It always looks so good to relocate beavers.  So much better than killing them.

Beaver believers: Native Americans promote resurgence of ‘nature’s engineers’

Beavers are often considered “nuisance” animals on the US west coast and, if captured, are destroyed by animal control companies.

But the beaver picked up by Molly Alves is to be transported to Alves’ employers, the Tulalip Tribes, a nation in Washington’s western corner. This Native American community, and others, are at the vanguard of the “beaver believer” movement, which holds that the rodents can play an essential role in maintaining healthy landscapes.

Beavers are known as nature’s engineers, due to their dam-building habits. For decades they have been hated by landowners, who dislike the animals’ tendency to fell trees and flood areas. However, their dams – although seen by some as a nuisance – help control the quantity and quality of water flow, while their ponds create habitat for numerous plants and animal species, including fish.

It gives me such a soft fuzzy feeling to read that somewhere beavers are so valued that they will move them rather than kill them. But still, new beavers will just be drawn to that spot and the whole thing will happen again. Better to let them stay like we did in Martinez and make changes so that everyone can be happy.

Back in 2018, Washington’s Cowlitz Indian Tribe started on an ambitious project: to reintroduce beavers back into the Gifford Pinchot national forest, a wild region on the slopes of the Cascade mountains, as part of efforts to reclaim indigenous land management practices. The animals had not been in the region since the 1930s, after they were trapped into near-extinction in North America during the 1800s fur trade.

In partnership with the Cascade Forest Conservancy, the tribe has spent the last two years capturing beavers from private lands, where their dams are often dynamited, and relocating them on to tribal land.

The project has been such a success that the tribe was recently awarded a grant to survey beaver habitat, mapping the impact beavers have made on the land, in order to create a relocation model for other communities in the state – and perhaps further afield.

Not this field I’m afraid. California doesn’t allow beaver relocation – except onto tribal lands where our government has no say. Once this was my dream for the state but now I just want CDFW to show landowners how to wrap trees.

I’ve become more realistic in my old age.

Interest has been spurred by California’s most intense wildfire season on record – in 2020 the state experienced five of its six largest-ever fires. Research published last year revealed beavers can be used to mitigate the spread of fire because beaver-inhabited land is simply too wet to burn.

But tribes in California have their own legal battle to wage: relocation of beavers in the state is illegal, and so communities have turned to other strategies, such as building beaver analogues – manmade dams – in order to attract the animals to their watersheds.

“Doing a full beaver reintroduction is difficult, and so we just decided to build analogues to get them to come to us instead,” says Roger Boulby, the Yurok’s watershed restorationist, who is restoring the Klamath River by physically moving the river’s path, as well as trying to bring back beavers to help boost salmon populations.

Hey if we are going to discuss beaver benefits in California can we maybe get a shout out to the beaver summit? Anyone?

Until legislation changes in California, which classes beavers as a detrimental species, the tribe is limited to building suitable environments in the hopes of attracting beavers.

“It’s unfortunate that the situation is so political but that is the case right now, given that the California department [of fish and wildlife] is reluctant to support beavers,” says Kate Lundquist, the director of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, a California organization that promotes biological and cultural diversity.

If projects in states like Washington go well, “it could open the door for future relocations,” says Lundquist. “We’re using these projects as pilots to show that beaver rewilding can be done in a responsible way, and hopefully that will answer some of the concerns, and ideally make it available to those not on sovereign lands.”

Ahem. Maybe if there were some kind of big meeting to discuss how beavers make a difference? A statewide “come to beavers” meeting? Like a pow-ow or a summit of some kind?