There’s nothing I like better than a good beaver mystery. I’m never happier than I am when I finally puzzle out the nutria living in the woman’s swimming pool, the groundhog in Wilbur’s backyard, or the Capybara visiting the water treatment plant.
But this surprised me. A sea-lion/beaver between the Mohave desert and San Bernadine in a salt water lake.
A 50-pound mystery surfaced in March 1987 after a resident spotted a sea lion swimming in Spring Valley Lake’s shallow depths.
Gossip filled the community as word of the unlikely guest spread, eventually resulting in 15 eyewitness accounts that made a concerned believer out of Karin Wyman.
Wyman was curator of the Laguna Beach-based nonprofit Friends of the Sea Lion (now the Pacific Marine Mammal Center), and interviews with residents convinced her of three things: the sea lion was a 10- to 11-month-old pup. It had been illegally captured and dumped in the 200-acre lake. And it was sick.
“Whoever caught it and brought it here couldn’t have approached it unless it was sick or injured,” Wyman said, adding that sea lions tout a bite four times stronger than any dog.
Equipped with nets and a fishing boat, Wyman and colleague Don Burns embarked on a weeks-long search for the mammal. Meanwhile, if caught, the culprit faced jail time and a $20,000 fine per the Marine Mammal Protection Act signed by President Nixon in 1972.
But there was a problem. Amid the search, willow and cottonwood trees began falling around the lake, their trunks gnawed nearly in half.
Joel M. Shows, a trapper for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, surveyed the damage and reviewed footage of the purported sea lion swimming. His conclusion was the saltwater mammal was, in fact, a rather large beaver that had wandered over to the man-made lake from nearby Mojave Narrows.
If there existed talk of a beaver being less likely than a sea lion, it was quelled by State Department of Fish and Game warden Dick Phillips, who said beavers weren’t so unusual in the arid High Desert.
Whoa. It’s either a very confused sea lion OR a beaver. And hey why are they calling an elevation of 2700 feet “High Desert“. Does that mean the top of Mt. Diablo is high desert? Hmm, maybe they’re referring to the population, not the landscape. Well a nonprofit in Laguna Beach got involved and did some sleuthing of their own. But fish and game said it wasn’t any marine mammal.
It’s an ongoing problem around here, especially in Spring Valley Lake, Oro Grande and (Lake) Arrowhead,” Phillips said. “Beavers are not native to the area. They were introduced.”
By Phillips estimation, beavers were imported to the region in the 1940s, and — as an example of their prevalence — he noted that six had recently been “taken,” including a 110-pounder in Oro Grande.
The solution was permits Phillips issued to Shows — who had experience trapping bears and mountain lions — and Spring Valley Lake officials that allowed for the beaver to be shot on sight.
Death was preferable to a tranquilizer because, according to Shows, “If you dart him, he’ll go under and drown before you can get to him.”
And so the beaver’s fate was presumably sealed. But there was another problem. No one — not even Phillips — had actually seen the beaver on land. And glimpses of it swimming in the lake didn’t exactly dispel the sea lion theory.
Never mind that beaver were historically prevalent and
30 years later a brilliantly researched paper would prove that fact, but why would they expect to see the beaver on land anyway? In 10 year’s of watching it was a fairly uncommon occurrence. And why WOULDN’T they expect to see a sea lion on land? My clearest sea lion memories were when they were sunning themselves on a dock some where….
Complicating matters was the discovery of 30-pound catfish in the lake that had been bitten in two; Daily Press writer Bruce Snyder noted in his reportage, “Sea lions dine on fish, while beavers are vegetarians.”
“Normally, I’d say that it (the sea lion) is probably a beaver,” Phillips said after the gruesome find. “But around here, anything can happen.”
Wyman and Burns stuck to their belief that the animal was a displaced sea lion and then Spring Valley Lake administrator Bernie Wagner agreed.
Anyway, near the end of the month, Wyman and Burn’s diligence finally paid off. It also proved them wrong, though. Hours before dawn one day, they stumbled on something swimming near the boat. They gave chase until the sun rose and revealed they had tailed a beaver for four hours.
Wyman called off the search, saying she wouldn’t come back unless there was solid proof of the sea lion’s existence. Still, even with the beaver identified, a creeping doubt nagged her.
“The only thing that makes me wonder is that we talked to people who say they saw a (sea lion) and say they saw the front flippers and things,” Wyman told the Sun. “Beavers don’t eat fish.”
Be that as it may, the sighting allowed the hunt to commence via Phillips’ permits. But a hunt never occurred because Spring Valley Lake officials declined to use them.
The stated reason: the beaver had disappeared.
Ooooh, tell me another one grandpa! That made me shiver in the nicest way. The actually funny thing about this is the story happened in 1989, just around the time beavers were trapped out of Lake Skinner 90 miles away in Riverside County. This of course led to the Friend’s of Lake Skinner case and the lawsuit that was won at the appellate level for trapping out beaver without a CEQA analysis. Now I can’t exactly see how a beaver would get from point A to point B, but it sounds from this article like they were doing a fair amount of trapping at the time, which is pretty interesting because it explains where those beavers might have come from.
Another Beaver Mystery Solved.
Taos is a historic and artist mecca in the upper middle of New Mexico. With an elevation of nearly 7000 feet, you will definitely feel the visit all the way down to your lungs. There’s plenty to keep you busy whether your hiking, painting or meditating. But save some free time tomorrow evening because Ben Goldfarb will be talking at the Harwood Museum about beavers and his new book.
Environmental writer Ben Goldfarb will spend his October residency at the Aldo & Estella Leopold Cabin putting the final touches on a manuscript about the importance of beavers in restoring ecosystems.
Beavers could be put to work building dams to stop a village from flooding in the 
National beaver expert Derek Gow will be in Cheshire to give a talk on the how the animal’s re-introduction could impact the countryside. Cheshire Wildlife Trust is hosting the one-off talk at its headquarters at Bickley Hall Farm, between Malpas and Nantwich.
