There aren’t many times in the world a famous beaver article is followed up by another beaver article that says EXACTLY what I want people to know about the first one. Consider this my last birthday present for turning 60. Not bad for a girl who just got out of the hospital.

When does beaver reintroduction make sense?

California is a poster child for the impacts of climate change — a state beset by shifting weather patterns that bring inconsistent snowfalls and years-long droughts. Many of its forests teeter on the edge of destruction, wherein a single spark could ignite yet another record-breaking fire. And the state must simultaneously muster — and store — enough water from often-scant annual precipitation for both the U.S.’s largest population and a yawning expanse of hydrologically intensive agriculture.

“I think we’re in kind of an idyllic [stage of] beaver literacy,” advocate Heidi Perryman said. “People have begun to hear a lot of good things about beavers, and they’re very hopeful that beavers can fix everything that we’ve messed up.”

But the view of this animal as wholly positive is “no more accurate” than earlier beliefs that they’re always a nuisance, Perryman added.

Perryman, a child psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area town of Martinez, calls herself an “accidental beaver advocate.” When a pair of beavers turned up in Martinez’s Alhambra Creek in 2006, town leaders wanted to get rid of them for fear that their dams would cause flooding.

But Perryman was taken with Martinez’s new rodent residents, and she wasn’t alone. A groundswell against killing them surged, and the beavers stayed.

Perryman reckons that, for years, she spent five hours a week watching the beavers after their arrival in Martinez, learning about their behaviors, discovering their personalities, and eventually documenting more than two dozen individuals. She posted blogs, photos and video on a website linked to the nonprofit she still leads, Worth a Dam.

As the beavers changed the watershed with their engineering, other wildlife flourished, Perryman said. “We had mergansers and heron and otter and mink, things that we had never seen in our creek before because of the dams that beavers maintained.”

The town is seen as a model for coexistence, and it still hosts an annual beaver festival even though the beavers have moved on, no longer living in Martinez.

Now, with two pilot relocations –– the one to Tásmam Koyóm and another on the Tule River Reservation in Sierra Nevada foothills that began in 2024 –– there’s another tool that sidesteps the lethal removal of beavers that come in conflict with humans.

Though exact numbers are hard to come by, Perryman estimates that the state allows killing of 1,000 to 3,000 beavers each year through the “depredation permits” CDFW issues to landowners when beavers cause damage, according to her public records requests.

“It’s still remarkable how many times California turns down the opportunity to coexist with beavers,” Perryman said.

All the feels. Thank you so much John Cannon for listening and taking what I said seriously. Not bad for a girl who just got out of the hospital.

Perryman said she understands why moving beavers is so enticing.

“It really appeals to people because it’s so much nicer to relocate things than to kill them,” Perryman told Mongabay. But, she added, “It’s really important for people to do relocations thoughtfully and carefully … It’s not without risks.”

Rather than concentrate on those risks, Perryman said, the focus today is more often on how beavers can help, which can be rife with unrealistic expectations. That view has made her skeptical of California’s translocation efforts.

“You don’t get to relocate beavers and have them stay just where you want them or have them only build dams where you want them or have them only take the trees you choose for them,” Perryman said. “They do their own thing, and our fortune is that we can be smart enough to learn how to coexist with them and [benefit from them].”

Most experts agree that finding ways to live with beavers should be the primary aim, before trying to move them.

“Translocation is kind of the final piece,” the OAEC’s Dolman said, “if and when you’ve exhausted everything [else].”

R. Kyle Pagel, a scientist with the state’s beaver restoration program, echoes that sentiment. CDFW starts with encouraging coexistence strategies when there’s conflict, such as coating tree trunks with sand-containing paint to discourage beavers from cutting down trees.

Only after those efforts fail should relocating the beavers — or killing them — be considered. The answer is, in part, pragmatic: The thinking is that once they’re gone, the “problem” is solved, but a spot that’s suitable for one family of beavers is apt to attract another, Pagel said.

It is better to fix the problem than to kill the problem. And better to solve the problem than move the problem.

Researchers like Emily Fairfax say they want to return more beavers to their historical range. The animals once lived across much of the state, but rampant trapping for fur markets up through the beginning of the 20th century “ruined beaver populations,” Fairfax said.

“I think we owe it to the beavers to do whatever we can to help them reestablish in the watersheds.”

I’m really not so sure how I feel about this sentence. On the one hand we do owe beavers a LOT. But on the other hand  beavers are already reestablishing themselves in the watersheds. And we can’t seem to stop killing them when they do.

I’m not sure how much more of our “help” beavers can take?

Given a chance, Fairfax said, beavers can adapt, if not always in predictable ways. She was a physicist before diving into the watery world of beaver ecology, and she said pinning their behaviors down is next to impossible, from the materials they use for their lodge to their choices of food. “They break every single rule,” she said. “You can’t write a law to describe them.”

A big part of the problem is shifting our approach from controlling nature to partnering with it, she added. “We dammed the Mississippi. We’ve built levees. We’ve dammed the Colorado. We know how to control nature,” Fairfax said. But teaming up with nature is “a lot harder.”

“Working with beavers requires letting go of some control,” Fairfax added. “It will be messy and frustrating.”

Well I agree with that 100 percent. Beavers do their own thing. They don’t build where we want them to or what we want them to. They aren’t lego sets that we just need to install everywhere.

And for the record, beavers DO adapt. But they can’t adapt to everything we have thrown at them for a five hundred years. Sometimes we are going to have to give them a little help first.

Just so you know, of all the photos in the article of ungroomed beavers in cages or being released onto tribal land THIS one is the best. And it was taken 8 blocks from my house in the community that worked to save them.