NORTH AMERICA AND THE WEST INDIES 61 



drainage of northern Nevada along the Humboldt River, and 

 its tributaries and in the Malheur Lake and Steens Mountains 

 drainage of southeastern Oregon . . . There are a few 

 beaver all along the Blitzen from its headwaters down to near 

 Malheur Lake, and George Benson reports one shot at the edge 

 of Malheur Lake in 1909. In 1916 they were found in Big 

 Fish Creek, McCoy Creek, and Kiger Creek. It is fair to 

 assume in the absence of specimens that the beaver in the 

 Silvies River and its branches on the north of Malheur Lake 

 are also of this subspecies. In 1920 they were still common in 

 many places along the Silvies and Blitzen Rivers, and while in 

 places they were doing some damage by flooding the meadows, 

 more often they were merely holding up the water to a better 

 depth and improving the meadows by subirrigation." Con- 

 cerning their former abundance in this last region, Bailey 

 quotes from older records to show that a little over a hundred 

 years ago, in 1826 and 1828, beavers were so numerous that a 

 party of trappers took over 300 in a month. 



On occasion, Bailey adds, they may dam up irrigation 

 ditches or locate in the banks of streams near fields and or- 

 chards where they do serious mischief and have to be removed, 

 driven away, or destroyed. With intelligent handling, "how- 

 ever, they could become a valuable asset on many of the 

 eastern Oregon ranches." 



COOK INLET BEAVER 

 CASTOR CANADENSIS BELUGAE Taylor 



Castor canadensis belugae Taylor, Univ. California Publ. Zool., vol. 12, p. 429, Mar. 

 20, 1916 ("Beluga River, Cook Inlet region, Alaska"). 



According to its describer, this race of beaver is the one 

 found from central British Columbia northward along the 

 coast of the mainland to the mountains of Alaska. Specimens 

 referred to the race are mentioned from Stuart Lake, British 

 Columbia, and from various localities on the shores of Cook 

 Inlet, Alaska. In color the single skin available to the describer 

 was said to be slightly paler than in the neighboring races, 

 phaeus and leucodonta. The skull, in comparison with that of 

 the latter, is "immediately distinguishable through the nar- 

 rower blades of the hamular processes of the pterygoids," with 

 a tendency for the maxillary tooth row and ratio of this to the 

 basilar length to be greater. 



