[Riley]

A short time later, authorities, using a helicopter and searchers on the ground, found what had prompted the scare -- a large beaver.

A beaver in Modesto? I lived in California almost all of my life, and the first beaver that I had ever seen in the wild didn't occur until I moved to the east coast. The only wildlife I have seen in Modesto was a skunk, which a second cousin of mine promptly shot.

Just doesn't seem like beaver country.

[runningbear]

LOL... well, strange animals do show at odd places.... Just think, in Palo Alto, they keep reporting mountain lion sightings....

[CIB-173RDABN]

"Just doesn't seem like beaver country"

---

Something else you can blame the French for. Around 1828, French Canadians set up camp at French Camp (North west of Modesto about 20 miles) and proceeded to trap beavers until they were almost all gone.

[Arthalion]

Just doesn't seem like beaver country.

You would be wrong on that count. Read this:

Our road was now one of continued enjoyment and it was pleasant riding among this assemblage of green pastures with varied flowers and scattered groves and out of the warm green spring to look at the rocky snowy peaks where lately we had suffered so much.

The lupine (is) a beautiful shrub in thickets, some of them being 12 feet in height. Occasionally three or four were clustered forming a grand bouquet about 90 feet in circumference and ten feet high. The whole summit was covered with spikes of flowers, the perfume of which is very sweet and grateful. A lover of natural beauty can imagine with what pleasures we rode among these flowering groves, which filled the air with a light and delicate fragrance."

Those are the words of John C Fremont as he pushed his cavalry through what is now the Modesto area in 1844. The land was later stripped and the forests razed (except in a few isolated riverine parks) by the cattlemen and wheat farmers, but the Modesto area was never natually a desert (that started just south of us) or a delta swamp (that started just north of us).

As for beavers, there is a large beaver population in the Delta which extends up the San Joaquin river, with a smaller branch population extending up the Tuolumne. The point where this beaver was spotted is about a mile from the conjunction of Dry Creek and the Tuolumne River, so this one was probably just exploring a new area (I've seen dozens of beavers while fishing the Tuolumne over the years, but I've never seen one in Dry Creek before).

[Porterville]

There are no beavers in the Centeral Valley; NONE- I swam in every river and lake and only seen muskrats; something stinks.

[Drago]

According to this map:
http://www.aphis.usda.gov/ws/nwrc/is/living/beavers.pdf
it looks like Modesto>South in CA and most of AZ are the only places Beavers are NOT found. Didn't know they were that widespread.