Invasive nutria are making inroads in Bay Area watersheds and gaining a lot of attention, prompting Director Chuck Bonham this week to detail “the hidden work” of the Department of Fish and Wildlife in trying to eradicate the 25-pound swamp rats.
He pointed out that trappers attempted to introduce the South American rodent in California starting in 1899. Stable populations later sprouted in the Central Valley and Central Coast in the 1940s. In the 1970s the state declared the pests eradicated. Yet in 2017 a thriving population in the San Joaquin Valley was detected, moving the following year to the southern edge of the Delta.
The voracious eaters destroy wetland habitats and weaken infrastructure by burrowing under roads, bridges and conveyance canals.
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CDFW flipped into emergency command mode with the new infestation. With $23 million in state and federal funding, it has taken down more than 5,000 nutria. The agency has deployed more than 165,000 traps and 12,000 cameras and uses detector dogs to track down nutria scat.
Despite the carnage, the rodents have continued to spread along the Delta’s fringes and this year into Contra Costa County. Bonham acknowledged he is more optimistic than the department’s experts on whether eradication is a realistic goal. Decades of nutria battles in the Chesapeake Bay have yet to bring the population to zero.
Bonham shot down any notion of sponsoring a hunting contest. He said Louisiana’s campaign has been complicated and shown little success.
