The Federal Problem with Virginia Beach's Nutria

Copyright 2011.

It is nice to see the nutria problem getting some attention in the news today. The New York Times ran a nice article today by Theo Emery that focuses on the lesser-known infestations around Delaware, Maryland and Virginia rather than the notorious situation in Louisiana. But there is an element to the infestations around Virgina Beach that I don't think anyone has publicly written about before.

I have a fair bit of personal experience with nutria. I spent something like eight to ten days (I honestly lost track) hunting nutria in different areas of Louisiana with shotgun, rifle, pistol, and on one occasion a very big steel trap. My new book, 'Eating Aliens,' features a whole chapter about that trip.

The situation in Virginia is one that I am also familiar with. While I haven't hunted nutria in Virginia, I spent some time doing ecology field work for college at Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge in 1995 and 1996. Back Bay NWR, which lies a few miles north of the border with North Carolina and is technically within the city limits of Virginia Beach, was riddled with invasive nutria and pigs at the time. They excavated large burrow systems in the banks of creeks and canals. Periodically the older burrows collapse and cause the bank to erode. The biologists talked about eradicating both the hogs and the nutria but were waiting for their studies on the problem to be completed.

About 15 years later, I returned to participate in an absolute mess of a managed pig hunt at Back Bay and I found they are still 'studying the problem.' I hunted pigs there several years in a row (you can read an account of my first hunt here; bear in mind that it was even more of a mess the following year) and I was just out there again a few months ago while hiking from Virginia Beach to Corolla, North Carolina. I had conversations about the pigs and the nutria with various refuge staff, including a park ranger, a Fish & Wildlife officer and a biologist from USDA.

They have all completely given up on even caring about the nutria. If they could wave a magic wand and make the nutria go away then they probably would. But nobody seemed to be interested in a really aggressive hunting and trapping program to remove either the pigs or the nutria. They had decided that the nutria weren't enough of a problem to bother with hunting them.

The problem with Back Bay's apathy is that this piece of federal land will be a constant source of new infestations in the region. While Virginia's Department of Game and Inland Fisheries may be reasonably serious about getting rid of nutria, they have no power to do anything on a federal wildlife refuge.

When you decide to provide a safe harbor for an invasive species the way that Fish & Wildlife and USDA have at Back Bay, you are condemning the long-term eradication efforts for all surrounding areas. Perhaps Back Bay's staff don't mind nutria digging holes in creek banks, but their Virginia Beach neighbors feel very differently about the matter.

Sometimes the federal government is helpful in the fight against invasive species. For example, there is a great project going on through the US Geological Survey to simulate the natural sexual attractants of silver carp in order to get them all in one place to be netted out of the water. But I have found that more often we see situations like the one at Back Bay. States and localities tend to get more serious about eradication, while the federal tendency is to study an invasive problem forever while blocking outside attempts toward eradication.