Okay I’ve been biding my time to tell hard core beaver fans about the VERY EXCITING DEVELOPMENT this weekend in identifying the historic range of beavers in California. This is a rarefied topic I know, not of obvious interest to everyone, but it matters because beavers all over are routinely killed with the justification “well they’re not native anyway”.(See Kings Beach). A very important historic paper by Tappe has been quoted by every possible source saying that beavers weren’t native over 1000 feet. We want to verify whether this is true.
Imagine how excited I was to meet Barry Hill this weekend at the Flyway Festival. He’s a regional hydrologist for the USDA working out of Vallejo. One of his jobs is to verify the activity of historical beavers so that meadow restoration can be justified by the US forestry service. (Meadows are linked to the soil deposits of old beaver dams.)
So in his research he came across an archeologist who was doing some digging near Feather River, Northern California, 4500 feet elevation. He now works with the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Oregon. Well his excavations included an old beaver dam which he had the foresight to have carbon-dated. Are you sitting down?
It was 750 years old.
The archeologist was interested in writing a paper on this find, but wanted a co-author. I said I’d be happy to introduce him to several, and Barry wrote me monday that we can organize a conference call on this topic for March.
Flyway Festival > Birds > USDA > Soil > Archeology > Beaver Dams > Worth A Dam.
How’s that for connections!
