So, the Tule River Tribe decided to find a way to bring them back.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n At the northern end of the Sierra Nevada, reintroduced beavers now live in a meadow called that the Mountain Maidu call T\u00e1smam Koy\u00f3m, which means \u201ctall grass.\u201d The beavers\u2019 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.<\/p>\n On the Tule River reservation, several releases since 2024 haven\u2019t yet led to the beavers\u2019 permanent return, with the first groups having likely fallen victim to predators. McDarment and the tribe remain undaunted, however: \u201cWe\u2019re happy to be moving along as we are, and hopefully we\u2019ll keep receiving beaver to add to our watershed.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThe concept of beaver restoration and the importance of beavers in California didn\u2019t start with the creation of the program,\u201d said Valerie Cook, CDFW\u2019s Beaver Restoration Program manager.<\/p>\n The broader aim of those involved has been to reimagine humanity\u2019s relationship with a species that is a close cousin of ours \u2014 if not genetically, then at least in the ways beavers similarly bend the environment to their needs.<\/p>\n The Occidental Arts and Ecology Center (OAEC) in California\u2019s Sonoma County has been at the forefront of the movement to restore, benefit from \u2014 and coexist with \u2014 beavers for more than 20 years. But from early on, the center\u2019s Brock Dolman said he noticed Californians\u2019 \u201ccerebral imperviousness\u201d to the benefits of more peaceable relations with beavers.<\/p>\n Fond of ecological metaphor, Dolman said, \u201cTo get to the ecosystem restoration, we have to restore the egosystem, which starts in the headwaters, which is the water in our own heads.\u201d<\/p>\n In contrast, other states<\/a> were pouring resources into beaver restoration and beginning to reap the benefits, said Kate Lundquist, co-director, with Dolman, of OAEC\u2019s WATER Institute<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cCalifornia had this massive beaver blind spot, as opposed to what was happening in Oregon and Washington and Utah,\u201d Lundquist said. \u201cEveryone else in the arid West was really starting to get their beaver act together, and California was surprisingly behind.\u201d<\/p>\n Among the currents flowing against beaver restoration was the long-held \u2014 and it turns out, erroneous \u2014 assertion that beavers had only ever been native to a small sliver of the state.<\/p>\n Hunters wiped out most of California\u2019s beavers from their former range by the mid-1800s, and that led to \u201ca century of amnesia\u201d about beavers, Dolman said. By the time zoologist Joseph Grinnell was studying them in the early 20th century, perhaps a thousand remained in California.<\/p>\n Grinnell\u2019s surveys turned up most of the state\u2019s 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>, a seminal guidebook, that they had probably never lived in the state\u2019s mountains.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s deserts. By the late 1980s, physician-scientist Richard Lanman and others had started gathering clues that beavers had been far more widespread in California.<\/p>\n The mostly dry creek bed that ran through Lanman\u2019s property in Silicon Valley initially sparked his interest. The home\u2019s previous owner had told Lanman he had fished for steelhead trout in the stream decades before. That didn\u2019t seem possible \u2014 unless, Lanman thought, once-present beavers in the region had played a role in damming water upstream, providing for more consistent flow.<\/p>\n But according to Grinnell\u2019s maps, this part of coastal California had also never been home to beavers.<\/p>\n As a physician, Lanman said, he was trained to develop multiple diagnoses for a patient\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not an expert, right? It\u2019s a new discipline for me,\u201d Lanman told Mongabay. \u201cMaybe that\u2019s what makes it easier for me to question the status quo.\u201d<\/p>\n Years later, Lanman was still nurturing an interest in the beaver\u2019s \u201chistorical ecology\u201d 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\u2019s T\u00e1smam Koy\u00f3m. The wood in the structures had gnaw marks and had been woven together \u2014 telltale signs of beavers.<\/p>\n 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\u2019 long persistence here, high in the mountains at 1,637 meters (5,371 feet) above sea level, refuting Grinnell\u2019s contention that they\u2019d been confined only to the lowlands.<\/p>\n The beaver\u2019s presence on the creek also vanished from the record right when Lanman expected it to, at the end of what he calls the \u201cCalifornia fur rush<\/a>\u201d 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.<\/p>\n In 2012, James and Lanman published their findings<\/a> in the journal California Fish and Game (now called California Fish and Wildlife Journal<\/a>). Lanman turned out more studies, collaborating with Dolman and Lundquist, that tapped into other veins of evidence for beavers\u2019 presence in the Sierra<\/a>, and beyond, including coastal California<\/a>.<\/p>\n Lanman had pored over settlers\u2019 journals and observations for mentions of beavers, and he dug into California\u2019s Native American languages. \u201cAll the tribes had words for beaver, from San Diego to Mount Shasta,\u201d he said, an indication that beavers existed within the tribes\u2019 territories, or at least nearby.\u00a0And 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.<\/p>\n \u201cIt wouldn\u2019t have been there if it wasn\u2019t a significant piece of history,\u201d McDarment said.<\/p>\n For much of the 20th century, humans\u2019 own hydrological engineering \u2014 for canals, dams and irrigation for agriculture \u2014 througout California engendered a \u201clethal relationship\u201d between beavers and people, Dolman said. From about 1920 to 1950, there had been a program to relocate \u201cproblem\u201d beavers to mountain areas. But after World War II, the push for development largely won out, supported by wildlife authorities\u2019 belief in Grinnell\u2019s historically narrow range for beavers in the state.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was really just, \u2018Get them out of our way. They\u2019re an impediment to progress,\u2019\u201d Dolman said. The approach was, \u201c\u2018We don\u2019t need these pesky nuisance [animals]. And if they\u2019re not native, all the better, so we can just kill them,\u2019\u201d he added.<\/p>\n By the early 2000s, the OAEC \u2014 which Dolman said focuses on \u201cdemonstrating solutions where there\u2019s dirt under the nails\u201d \u2014 had involved itself in efforts to help California\u2019s cratering coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch) population in the Russian River. The center soon seized on the role that beavers could play in the \u201cprocess-based restoration,\u201d not just of salmon populations, but of entire watersheds.<\/p>\n Lundquist called that focus a \u201cno-brainer.\u201d They ended up asking themselves, \u201cWhy aren\u2019t more people actually doing anything active to restore beaver with that intention?<\/p>\n \u201cThat gave us our marching orders,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n Early on in the center\u2019s \u2018Bring Back the Beaver\u2019 campaign<\/a>, they noticed how widespread \u201cmisperceptions\u201d helped perpetuate an adversarial human-beaver relationship, Lundquist said \u2014 that beavers hurt fish populations, for example, or that they\u2019re bad for farmers.<\/p>\n To this day, the center continues to focus on education to dispel these myths. They\u2019ve also developed tools<\/a> 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\u2019t chomp on them until they fall.<\/p>\n A poster from the mid-20th century promoting past relocations of beavers in California. Image courtesy of CDFW.<\/p>\n T\u00e1smam Koy\u00f3m, a Mountain Maidu meadow in northern California. Image by John Cannon\/Mongabay.<\/p>\n Beavers leave their crates on the Tule River Reservation in southern California. Image courtesy of CDFW.<\/p>\n A beaver from the 2024 Tule River Reservation release. Image courtesy of CDFW.<\/p>\n The beaver lodge at T\u00e1smam Koy\u00f3m. Image by John Cannon\/Mongabay.<\/p>\n A young beaver swims in the pond at T\u00e1smam Koy\u00f3m. Image courtesy of CDFW.<\/p>\n Red Clover Valley, where beaver dam remnants discovered in the 1980s helped confirm that beavers had lived in the Sierra Nevada for hundreds of years. Image by John Cannon\/Mongabay.<\/p>\n \u2018Welcoming home\u2019<\/p>\n Correcting the historical record to reflect the beaver\u2019s widespread presence and starting to shift the state\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cAt that time, there was no way to move beaver in California that was legal,\u201d McDarment said.<\/p>\n So the coalition soon engaged in what Dolman calls \u201cthe democratic arts of policy change,\u201d working with \u201cthe only beaver lobbyist in California\u201d to spark a series of successes for beaver restoration.<\/p>\n In 2019, a petition to the California Fish and Game Commission set out to change the way the state\u2019s wildlife agency issues \u201cdepredation\u201d permits for beavers causing problems. Ultimately, in 2023, CDFW policy was updated to include recommendations that landowners try non-lethal \u201ccoexistence\u201d measures when possible, before being allowed to kill them and to prevent future conflict with beavers. The department\u2019s beaver web page<\/a> now also acknowledges beavers\u2019 \u201cconservation value.\u201d<\/p>\n The year prior, in 2022, California\u2019s Governor Gavin Newsom included a beaver restoration program in his budget. Then, in 2024, Assembly Bill 2196<\/a> made support for the program permanent.<\/p>\n 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 T\u00e1smam Koy\u00f3m meadow was \u201ca full circle moment.\u201d The Mountain Maidu consider beaver \u2014 hi-chi-hi-nem \u2014 to be family.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was like a big welcoming home,\u201d 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<\/a> by CDFW credits the beavers with increasing water coverage in the meadow by more than 22%. They\u2019ve also burrowed into the bank of a creek further downstream.<\/p>\n The department has since released more beavers at the site \u2014 as Dolman put it, \u201cbecause the success is so amazing.\u201d<\/p>\n Banner image: A beaver swimming in a pond just after its release at T\u00e1smam Koy\u00f3m in northern California. Image courtesy of CDFW.\u00a0<\/p>\n John Cannon is a staff features writer with Mongabay. Find him on Bluesky<\/a> and LinkedIn<\/a>.<\/p>\n NASA satellites reveal restoration power of beavers<\/a><\/p>\n In a big win, Yurok Nation reclaims vital creek and watershed to restore major salmon run<\/a><\/p>\n Citations: <\/p>\n Grinnell, J., Dixon, J. S., & Linsdale, J. M. (1937). Fur-bearing mammals of California: Their natural history, systematic status, and relations to man. Berkeley: University of California Press. Recovered from: https:\/\/www.google.com\/books\/edition\/Fur_bearing_Mammals_of_California\/yS1BAAAAYAAJ?hl=en<\/a><\/p>\n James, C. D., & Lanman, R. B. (2012). Novel physical evidence that beaver historically were native to the Sierra Nevada. California Fish and Game, 98(2), 129\u2013132. Recovered from: https:\/\/oaec.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/novel-physical-evidence-beaver-sierra-nevada-James-Lanman-2012.pdf<\/a><\/p>\n Lanman, R. B., Perryman, H., Dolman, B., James, C. D., & Osborn, S. (2012). The historical range of beaver in the Sierra Nevada: a review of the evidence. California Fish and Game, 98(2), 65\u201380. Recovered from: https:\/\/www.sierraforestlegacy.org\/Resources\/Conservation\/SierraNevadaWildlife\/North%20American%20Beaver\/Beaver-Lanman%20et%20al.2012.Sierra.Evidence.pdf<\/a><\/p>\n Lanman, C. W., Lundquist, K., Perryman, H., Asarian, J. E., Dolman, B., Lanman, R. B., & Pollock, M. M. (2013). The historical range of beaver (Castor canadensis) in coastal California: an updated review of the evidence. California Fish and Game, 99(4), 193\u2013221. Recovered from: https:\/\/www.webapps.nwfsc.noaa.gov\/assets\/2\/7449_05182016_102036_Lanman.et.al.2013-Pollock-Calif-Fish-Game-99-4.pdf<\/a><\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/6-beaver-pictograph.jpg\")
<\/a>A beaver pictograph on a wall of Painted Rock on the Tule River Reservation in southern California. Image courtesy of the Tule River Tribe.
\nA muddied history<\/p>\n![\"CDFW](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/1584-CDFW-staff-move-a-family-of-seven-beavers.jpg\")
<\/a>CDFW staff move a family of seven beavers close to the release site at T\u00e1smam Koy\u00f3m in 2023. Image courtesy of CDFW.
\n![\"Seven](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/2391-2-Seven-beavers-take-to-their-new-home.jpg\")
<\/a>Seven beavers take to their new home at T\u00e1smam Koy\u00f3m. Image courtesy of CDFW.
\nA \u2018century of amnesia\u2019<\/p>\n![\"Leaders](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/10-Leaders-of-the-Tule-River-Tribe.jpg\")
<\/a>Leaders of the Tule River Tribe perform a blessing prior to the release of beavers into the reservation\u2019s watersheds in 2024. Image courtesy of CDFW.<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/17-A-baby-beaver-kit-hitching-a-ride-on-the-tail.jpg\")
<\/a>A baby beaver kit hitching a ride on the tail of its older sibling so that it can join the rest of the family in exploring their new habitat. Image courtesy of Brock Dolman\/OAEC.
\nBuilding momentum<\/p>\n![\"5-A-poster-from-the-mid-20th-century\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/5-A-poster-from-the-mid-20th-century-1200x800.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"1112-T\u00e1smam-Koy\u00f3m,-a-Mountain-Maidu-meadow\"\/](\"https:\/\/news.mongabay.com\/wp-content\/plugins\/soliloquy\/assets\/css\/images\/holder.gif\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n