Today the Washington Post has an article about invasive beavers that were introduced to Argentina and have been expanding their range.According to the Post the beavers probably number about 200,000. The Argentine government still has not given permission for the beavers to be harvested for food, in spite of a good effort having been made by local chefs to work with them.
My opinion is that they do not have a prayer of getting rid of these things. If they are still regulating the hunting of the species to the extent that they only allow them to be killed under particular circumstances and for particular reasons then there is absolutely no hope of removing the beavers.
The way to eliminate a species like this is to simply kill them. Stop studying it, stop regulating it. Create a continuous open season year-round and allow people to hunt them with traps and rifles on all public land and on private land with the owner's permission. No bag limits, no restrictions. Add a viable bounty per head on top of that (at least $10 each, if not more), while also allowing the meat to be eaten and the hides to be sold, and you have the makings of a program that could work.
Argentina doesn't sound prepared to do this.
Meanwhile, back here in the US we have invasive nutria that were brought from Argentina last century to provide for a fur-trapping industry. Ironically, this was the same reason why beavers were introduced to Argentina. Can't we all just be happy with the big furry aquatic rodents that we already have?
I've just spent about a week and a half hunting nutria in Louisiana and my conclusion is that they aren't much farther along in their thinking than Argentina is. They still have a closed season on nutria for much of the year, and they even still have bag limits. In a few areas like Jefferson Parish we find local governments that are seriously doing something about the problem but the state and federal government are both really just giving the problem lip service. They'll do anything to get rid of the nutria, short of actually letting people go out there and kill them.
The interactions between nutria and beavers are interesting and unfortunate in the US. Nutria have a habit of ganging up into large groups to attack and kill beavers in order to take their lodges. I spent several days in the backwaters of Caddo Lake near the Texas border ambushing a group of 'nutes' that had done exactly this. The beaver lodge was occupied by nutria and the beaver were nowhere to be seen. Trees with obvious beaver chewing signs were seen here and there, but all of the weathering suggested that they'd been gone for at least a couple of years.
In Argentina the invasive beavers seem to be moving straight into the native territory of the nutria. Will the nutria provide a check against their advances, just as they have hurt beaver populations in North America? I don't know. There are certainly other factors involved as well, such as a lack of predators in Argentina that specialize them. There may also be diseases and parasites that periodically control beaver numbers in their native range which do not occur in South America.
[Photo copyright 2011 by Jackson Landers. All rights reserved. That's me holding the nutria. It was delicious]
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