a single depredation permit, there probably aren’t very many beavers in the area.
So I spent yesterday starting to go through our UN permits – meaning all the places where a permit was never granted. It’s a long job because you have to take the record for the actual permits and discern what never happened. And my old friend that used to make these maps for me is long gone so I had to laboriously use a new tool to try it myself.
But I think this is starting to look really interesting.
First of all what this shows is that the Southern half of the state is missing plenty of beavers. And second I think this is beginning to show what a huge impact it has on all of central california when beaver are depredated. The population takes a long while to rebound. Regions at the edge like Kern or SLO take even longer to rebound. I have four more years to slog through but I think in the end the counties who have reported no beaver depredation over the time period or only 1 or two permits in 7 years should be marked as a special risk on the EIR of what is likely to happen to the population with an APHIS response.
Or hey maybe what it means is that before APHIS is allowed to trap beavers someone should you know, actually count how many there are.
