It’s great to be a beaver in California for the first time in 200 years. With unanimous bipartisan support, the state Legislature passed Assembly Bill 2196 this summer, codifying the state’s beaver recovery program at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. The law gives the program, which implements beaver-supported environmental projects, protection from state budget cuts and political upheaval, and the shocking 2023 Supreme Court ruling that removed up to 70% of the nation’s waterways and wetlands. This is a rebuke to the judgment. Protection under the Clean Water Act.
Environmentalists, biologists and Indian tribes in California have championed the beaver for more than two decades, launching an extensive education campaign that included convincing officials that the beaver is a native species throughout the state. The restoration effort is in addition to California’s 30×30 goal, a national effort to secure and protect 30% of the nation’s land and coastal waters by 2030.
A beaver management plan is underway, with $2 million earmarked to help develop a statewide coexistence strategy and move beavers from areas where they cause problems to areas where they can solve them. Finally, Castor canadensis, long maligned as a pest, is being reevaluated as an environmental hero.
“I’m really proud that we’ve gone from being a laggard to a leader when it comes to beavers,” said California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot. “While there is no silver bullet for environmental restoration, beavers are an important species and an important part of the puzzle to restore California’s ecosystems.”
Once abundant, beavers were hunted by fur traders and driven out by development, and by 1900 they were extinct from most of California’s habitat. The remaining trees were left behind by landowners who didn’t want their trees dug into the ground and removed to make way for dam construction, or who found their fields and roads flooded when a colony of beavers moved in nearby. This often caused trouble for landowners. A “nuisance” beaver was killed. Still, California needs beavers. Beavers are nature’s greatest ecosystem and water engineers.
Climate change is fundamentally altering California’s hydrology, exacerbating more rainwater and less snowmelt, wildfires, drought, and groundwater and aquifer depletion. The ponds and wetlands that beavers create become the antidote to all these problems as beavers move into streams and streams and begin building damming facilities.
Water coming out of beaver ponds is just the beginning. Beaver ponds store an average of three times as much water as visible water by creating essentially giant underground sponges that can slow rivers and streams and keep them flowing during dry summers and droughts. . In the event of a flood, the same sponge absorbs some of the excess, creating resilience.
Research has clearly shown how beavers fight fires. Satellite images of the aftermath of the massive Manter Fire in 2000 in Tulare County show a scorched landscape except for a healthy green line where beavers built dams. The before-and-after data convinced the researchers that Smokey the Beaver had created a “ribbon” of fire-resistant habitat at low cost.
Beavers are essential to healthy rivers and our future water supply. Wetlands surrounding beaver ponds sequester carbon and purify water by filtering pollutants such as nitrogen and phosphorus. Beaver “engineers” build dams and canals that create connections between land and water. These beaver wetlands serve as important centers of biodiversity for plant and animal species, including endangered species. River wetland systems with beavers have 30% more plant and animal species than wetland systems without beavers.
Recent research has established the value of having beavers in the landscape. The University of Helsinki, for example, estimates savings of $500 million a year in the Northern Hemisphere alone.
Molly Alves, a senior environmental scientist who joined the California Department of Fish and Wildlife this summer to oversee the beaver recovery program, is mapping watersheds to help move nuisance beavers to where they can be most effective. creating and collecting data.
“We’re looking at the entire landscape,” she said. “Where is the risk of wildfire greatest? Where are the areas most affected by drought? Where is erosion?” She is also working on the current translocation progress report. Masu.
Last year, beavers were returned to two traditional California Native American lands: Mountain Maidu and Tule River Indians.
Seven beavers joined one resident in October 2023 on 2,000 acres of land near the headwaters of the Feather River, which the Maidu people call Tasmamu Koyom. In June 2024, the Fish and Wildlife Service announced that another group of beavers had been relocated to the South Fork. The Tule River watershed in the Sequoia National Forest east of Porterville, California.
In both cases, the release was a true homecoming. Researchers found the remains of beaver dams on the Tasmum-Koyom River in mountain meadows and in the southern Sierra. Kenneth McDerment, Habitat Manager for the Tulare River Tribe, said: [ancient] Emoji. ”
Tribal leaders are working with scientists, nonprofits, and the state to prepare beaver-friendly habitat, planting willows and other plants that beavers eat and where beavers can survive to establish colonies. An analogue of a man-made beaver dam was installed to bring sufficient water to the area.
The Maidu hope Tasmamu Koyom will become a showcase for traditional ecological knowledge. “Bringing the beavers back has brought the area back into balance and back to what it was meant to be,” Maidu Consortium spokeswoman Lorena Golbert said.
As for the Tule River property, as McDerment explains, “In 2014 we had a drought and the river was dry. We said, ‘Why don’t we bring the beavers home?’ Said.
When the Supreme Court narrowed the definition of waterways covered by the Clean Water Act, it denied protection to “discontinuous” rivers and streams from development, pollution, and destruction. These include tributaries and wetlands, the very waterways that beavers help build, maintain, and maintain. health.
We have already destroyed over 50% of our national wetlands, and more are being destroyed in California. By codifying the Pilot Beaver Relocation and Restoration Project, California is pushing back against its history and the Supreme Court’s dangerous myopia. This shows the public how political commitment to nature-based solutions can create environmental and economic resilience.
All eyes are now on California and its beavers.
Leila Phillippe is the author of Beaverland: How One Strange Rodent Built America. She is a professor and professor of humanities at the College of the Holy Cross.
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