For the first time in almost 75 years, beavers were released into California waters as a part of conservation efforts by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and Maidu Summit Consortium.
A family of seven beavers swam their way through Tásmam Koyóm, a tribal community in Plumas County that are ancestral land to the Mountain Maidu people. This new family will join a "single resident beaver in the valley" with the goal to re-establish a breeding population, according to the CDFW.
Ben Cunningham, chairman of the Maidu Summit Consortium, said the valley had beavers years ago, but due to pioneer interference, the population disappeared.
Rodents. This order is characterised by having a single pair of continuously-growing incisors. 40% of mammal species are rodents. Examples include rats, mice, beavers, capybaras, squirrels, and chipmunks.
Primates. This order includes lemurs, monkeys, apes, and the girl reading this.
This is a really exciting development! We've already seen the positive effects of beavers returning to their historic range here in North America, so it's even better to see the same thing underway across the Atlantic. A single pair with their first litter of kits certainly isn't a large-scale reintroduction, but it's proof that these animals have the capacity to get back to work here.
Beavers are often called ecosystem engineers, and for good reason. These keystone species alter waterways by building dams and lodges, creating ponds and other aquatic habitats for species that can't handle faster-moving water. These also often serve as water reservoirs during summer droughts. The dams and lodges themselves may also provide nesting sites for birds and shelter for other animals, plants, and fungi.
Sadly there are still people who want to see beavers trapped and hunted as pests because their dams can sometimes flood fields, to include those that were historically seasonal wetlands. Until we stop seeing animals' value only in terms of whether they're useful to us or not, the beavers are going to face opposition as they reclaim their old territories on both continents.
Nonetheless, I give a hearty cheer to the Mammalian Corps of Engineers!
North America once housed more beavers than humans — by a lot. Even before Europeans showed up and built an entire extractive economy on beaver pelts, estimates put the number in the hundreds of millions (during the Pleistocene, there were even giant species of beaver, as large as bears). The North American fur trade, which lasted for centuries, nearly wiped beavers off the continent — and, unknown to trappers, vastly changed its ecosystems from sea to sea.
“There is evidence that riverscapes across the West were much more complex and ‘anastomosed’ prior to European colonization,” says Nicholas Kolarik, a Ph.D. student working with Brandt, who is focusing on mapping data sets of wetlands. Anastomosis denotes branches connecting two things, like organs in the body, but in this case, he means streams, since waterways in the U.S. West used to be much more interconnected.
Today, they’re “starved of wood,” he says, but by adding wood into streams and rivers, especially by building dams, beavers slow water down significantly.
“In doing so, sediment is stored, water infiltrates into the aquifers, riparian vegetation establishes, habitat is created, and carbon is stored,” Kolarik says.
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“Beavers maintain healthy riverscapes which store carbon and water. Consistent access to water is key to mitigating the effects of climate disturbances like drought.”
Beavers’ role as firefighters has already been documented in Idaho. A 2018 technical report by Anabranch Solutions, a river restoration company, found that beavers were a major factor in decreasing burn intensity along Baugh Creek during that year’s Sharps Fire.
“Where active beaver dams were present, native riparian vegetation persisted, unburnt,” the authors wrote. In our hotter and fierier world, beavers are a buffer.
Antique mall/flea market find. Not sure what the big beaver is supposed to be but his smaller friends are helpfully labeled. Kind of kicking myself for not taking this one home tbh.
I had a dream that I was a manager for a resort that catered to supernatural beings and talking animals and I kept getting stopped every other minute to fix problems. Like vampires who needed their rooms darker and otters who didn’t want to play nice with beavers