For the first time in 200 years it’s great to be a beaver in California. In a show of unanimous bipartisan support, the state Legislature voted this summer to pass Assembly Bill 2196, which codifies the state’s Beaver Restoration Program at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. The law gives the program, which implements beaver-assisted environmental projects, protection from state budget cuts and political upheaval, and it stands as a rebuke to the Supreme Court’s devastating ruling in 2023 that removed up to 70% of the nation’s waterways and wetlands from Clean Water Act protections.
California environmental activists, biologists and Indian tribes have been advocating for beavers for more than two decades, launching an extensive education campaign that included having to convince authorities that beavers are a native species throughout the state. Now the restoration effort will add to California’s “30x30” goals — the national effort to set aside and protect 30% of U.S. lands and coastal waters by 2030.
For the record:
5:38 p.m. Jan. 7, 2025A previous version of this op-ed conflated $2 million allocated for beaver coexistence programs with the state’s relocation projects. The two are separate.
Two million dollars has been allocated to develop training and support for coexistence strategies, and a beaver management plan is underway. The state has already begun moving beavers from where they cause problems to where they can solve them. Finally Castor canadensis, long maligned as a pest, is getting a rebrand as an ecological hero.
The rodents are natural engineers who can restore wetlands.
“I’m really proud of the transition we’ve made from laggard to leader on beavers,” said Wade Crowfoot, California’s secretary for natural resources. “While there’s no silver bullet solutions to environmental restoration, beavers are a keystone species, and an important part of the puzzle to restore our ecosystems in California.”
Beavers, once plentiful, were wiped out of most of their range in California by 1900, hunted by fur traders and chased out by development. Those that were left often annoyed landowners who didn’t want their trees gnawed down to the ground and carted off to build dams, or who found their farmland or roadways inundated when a beaver colony moved in nearby. “Nuisance” beavers were killed. And yet California needs beavers — they are nature’s superlative ecosystem and water engineers.
Climate change has fundamentally altered California’s hydrology, delivering more rainwater and less snowmelt, exacerbating wildfire, drought and the depletion of groundwater and aquifers. When beavers move into a stream or creek and begin building their damming complexes, the ponds and wetlands they create are an antidote to all these problems.
Beavers create unburned islands where plants and animals can shelter from megafires, research has confirmed. A movement is afoot to reintroduce the rodents to the state’s waterways.
The water swelling out of a beaver pond is just the beginning. Beaver ponds slow rivers and streams, storing an average of three times the water that’s visible by creating what are essentially huge underground sponges that can keep things flowing in dry summers and during drought. In times of flood, those same sponges soak up some of the excess, creating resiliency.
Studies have shown in stark terms how beavers fight fire. Satellite photos of the aftermath of the massive Manter fire in 2000 in Tulare County show a charred landscape except for a line of healthy green where beavers had built dams. Before and after data convinced the researchers that “Smokey the Beaver” was a low-cost creator of “ribbons” of fire-resistant habitat.
Beavers are critical to healthy rivers and our future water supply. The wetlands ringing a beaver pond sequester carbon and clean the water, filtering out pollutants like nitrogen and phosphorus. Beaver “engineers” build dams and canals that create connectivity between land and water; these beaver wetlands function as vital biodiversity hubs for plant and animal species, including many that are endangered. River wetland systems with beavers have 30% more animal and plant species than those without.
The Tule River Indian Tribe and state wildlife crews reintroduced nine beavers to their natural habitat in the Sierra.
In recent years, studies have established the dollar value of having beavers in the landscape. The University of Helsinki, for instance, estimated the savings at $500 million annually for the Northern Hemisphere alone.
Molly Alves, a senior environmental scientist who joined the California Department of Fish and Wildlife this past summer as the Beaver Restoration Program supervisor, is mapping watersheds and collecting data so she can move nuisance beavers to where they can do the most good.
“We are looking at the landscape as a whole,” she said. “Where is the greatest wildfire risk? What areas are most impacted by drought? Where is erosion?” She is also working on a progress report of current translocations.
Last year, beavers were returned to two sites on the traditional lands of Indigenous Californians, the Mountain Maidu and the Tule River Indians.
On land the Maidu call Tásmam Koyóm, 2,000 acres near the headwaters of the Feather River, seven beavers joined a single resident in October 2023. In June of 2024, the Fish and Wildlife department announced that another group of beavers was translocated to the south fork of the Tule River, in Sequoia National Forest east of Porterville, Calif.
‘Beaver believers’ are celebrating the appearance of a young kit along a Palo Alto creek, saying it bodes well for the species’ resurgence in California.
In both cases, the releases were true homecomings. Researchers found remnant beaver dams in the mountain meadow Tásmam Koyóm streams, and in the southern Sierra, as Kenneth McDarment, the range manager for the Tule River Tribe, puts it, “There are beaver in our [ancient] pictographs.”
Tribal leaders worked with scientists, nonprofits and the state to prepare beaver-friendly habitat, planting willows and other plants beavers eat and installing human-made beaver dam analogs to bring enough water to the area that beavers could survive to establish colonies.
The Maidu want Tásmam Koyóm to be a showcase for traditional ecological knowledge. “Bringing the beaver back,” said Lorena Gorbert, a spokesperson for the Maidu Consortium, “was bringing back more balance to the area, putting it back … the way it should be.”
As for the Tule River site, as McDarment explains, “We were in a drought in 2014 and the river was drying up. We said, ‘Why not bring beaver home?’
When the Supreme Court narrowed the definition of waterways covered by the Clean Water Act, it denied protection from development, pollution and destruction to “noncontinuous” rivers and streams — these include tributaries and wetlands, the exact waterways that beavers help construct, maintain and keep healthy.
We’ve already destroyed more than 50% of our national wetlands, even more in California. With pilot beaver relocations and the codification of the restoration project, California is pushing back against that history and the Supreme Court’s dangerous shortsightedness. It’s showing the nation how political engagement with nature-based solutions can create environmental and economic resiliency.
All eyes are on California now … and its beavers.
Leila Philip is the author of “Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America.” She is a professor at the College of the Holy Cross, where she holds a chair in the humanities.
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