The beavers arrived in October 2023: a breeding pair and their offspring, seven in all, relocated from Sutter County to a mountain meadow in Plumas County known to the Mountain Maidu as Tásmam Koyóm. One beaver was already living in the valley. The new family joined it.
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife called it the state’s first beaver conservation release in nearly 75 years. The lead partner was the Maidu Summit Consortium, which stewards the land.
Why California beaver reintroduction matters
“Beavers help retain water on the landscape, which increases groundwater recharge, improves summer baseflows, extends seasonal flows and increases fuel moisture during wildfire season, effectively creating green belts that can serve as wildfire buffers or breaks and provide refugia for wildlife,” said Charlton H. Bonham, the department’s director, when the release was announced.
In June 2024, a second family of seven was released in the South Fork Tule River watershed on the Tule River Indian Reservation in Tulare County, the first beavers on the reservation in decades. Roughly 80 percent of the tribe’s drinking water originates in that watershed.
“I’m very happy to see them come home and it’s going to be wonderful to watch them do their thing,” said Kenneth McDarment, a Tule River Tribe member and past tribal councilman. “My hope is to have the beaver throughout the reservation and all the watershed that we have.”
Dam good at their job
By April 2025 the department had placed 28 beavers at five sites in the Sierra Nevada. Two litters of kits had been born, and dams were up at three release sites. At the most productive one, in an area burned by the 2021 Dixie Fire, the beavers built a 100-meter dam, expanded the surface water area by about 23 percent, reconnected the stream to its floodplain and dug a network of canals. A kit was photographed on the Tule River reservation.
The department is candid about the hard part. Survival among relocated beavers ran 40 to 60 percent, with predation and illness related to capture stress the main causes. Moving a beaver is not easy on the beaver.
“The Beaver Restoration Program was formed because we recognize the value that beavers can provide on a landscape,” said Molly Alves, who supervises the program. Governor Gavin Newsom put it another way in the 2024 announcement: “It turns out that beavers are not only good at building dams, but they’re dam good at building trust, too.”
Sources
- CDFW, CDFW Releases Beavers into the Wild for First Time in Nearly 75 Years (Dec. 2023)
- KTLA, Beavers released into California wild for 1st time in 70 years (Jan. 2024)
- Office of Governor Gavin Newsom, Wood’nt you know it: beavers are back (June 2024)
- CDFW, CDFW Sees Ecosystem Engineers at Work in Beaver Restoration Pilot Projects (April 2025)
