GIVING HUMANS THE BIRD

 

I’ve been eating dolphin safe tuna for almost sixty years now and the darn dolphins are still not safe. I thought these guys were supposed to be so smart! Meanwhile, nobody was trying to protect the Northern Pike of Lake Davis, California: Quite the opposite.

See, some idiot released a couple of Esox Lucius Linaeus – Northern Pike - into the small and placid Lake Davis back in 1991 because they thought Pike would be fun to catch. Unfortunately the lake already had a stocked population of game fish, Onocorhynchus clarki – Rainbow Trout - which are not only native to the lake but a popular game fish among tourists. However the trout are also an easy meal for the voracious Northern Pike.

To the California Fish and Game Department the worry was that once these piscatorial carnivores had finished off the Trout in Lake Davis they would swim downstream on the Feather River, into the Sacramento and then upstream to devour the Delta Salmon fry populations, which The California Fish and Game Department had just spent tens of millions of dollars re-introducing. So, beginning in 1997 officials spent something in excess of $24 million trying to kill off these finned invaders from Minnesota  and that effort didn't prove to be fun for anybody, except possibly the Pike.

The Northern Pike of Lake Davis were poisoned. They were electrocuted. They have been shot, netted, hooked, cornered, dynamited, starved and suffocated. The state even drained the lake. For over a year the nearby human population couldn’t drink the water, it was so full of piperonyl butoxide. The pike barely noticed the stuff.

Sometimes it seemed that the "experts" were hunting down the pike individually,  to beat them to death one at a time with sticks and clubs. It was like trying to control flies with a fly swatter. It seems to have just ticked them off.These Franken-Pike refused to die. They weren't on any endangered species list, they’re on the ten most wanted list. They had more people gunning for them than Osama bin Laden, and for years with about as much luck .When nothing else worked California Fish and Game tried stocking Lake Davis with oversized Trout fry, thinking they would be too big for the young Pike fry to eat and the Pike would then starve to death or be eaten by the giganto-trout. But in response the Pike began growing nine to fourteen times faster than normal. They became super-pike fry-enators: big nasty Pike that had no trouble swallowing the trout of unusual size.Six hundred Pike were caught in Fish and Game sample nets the year after the lake was poisoned. In 2004 the catch was 17,635. In all, something over 65,000 Pike were pulled from Lake Davis since humans began trying to eradicating them, and God knows how many sacrificial trout. But however many it was, it wasn't enough.

In May of 2005 the Pike Fry were caught trying to find a way around the specially built screens on the spillway. And in 2006, after a winter of heavy snow pack and spring rains, Lake Davis came within inches of overflowing the spillway entirely, releasing the Pike directly into the Sacramento River system. Still, not willing to admit he has been beaten by a mere fish, Steve Martarano of California Fish and Game gamely insisted, “We’ve gotten better at knowing where the Pike are.” Yeah, Steve: they’re in the water.

Well, in January, 2007, Fish and Game announced plans to try it one more time. That fall,  as part of yet another $12 million "new" program, about 48,000 acre feet of “rotenone”, a commonly used and “safe” pesticide, were dumped into the lake and, this time, upstream in the lake's tributaries. And this, The Department of Fish and Game assured everyone, would finally kill off "the-Pike-that- wouldn't-die" without killing the people or the local economy...again. They would not know for certain if it worked until the spring of 2008. 

The ice over Lake Davis that year was 12 to 24 inches thick, but under the ice 31,000 new Eagle Lake Trout had been re-stocked, ranging in size from 8 oz.to 3 lbs. And down there, in the dark water, unseen by human eyes, the battles were occurring which would  decide the fate of many a naturalist at Fish & Game. As spring approached they poured in another 1 million trout. And everybody in California had their fingers crossed. And come spring, the hated Pike were gone, And ever since, "...there have been no confirmed cases of northern pike in the lake."  Still the locals cannot avoid the gnawing anxiety that somewhere in the still, deep, dark waters of Lake Davis, the ancestors of the Pike are merely waiting to rise and begin to eat tourists and boats and any SUVs parked too close to the shore. And in that way, the story of Lake Davis reminds this reader of a certain Mary Shelly monster story.

Meanwhile, at the same time,  biologists were raising endangered California condor chicks. They were even using hand puppets to feed the baby vultures, so they would have no positive human interaction before they were released. But despite these efforts about a half dozen of the first juvenile Condors freed in the wild chose to hang out at the Pine Mountain Club, a condo resort village down the road from Fraser Park, at the Western end of the Tehachapi mountain range between Central and Southern California. The problem was that the bird brains figured out on their own that their razor sharp beaks and talons designed to rip open animal carcasses worked even better on plastic trash bags and kitchen window screens.One “naturalist” studying the Condor-condo interactions returned home after a hard day of remote Condor observing via powerful binoculars to discover three of the 30 pound birds and their 10’ wingspans, gallivanting about his bedroom, using it as a sort of playroom and free toilet. They had entered via a slit they made in his window screen. One was in his underwear drawer shredding his shorts while the other two were slowly dissecting his mattress with all the abandon of adolescences free from parental oversight.  It almost looked as if the birds had picked out this guy personally to deliver the message; "Stop watching us, you eco-papparazi!" Now the average citizen, like say maybe Russel Crowe, would have gone into that room with a broom and defended his privacy, and he would driven those feathered gangbangers out the way they had come in!
But this guy was a “naturalist”. So, to avoid human interaction with the feathered truants he retreated until the birds got bored and left on their own. The “naturalists” then convinced local politicians to require all trash to be held inside until the morning of collection, and then placed only in locking containers. And at the landfill a bulldozer would immediately cover the trash bags with dirt.
The thinking was that without an easy food supply the condors would return to their natural behaviors.  Instead the Condor youth gangs’ response was to loom about on the roof of a local restaurant, depressing the hell out of potential customers. The condors were actually waiting for the trash trucks to arrive. They would then use their extraordinary skills at gliding to follow behind the trucks all way to the dump, where they quickly descended on the leftover meat and soup cans and macaroni and cheese containers as if they were a dinning on a dead wooly mammoth. The front loaders couldn’t cover the trash bags without the risk of burying a condor at the same time, so the meals could now be eaten at leisure in a sort of Condor olfactory buffet. Game, set, and match to the condors.The biologists and naturalists were horrified because it didn’t fit their image of noble Condors sailing in an empty sky above an untouched wilderness - which is where the Condors almost became extinct in the first place. Need I point out that not a single condor died at the Pine Mountain Club? They ate too many French fries but none of them died!
The happy ending to this story of rebellious condors is that once they matured and mated the adult condors didn’t want their offspring growing up in an urban environment anymore than Republicans do. Today, the Pine Mountain Club is mostly condor free, except for a few weeks every summer when the newly adolescent vultures fly in for a sort of condor rumsringa. They eat spicy food, taunt the humans and stage panty raids on the naturalists. And then they leave.Now, I’m not suggesting we try protecting endangered species with dynamite or by raising their cholesterol levels, but it does seem that the animals we’re protecting are all in trouble while the ones we’re trying to exterminate are experiencing population booms. What can we learn from this? Well, that there are eight billion humans on this planet at present and baring a natural disaster or WMD we are not going anywhere. And if we do, so are the Condors and most of the Pike and Trout. 

Modern Condors, searching for dinner while soaring above the wilderness are going to see a lot more humans than dead deer. And Pike and Trout are going to meet a lot of little fish with hooks in them. So why not “humanize” them, teach them what every mentally challenged pigeon already knows; the fries are better at Burger King, don’t drink the yellow water, never trust a politician in an election year and don’t go swimming in Lake Davis unless you want your talons bitten off.

-30 -