I realized yesterday’s story in Marin was a big, big deal. All day different people, including my 94 year old uncle. sent it to me. It occurred to me, it was the first time, not counting Martinez I mean, that Californians really DEMANDED beavers. Asking CDFW to allow them to have beavers is pretty groundbreaking. I kept hearing the tune of Dire Straits “I want my, I want my.I want my MTV” all day in the back of my mind. Except we’d have to change it to “I want my BÆV”
And then there’s articles like this; From the California Water Blog
Nature has solutions…What are they? And why do they matter?
California’s water problems are intense; so much so they are often referred to as ‘wicked’ for their extraordinary depth of complexity and general unsolvability. Yet it recently occurred to me that some of the better and more creative solutions often derive from one particular source – nature itself. Indeed, studies of nature-based solutions or ‘NBS’ are rising rapidly (Davies and Lafortezza 2019; Nelson et al. 2020; Acreman et al. 2021), and are especially popular within the NGO and environmental communities.
Beavers are one important nature-based solution that just aren’t discussed enough! During the early 1800s, fashion trends played an unusual role in the decline of Pacific salmon populations. Though perhaps odd to us now, at that time, the classic beaver hat was considered high fashion. Further, the main source of beaver pelts was California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho and British Columbia. Because of territorialism (e.g., between various fur-trapping regions), beavers were purposefully and quickly deleted from many salmon-producing streams to discourage nearby trapper encroachment. The net effect was something referred to as the “fur desert” (Ott 2003).
Yet as beaver populations dwindled, so too did occurrence of beaver dams along the West Coast. This was a problem for fishes because native salmon and trout populations are known to exploit beaver ponds as productive rearing habitats for their young (Talabere 2002; Pollock et al. 2004; Herbold et al. 2018). For those of us interested in improving native trout and salmonid habitats, beaver conservation and reintroduction must be part of the larger fix (Wathen et al. 2019; Pollock et al. 2019).
Mountain meadow restoration in particular has been floated as an important element to climate resilience in California, and is part of the California Water Resilience Portfolio. The meadow collaborative is currently working to support restoration of these systems. But scaling any substantial increase in mountain meadow acreage will need more beavers.
Some how. Some day, California will wake up to the fact that it needs water savers. Maybe when it’s too late. But it will happen.
