What do you know. The California Beaver Summit made Wildfire Today. I thought I only dreamed that would happen. Along with one of my favorite old stories about beaver lawsuits.

The Oregon Supreme Court ruled in favor of beavers — in 1939

When Paul Stewart bought his rangeland in Eastern Oregon in 1884 it included a meadow with “stirrup-high native grasses”. The sub-irrigation provided by Crane Creek was amplified by several families of industrious beavers who had built numerous dams across the stream to form ponds for their homes.

In 1924 he left his farm for a year and upon returning found that poachers had trapped and removed the beavers. The dams had washed out and over the next 12 years the meadow and the creek was transformed. Uncontrolled flood waters eroded the banks, cutting into his valuable crop land. The stream was flowing 15 feet below its original level and the water table had dropped. The meadow was drying up and a well was barely producing any water.

Do you know this story? IF not you should DEFINITELY go read the whole thing. Is the old chestnut of beaver tales that keeps giving again and again. Anyway, the article by Bill Gabbert concludes the retelling with this fine paragraph:

If you’re still starving for more information about beavers, Heidi Perryman, Co-Chair of last month’s California Beaver Summit, tells us that their website has information about presentations made at the conference, including the effects on wildfires, managing the challenges beavers can cause for landowners, and the value beaver engineering can have for the drying state of California. She said two of the researchers mentioned in our May 5 article, Dr. Emily Fairfax and Dr. Joe Wheaton, gave keynote talks at the conference. There were also speakers from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, US Forest Service, and Bureau of Land Management.

AND a link to the summit website because as we know it’s allllllllllllllll about the links. Thanks Bill Gabbert for the mention.  Hopefully the Sierra Club will follow suit and we’ll get something in the Bay Nature Website soon. Carolina Cuellar has been working to put something together since her story on San Luis Obispo Beaver Brigade. Recently she and a photographer made it to Fairfield to snap some photos of beaver dams for the article.