Graduation Day

In the 60-plus years since the two naturalists drew up their beaver range maps, surprisingly little has changed in the state’s official outlook. For the most part, Castor canadensis is considered a non-native pest, and subject to state-permitted removal from backyard streams, or anywhere else people find it inconvenient.

But in a new paper recently published in the scientific journal California Fish and Game, a group of hobbyist and professional ecologists rethink Grinnell and Tappe’s assessment. They’ve compiled evidence from a wide range of digital and paper archives to show that beavers were once prevalent throughout most of California, including the entire San Francisco Bay Area.

Alison Hawkes, the online editor for bay nature, did an incredible job putting all this information together. I’m so excited this article got written and hope it inspires 5 more. You really should go read the whole thing, and then have some coffee and read it again: it’s that good.

If that notion could be disproved, maybe it would change the nature of the debate. In 2012, Perryman, Lanman and Brock Dolman from the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center’s Water Institute wrote their first paper reviewing the evidence for beavers in the Sierras.

Perryman founded the beaver advocacy group, Worth a Dam, to save from extermination a beaver family that had moved into a highly-visible pond outside a Starbucks coffee shop in downtown Martinez in 2007. City officials thought the beavers were a flood hazard and didn’t belong there. It’s a reaction that beavers get time and again, and is often legitimized with depredation permits. In 2013, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife issues 172 depredation permits, each one allowing the removal of multiple beavers on an individual site.

Well now those paragraphs made me happy. They sort of remind me of a Judy Garland and Micky Rooney movie, when the kids role up their sleeves and decide they they can clean the old barn to use as a stage for a show that will raise money for their cause. Regular people taking matters into their own hands. Doing it themselves. Plus, I’m always happy when Worth A Dam gets promoted and our hard work is noticed.

It is perhaps because of their longtime absence that beavers are so overlooked as a solution to today’s conservation problems. Need help restoring a wetland, or recharging groundwater? You could bring in a beaver. Does your river dry out for half the year? A beaver might fix that. Are you trying to bring back salmon populations, or red-legged frogs? Beavers.

I wish people had been talking about [this] when California declared drought this year,” said Perryman. “People need to be thinking about the animal that keeps water on the land as a resource.”

Oh my goodness, an article that says beavers used to be everywhere and we NEED them everywhere? Hand me the smelling salts, I feel faint. I dreamed this day would come, but I never really believed we’d get here. Oh and this is my very favorite part, the part where I know I personally made a difference and changed the conversation for the better: