Endangered Birds Have Priority Over Beavers, Judge Rules

A Superior Court judge on Monday rejected a request by animal welfare activists that no beavers be killed along Lake Skinner, where they are ruining the habitat of two endangered species of songbirds.

The birds’ survival is more important than the beavers’, Judge Gloria Connor Trask ruled.

Trapping is being conducted by a consortium of federal, state and local public wildlife agencies because about 20 beavers are destroying trees needed by the least Bell’s vireo and the willow flycatcher when they return to the lake shore in a few weeks.

An attorney on behalf of Friends of Lake Skinner Wildlife, which was recently organized to protect the beavers, had argued that the public agencies that control the wildlife reserve were acting hastily, without due public debate and without regard to the welfare of the beavers and their potential benefits to the environment.

But Trask ruled Monday that the state Department of Fish and Game seems to have acted properly in issuing the trapping permits and that its opponents, who sought a temporary restraining order, would probably not prevail if she ordered a temporary halt to the trapping so that a hearing on a more permanent order could be conducted.

To halt trapping even temporarily, she said, would “impose a substantial risk of irreparable harm” to the birds’ habitat, Trask wrote.

She noted that while both kinds of birds are on state and federal endangered species lists, beavers are neither threatened nor endangered as a species.

“To the contrary,” she wrote, “it appears that beavers exist in abundance and can pose a significant threat to the continued existence of other species.”

So far, six beavers have been trapped live and relocated to other facilities and officials say that at least seven more will be taken elsewhere once they are trapped. Unless more homes are found, the remaining beavers would be killed in two weeks, before the birds return, officials say.

Mitchell Wagner, the attorney representing the beaver supporters, expressed disappointment at the ruling, but said there was not enough time to appeal it.

Instead, he said, the group will ask the state attorney general’s office to compel the Department of Fish and Game to complete an environmental impact report on the additional trapping of beavers, if others return in the fall and need to be trapped for the same reason.

Department of Fish and Game regulations require that it issue permits for removing beavers if they cause property damage.

“No matter how strongly this court feels about an issue,” she wrote, “it is not free to substitute its views for that of the Legislature, nor will this court overrule a reasonable interpretation of a statute by the executive agency charged with its enforcement.”

The sanctioned killing of beavers is commonplace in the watershed shared by Lake Skinner, but has not drawn loud protests in the past.

Wildlife officials downstream at the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base say that since 1984, they have killed about 170 beavers because of damage to the birds’ habitat.