I‘ve been hard at work on my presentation to the waterboard next week, but I had to add a new section on our papers about historic prevalence for this particular audience, and I didn’t want to lose much of my original info so I wanted it to fit in five minutes. This meant I couldn’t wander about looking for the words so I wrote a little passage to insert, that I thought it could double as a post. Hopefully it will be new to you or at least interesting.

Martinez was eager to teach other cities in California what we learned. But before we could really share the wealth we had to deal with a 70 year old mistake. The confusion started with Joseph Grinnell, the first director of vertebrate zoology at UCB and the author or the important work on the states fur-bearing mammals. In his chapter on beavers he noted that they didn’t live above 1000 feet in the Sierras and were absent from our Coastal Rivers. According to Grinnell beaver didn’t belong in Tahoe or Berkeley and before we talk about how this was possible I need to say a little bit about the history of the fur trade.

Just like our thirst for oil has driven the economy and the politics for that last century, our need for beaver fur was the “oil” of the previous 800 years. Beaver were so important to trade that they were entirely trapped out of Europe by the end of the middle ages. The Russians trapped the California Coast in the 1700’s. Folks came to Canada looking for new sources of the valuable fur and trapped west and south at a great rate. Beaver were extinct on the East coast of America by the 1800’s and sought steadily west by the French, the Dutch, and the Americans. By the time that the 49ers arrived in them thar hills looking for gold in California the once ubiquitous beaver gold was long gone.

In 1900 there were nine known colonies of beaver left in CA. Fish and game, to their credit was concerned that zero beaver would mean more erosion, fewer fish and less waterstorage. They began a period of reintroduction in the late 20;’s and 30’s. This lead Grinnell to think that beavers in the sierras or coastal rivers were introduced, rather than reintroduced. We were particularly interested in this confusion because it lead people to say that beavers weren’t native. We wanted to challenge that idea.

The first place we started was with the work of an archeologist at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He came across a paleo beaver dam during a dig in the Sierras and had the sense to carbon test three parts of the dam. As you can see the oldest tested at 580 AD and the dam was continually maintained until the 1800’s. We then looked at secondary data including anthropological information, place names and a reevaluation of trapping records. We found numerous evidence to contradict Tappe and Grinnell. This Rock painting by the Chumash Indians is at 1600 feet above Santa Barbera, The Emeryville Shell mound contained beaver bone fragments, After his good service Kit Carson was rewarded with the right to trap all beaver in Alameda Creek.

The fossil record for beaver contained a skull from Sespe creek in Santa Barbara that didn’t ft with Grinnell’s theories, so he marked on his map with a question mark. Recently digitized correspdence however made available to us the letters better Naturalist John Hornung and his friend Dr. Grinnell. He wrote that he himself had found the beaver in question floating down the creek on a log, and like any good naturalist of the time would do with a rare animal, killed it himself and sent off the skull.

At this time the book was already in press and this discrepancy was dismissed. The misreport of Grinnell was copied by every other author and taught in science classes for 70 years.

What do you think, convincing? If you want to read more the links to these published papers is in the right hand margin about halfway down the page under the section “Solving problems”. Happy reading!