Beavers in San Diego County

Yes, beavers are cute and amazingly fun to watch but that is not why San Diego County needs them. Beavers are nature’s engineers! Beavers and their dams create wetlands which in turn create lush, expansive habitats for numerous other animal species. But that’s not all. Beavers increase biodiversity, improve water quality, store massive amounts of water during droughts, and reduce the risk of flooding during spring and early summer flooding peaks. And beavers do all this for FREE!

“But beavers are an invasive species to San Diego County. They are not native to this part of California. They don’t belong here. They should not be reintroduced!”

This has been the thinking for almost 100 years. However, new research demonstrates that the historic range of beavers in what is now California once stretched along every coastal watershed from the Oregon border to the Mexican border in the south, including San Diego County!

Historic place names are often indirect evidence of the one time presence of beavers. If there is a creek named “Beaver Creek”, there is a very strong probability that beavers live or once lived in that waterway. And San Diego County has one such historic place name: “Beaver Hollow”, located in the Sweetwater River watershed. More research needs to be done to confirm the historic presence of beavers at this location, but it would be very odd to name a location “Beaver Hollow” if there had never been any beavers there.

So we “beaver lovers” are not asking the state to introduce a new “invasive” species into the rivers and creeks of San Diego County. We are asking the state of California to return beavers to their original habitat, including the rivers of San Diego County. We are asking the state of California to fight drought and river bed erosion with cheap (free) labor! Let the beavers go to work doing what they love to do and do best: water engineering!

Dear State of California: Reintroduce beavers to the San Diego, San Dieguito, Sweetwater, and San Luis Rey rivers!

I encourage all my readers to contact their California state legislators and urge them to pass legislation which would allow the reintroduction of beavers into the rivers of San Diego County.