By John Cannon, Mongabay
KEY IDEAS:
- In 2023, California relocated beavers for the first time in more than seven decades.
- The state’s wildlife agency partnered with Native American tribes to move beavers from places where they were causing problems, such as flooding, to parts of their former range.
- The moves and the state’s broader beaver restoration program are the result of decades of advocacy to change an adversarial relationship to one focused on beaver conservation and the benefits beavers can provide, from increased fire resilience to more consistent water supplies.
- The change in mindset involved education and coexistence campaigns, as well as correcting long-held misconceptions about the limited extent of the beaver’s former range in California.
The pictograph, an ochre-red outline with four paws and an unmistakable paddle of a tail, has been on the reservation “my whole life,” said Kenneth McDarment, a member of the Tule River Tribe. It’s just one of many paintings — of people, geometric designs and other wildlife — from 500 to 1,000 years ago adorning the walls of a site called Painted Rock in the southern California foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains.
But today, it stands out to McDarment, who formerly served on the Tule River Tribal Council.
“Sometimes you need to just look at things more often,” he told Mongabay.
About a decade ago, a succession of drought years parched the land, and leaders were searching for ways to shore up the reservation’s water.
Was there ancient wisdom in that artist’s depiction of the beaver, an animal long absent from these lands? If the tribe could return them to the reservation, McDarment thought, they might have a solution to their water woes.
The potential benefits of beavers are manifold, from fire prevention and resilience to improved water quality and fishing. As these “ecosystem engineers” construct their lodges and dams, they alter the courses of brooks, streams and creeks, forcing the water to spread out beyond the banks and remain in parts of the landscape for longer.
So, the Tule River Tribe decided to find a way to bring them back.
A muddied history
The relationship between beavers and people has been particularly fraught over the past several hundred years in California: A continent-wide assault on beavers (Castor canadensis) for the fur trade killed tens to hundreds of millions across North America, and they disappeared from many parts of the state. Since then, the few survivors and their descendants in California have often clashed with humans when beavers cause flooding and other issues.
Recently, though, things have started to turn: In 2023, the state began a beaver restoration program through the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW). Most notably, the program partnered with the Tule River Tribe, as well as the Mountain Maidu people in northern California, to move beavers to tribal lands from areas where they were causing problems for humans, primarily in the watersheds of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers.
At the northern end of the Sierra Nevada, reintroduced beavers now live in a meadow called that the Mountain Maidu call Tásmam Koyóm, which means “tall grass.” The beavers’ homecoming has reinvigorated the wetland habitat, drawing in wildlife like willow flycatchers (Empidonax traillii), sandhill cranes (Grus canadensis) and river otters (Lontra canadensis). These moist grasslands can also put the brakes on the destructive fires that beleaguer the forests of dry western states like California. And the dams store water and trap silt, improving water quality downstream for fish and humans alike.
On the Tule River reservation, several releases since 2024 haven’t yet led to the beavers’ permanent return, with the first groups having likely fallen victim to predators. McDarment and the tribe remain undaunted, however: “We’re happy to be moving along as we are, and hopefully we’ll keep receiving beaver to add to our watershed.”
But the translocations of beavers, like the spires of the Sierra Nevada crest that loom to the east of the Tule River Reservation, are just the most visible part of a massive batholith. The foundations of a shift toward living in harmony with beavers lie in decades of education, research and advocacy.
“The concept of beaver restoration and the importance of beavers in California didn’t start with the creation of the program,” said Valerie Cook, CDFW’s Beaver Restoration Program manager.
The broader aim of those involved has been to reimagine humanity’s relationship with a species that is a close cousin of ours — if not genetically, then at least in the ways beavers similarly bend the environment to their needs.
A ‘century of amnesia’
The Occidental Arts and Ecology Center (OAEC) in California’s Sonoma County has been at the forefront of the movement to restore, benefit from — and coexist with — beavers for more than 20 years. But from early on, the center’s Brock Dolman said he noticed Californians’ “cerebral imperviousness” to the benefits of more peaceable relations with beavers.
Fond of ecological metaphor, Dolman said, “To get to the ecosystem restoration, we have to restore the egosystem, which starts in the headwaters, which is the water in our own heads.”
In contrast, other states were pouring resources into beaver restoration and beginning to reap the benefits, said Kate Lundquist, co-director, with Dolman, of OAEC’s WATER Institute.
“California had this massive beaver blind spot, as opposed to what was happening in Oregon and Washington and Utah,” Lundquist said. “Everyone else in the arid West was really starting to get their beaver act together, and California was surprisingly behind.”
Among the currents flowing against beaver restoration was the long-held — and it turns out, erroneous — assertion that beavers had only ever been native to a small sliver of the state.
Hunters wiped out most of California’s beavers from their former range by the mid-1800s, and that led to “a century of amnesia” about beavers, Dolman said. By the time zoologist Joseph Grinnell was studying them in the early 20th century, perhaps a thousand remained in California.
Grinnell’s surveys turned up most of the state’s beavers in the low-lying valleys of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers. That led him to report in Fur-bearing Mammals of California, a seminal guidebook, that they had probably never lived in the state’s mountains.
But beavers had proven their adaptability elsewhere, colonizing the high elevations of other North American mountain ranges and just about everywhere else outside of the continent’s deserts. By the late 1980s, physician-scientist Richard Lanman and others had started gathering clues that beavers had been far more widespread in California.
The mostly dry creek bed that ran through Lanman’s property in Silicon Valley initially sparked his interest. The home’s previous owner had told Lanman he had fished for steelhead trout in the stream decades before. That didn’t seem possible — unless, Lanman thought, once-present beavers in the region had played a role in damming water upstream, providing for more consistent flow.
But according to Grinnell’s maps, this part of coastal California had also never been home to beavers.
As a physician, Lanman said, he was trained to develop multiple diagnoses for a patient’s condition. That skill may have helped him think through a variety of unique explanations, for example, why the creek had become so anemic by the time he arrived. He also sees his naivety as an outsider in ecology as an advantage.
“I’m not an expert, right? It’s a new discipline for me,” Lanman told Mongabay. “Maybe that’s what makes it easier for me to question the status quo.”
Years later, Lanman was still nurturing an interest in the beaver’s “historical ecology” when he linked up with Charles Darwin James, an archeologist. In 1988, James had found what appeared to be two beaver dams in a mountain meadow near Red Clover Creek in the Sierra Nevada, not far from the Mountain Maidu’s Tásmam Koyóm. The wood in the structures had gnaw marks and had been woven together — telltale signs of beavers.
Carbon dating one of the dams punctuated the discovery: The oldest section was from around 580, and another dated to 1730; the most recent came from around 1850. The results were clear evidence of beavers’ long persistence here, high in the mountains at 1,637 meters (5,371 feet) above sea level, refuting Grinnell’s contention that they’d been confined only to the lowlands.
The beaver’s presence on the creek also vanished from the record right when Lanman expected it to, at the end of what he calls the “California fur rush” and the beginning of the California Gold Rush in the mid-19th century. The onslaught, it turns out, served to wipe out not only the beaver itself but also the memory of its presence throughout much of the state, at least for Western science.
In 2012, James and Lanman published their findings in the journal California Fish and Game (now called California Fish and Wildlife Journal). Lanman turned out more studies, collaborating with Dolman and Lundquist, that tapped into other veins of evidence for beavers’ presence in the Sierra, and beyond, including coastal California.
Lanman had pored over settlers’ journals and observations for mentions of beavers, and he dug into California’s Native American languages. “All the tribes had words for beaver, from San Diego to Mount Shasta,” he said, an indication that beavers existed within the tribes’ territories, or at least nearby. And the research drew on evidence like the Painted Rock pictograph on the Tule River Reservation as a demonstration of its presence in both the landscape and the cultures of the peoples with whom they shared the landscape.
“It wouldn’t have been there if it wasn’t a significant piece of history,” McDarment said.
Building momentum
For much of the 20th century, humans’ own hydrological engineering — for canals, dams and irrigation for agriculture — througout California engendered a “lethal relationship” between beavers and people, Dolman said. From about 1920 to 1950, there had been a program to relocate “problem” beavers to mountain areas. But after World War II, the push for development largely won out, supported by wildlife authorities’ belief in Grinnell’s historically narrow range for beavers in the state.
“It was really just, ‘Get them out of our way. They’re an impediment to progress,’” Dolman said. The approach was, “‘We don’t need these pesky nuisance [animals]. And if they’re not native, all the better, so we can just kill them,’” he added.
By the early 2000s, the OAEC — which Dolman said focuses on “demonstrating solutions where there’s dirt under the nails” — had involved itself in efforts to help California’s cratering coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch) population in the Russian River. The center soon seized on the role that beavers could play in the “process-based restoration,” not just of salmon populations, but of entire watersheds.
Lundquist called that focus a “no-brainer.” They ended up asking themselves, “Why aren’t more people actually doing anything active to restore beaver with that intention?
“That gave us our marching orders,” she added.
Early on in the center’s ‘Bring Back the Beaver’ campaign, they noticed how widespread “misperceptions” helped perpetuate an adversarial human-beaver relationship, Lundquist said — that beavers hurt fish populations, for example, or that they’re bad for farmers.
To this day, the center continues to focus on education to dispel these myths. They’ve also developed tools to foster coexistence for landowners who might need help installing a pond leveler to deal with flooding from beaver dams, or pointers on wrapping trees with protective wire so beavers don’t chomp on them until they fall.
‘Welcoming home’
Correcting the historical record to reflect the beaver’s widespread presence and starting to shift the state’s beaver mindset buttressed a nascent foundation for coexistence. Then, in the mid-2010s, the Tule River Tribe and the Maidu Summit Consortium each approached OAEC. They both wanted to bring beavers back to their tribal lands, but hurdles stood in their way.
“At that time, there was no way to move beaver in California that was legal,” McDarment said.
So the coalition soon engaged in what Dolman calls “the democratic arts of policy change,” working with “the only beaver lobbyist in California” to spark a series of successes for beaver restoration.
In 2019, a petition to the California Fish and Game Commission set out to change the way the state’s wildlife agency issues “depredation” permits for beavers causing problems. Ultimately, in 2023, CDFW policy was updated to include recommendations that landowners try non-lethal “coexistence” measures when possible, before being allowed to kill them and to prevent future conflict with beavers. The department’s beaver web page now also acknowledges beavers’ “conservation value.”
The year prior, in 2022, California’s Governor Gavin Newsom included a beaver restoration program in his budget. Then, in 2024, Assembly Bill 2196 made support for the program permanent.
Then, on Oct. 18, 2023, California relocated its first beavers in more than seven decades, releasing seven on Indigenous Mountain Maidu lands in northern California. Shannon Salem Williams, who is Mountain Maidu and a program manager for the nonprofit Maidu Summit Consortium, said seeing the beavers slip into the water in the Tásmam Koyóm meadow was “a full circle moment.” The Mountain Maidu consider beaver — hi-chi-hi-nem — to be family.
“It was like a big welcoming home,” Williams said. The beavers brought with them the promise of healing for the meadow, a spiritual place for the tribe, she added. Today, the colony has built a 100-m (328-ft) dam at the edge of a pond and blocked off a nearby rivulet to push water back into their pond. An April 2025 report by CDFW credits the beavers with increasing water coverage in the meadow by more than 22%. They’ve also burrowed into the bank of a creek further downstream.
The department has since released more beavers at the site — as Dolman put it, “because the success is so amazing.”
