Posted on 08/17/2018 1:49:53 PM PDT by Red Badger
For the small six-person team tasked with combating California's nutria infestation, a typical day consists of working in 100-degree weather, wading through marshes and avoiding traps built to catch 20-pound rodents, targeting about 2 million acres.
Nutria, a destructive rat-like mammal, is currently burrowing into central California's wetlands. In the spring, the Department of Fish and Wildlife began to warn the public about the dangers of the animal, which devastate agricultural infrastructure by burrowing into levees, roadbeds and canal beds.
But in the past few months, only 200 nutria have been exterminated, 100 of which were found in a pond on a single private farm in central California.
As the agency prepares for an intensive survey of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, officials say they have no idea what the actual numbers of nutria will look like. In April, there were two confirmed sightings of nutria just outside the delta, a region critical to California's waterways.
"We can't guess, we have no idea what we're going to find in there," California Department of Fish and Wildlife spokesman Peter Tira told SFGATE. "We need to survey and see to what extent they're in there, we haven't determined a complete range of nutria in the region."
"Our goal is to keep the nutria out of the delta as much as possible," Tira said. "That's the epicenter of our water control and flood control in California."
The Department of Fish and Wildlife isn't expected to get people on the ground in the delta until later this month, since they are still in the process of getting permission from farmers and other landowners to access private property. Most of the land in the delta is private.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Ship them to the Everglades to feed the pythons!
Stetson used to use their hides for hats. they were very expensive.
They have lots of predators to keep them in check..................
Them thangs breed like rats.
Oh wait a minute.
They be rats.
A perfect living meme for California’s RATs.
I hear the sausage is awesome...................
Maybe North Korea . . .
Don’t know which is worse; nutria or armadillos...
armadillos will knock your car’s front end out of alignment...............
Store bought. My wife cooked it up.
Plus armadillos can carry Leprosy....................
When I was a kid my buddies and I would go up on the Bald Hills and spend the day shooting grey diggers. Didn’t have SWAT teams back then.
I remember the “Raise Nutria in your Basement or Garage for fur!” back in the 1950s. How’d that go over.
Hahaha,
!Cali soooo deserves this new incursion of illegals!
***Fur coats?................***
Been tried in the 1950s. Did not go over well.
Looks like a beaver without the tail.
Time for an oldstyle solution:
Give a $50 bounty on each Nutria turned in. Allow leghold traps (very effective on nutria, and humane, the trap drags them underwater and drowns them), and snares. Allow them to be hunted without limit.
California will not do that, because it would be politically incorrect. Better the state be overrun with vermin than allow the common man a hand in eradicating them.
$50 each would be cheap compared to what they are paying the six man “eradication” team.
Six people, full time, six months. Figure $25 an hour minimum in California, with benefits. That is six thousand hours or $150,000 dollars.
They got 200 nutria. That is equivalent to $750 bounty for each!
Depending on size, quality and quantity, nutria pelts are worth from $11 to $25 apiece.
http://www.righteousfur.com/wholesale-pelts-price-list.html
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