and Wildlife Service released a 700-page environmental impact statement discussing the Farallones’ mice and dozens of ways to potentially address the matter. Doug Cordell, a spokesman with the service, says his agency considered a total of 49 different solutions to the infestation, including releasing cats onto the islands, using traps to curb their numbers and checking their fertility using medicine-laced bait. Most of these proposed actions have been dismissed, he says, leaving on the table just three. Two involve poisoning the rodents. The other would be to do nothing at all. “We wouldn’t move forward with any option that posed more risk to the environment than benefits,” Cordell says. “Our job as an agency is to serve and protect wild lands and wildlife.” Cordell stresses that the Fish and Wildlife Service currently has “no preferred alternative.” Yet he describes the mice at the islands as “plague-like”
Jim Tietz/Point Blue
‘STUART’ Burrow owls have flocked to the islands for the mice, but are also
eating rare native birds in the winter and spring.
in numbers, and he tells the Bohemian that successful rodent eradication would require removing every single individual mouse from a population. Traps, he says, would likely fail to substantially dent the mice’s numbers. Cats, too, would not catch every last one, and would certainly prey on the Farallones’ birds. It may sound like an unlikely prospect—eradicating invasive rodents from a place where the ground appears to crawl with them. Yet this has been successfully achieved on many small islands worldwide. For instance, Anacapa Island, off of Santa Barbara, was successfully cleared of rats in 2001 using grainbased pellets laced with a powerful rodenticide called brodifacoum. This is likely the poison that would be used at the Farallones. A tiny amount would be applied, according to Cordell. He says the pellets under consideration contain just 0.005 percent rodenticide—such a low density, Cordell says, that any bait pellets that drift into the ocean would dissolve and be rendered virtually harmless. The pellets would not be aimlessly scattered either, according to Jaime Jahncke, a researcher with Point Blue Conservation Science, formerly the Point Reyes Bird Observatory. Jahncke, who backs the poisoning plan, says the pellets would be dropped from a low-flying helicopter and directed away from the tidal zone via a deflector at the mouth of the dispenser. This, he says, would minimize the number of pellets that reach the water. Even if some pellets do dissolve into the tide pools, it may be unlikely that the marine environment would be effected. Jahncke points to an accidental spill in New Zealand in 2001 that put 15,000 pounds of poison pellets—containing almost a pound of brodifacoum—into a tidal marsh. The event, he says, had virtually no lingering measurable effects. Harvesting of shellfish for consumption was temporarily banned after the accident but was soon green-lighted again by officials. ) 10
Keep Calm
As the first day of 2014 wound to a close, a mysterious fire destroyed part of a tent, photos and other sacredly infused objects at a large Moorland Avenue memorial to Andy Lopez, at the site where the 13-yearold boy was shot and killed by Sonoma County Deputy Sheriff Erick Gelhaus on Oct. 21. Speculation about the fire’s origins immediately set the community on edge. In a letter addressed to retired Santa Rosa Police Department chief Tom Schwedhelm (he stepped down Dec. 20) and Sheriff Steve Freitas, dated Jan. 2 and sent via overnight delivery, Lopez family attorney Arnoldo Casillas wrote, “The first-hand accounts I have received indicate that the fire appears to be intentionally set.” Casillas continued: “The intentional burning of the monument represents a threat against the parents of Andy Lopez based upon their race/ ancestry/national origin and is a blatant act of intimidation. . . .” In the letter’s conclusion, he requested that officials undertake a “hate crime investigation.” Other activists and community members soon leapt to the conclusion that the fire had been set with some sort of malicious intent; with tensions running high since the shooting and Gelhaus’ subsequent return to work— despite calls for his ouster—the assumptions are somewhat understandable. But it may be time for cooler heads to prevail. A daylong investigation by arson investigators from four agencies determined that the fire was started accidentally—most likely by a burning candle at the center of the memorial structure. Central Fire Authority chief Doug Williams told the Press Democrat that no evidence of accelerants, such as gasoline, were found at the site. Plans are in the works to rebuild the memorial.—Leilani Clark The Bohemian started as The Paper in 1978.
9 NO RTH BAY BO H E M I AN | JANUARY 8–14, 2014 | BOH EMI A N.COM
stopovers but who now, due to the abundance of mice, remain for long periods. When the mouse population suddenly plummets early each winter, the owls abruptly find themselves with almost nothing to eat. This turns their attention to native birds, in particular the ashy storm-petrel, a rare species that nests on the islands every winter and spring. The owls, according to experts, are slowly whittling away the petrels’ population. But the owls prefer mice, and if only the rodents could be eliminated, the owls, too, might go away. For many ecologists associated with the islands, the solution to the matter seems clear: poison the rodents. “Nobody is happy about maybe having to use poison,” Pyle says. “Nobody wants to do it, but when you weigh the costs against the benefits, it’s probably worth doing.” The idea is more than an informal conversation topic. In October, the federal Fish