Tali Trillo, NEC Staff
You may find me at the NEC organizing interviews and events with Indigenous community members, or cleaning up trash with unhoused friends, or writing grants to keep actualizing our dreams. What you may not know is that I also “beaver.” That is: I’m one of those handful of geeks in the creek desperate to bring beavers back.
Since October 2022, I have been working seasonally with Symbiotic Restoration (SR). The group, as mentioned in their EcoNews article last August, specializes in low-tech, process-based restoration when building Beaver Dam Analogs (BDAs). Put simply, BDAs are humble human attempts at making a beaver dam. “Low-tech, process-based” means that we try to reduce as much disruption to the environment as possible by not using heavy machinery and resourcing natural materials from each worksite.
Though the overarching intention is to encourage beaver return, other goals of BDAs mirror the necessity of beavers and the ecosystems they influence: capturing sediment, rehydrating soils, improving the quality of water, slowing the flow of water to prevent flooding downstream and erosion, and recreating habitat for wetland and riparian wildlife. If there are willows on the worksites, we replant them around or into the BDAs in order to increase the willow population. Willows play an important role for wetland ecosystems, climate change mitigation, and basketry and medicine as a critical cultural resource.
My work with SR has mainly been at Yellow Creek in Tásmam Koyóm, a valley encompassing over 2,000 acres of Mountain Maidu territories. These lands became colonially known as northwestern Plumas County.
Since I first came to Yellow Creek, I have experienced the landscape recovering, quenching thirst, and reuniting with loved ones. I have seen less blackened trees and more green pine babies sprouting. I have heard more woodpeckers drumming and mountain chickadees sharing their love of cheeseburgers. I have felt changes in how lush the meadows have become, including the growing abundance of native plants like willows, yarrow, columbines, and blue-eyed grass. In a span of only a few years, I have witnessed the area transform environments hospitable enough for beavers to come back.
And so, they finally came. At the end of 2023, Tásmam Koyóm was the site of the first North American beaver (Castor canadensis) reintroduction in over 75 years. A long-awaited return of a keystone relative.
Mountain Maidu traditional lands are of the many Native Californian territories (and beyond) that endured settler genocide of their Peoples and nonhuman kin, including beavers. Fur trade, commercial trapping, industrialization, private lands, and other colonial horrors destroyed almost all wetlands and beaver populations across the state. Where there once was an estimated millions of beavers in California, only thousands remained by the 1900s. Survivors were displaced and further plagued with habitat loss and ongoing settler contact; their descendants still being hunted today.
Settlers have occupied Mountain Maidu homelands for nearly two centuries, coming in waves of pursuit for gold, timber, places to put cattle ranches, and hydropower. The industries’ impacts in conjunction with the loss of beavers transformed Tásmam Koyóm’s historic wetlands into dry grasslands. With obliterated wetlands and forest fuel accumulating for years, nearly 80% of Mountain Maidu ancestral territories have been burned by wildfires. The infamous Dixie Fire scorched almost a million acres of northern California — acres that included Tásmam Koyóm.
Since the Mountain Maidu Peoples are not a federally recognized tribe, they created the Maidu Summit Consortium (MSC) in 2003 as a way to re-acquire homelands and begin healing the wetlands. It was through their nonprofit status that Tásmam Koyóm was at long last able to be returned in 2019 from PG&E; the company that was responsible for the Dixie Fire and leasing to cattle ranchers at Tásmam Koyóm. PG&E still owns water rights to those lands. The Secretary of MSC, Marvena Harris, responded to the land return by saying,
The reality of this is that our lands were created by Kodoyapem, World Maker, for our People to use and live. We never take no more than we need to from the land or animals. The land has always been ours and will always be ours. We are here to be stewards of the land and creatures that exist on the land. (maidusummit.org)
Photo Credit: Brock Dolman (oaec.org)
California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) awarded MSC a grant in 2018 that included beaver restoration work in Tásmam Koyóm and restoring ecological conditions on Yellow Creek. Last year’s beaver reintroduction at Tásmam Koyóm was the first phase of CDFW’s North American beaver restoration project; a project aimed towards wildfire resilience and ecological conservation. The translocated family of seven beavers will be monitored for years by scientists assessing their behaviors, movements, activities, and habitats. When I saw the CDFW video of the release, I was overcome with tears and hope that these native animals will ever-grow as part of the landscape once again.
On June 3, I made the familiar trek to Tásmam Koyóm. I arrived at the same shared campsite greeted by co-workers boasting beaver pun license plates and snacks to share. We woke the next day around sunrise to have our morning safety meeting. After a group clap, we left to trees marked by colored ribbons, letting us know ideal places to put a dam. And for the next week, we embodied our furry friends. Every time I participate in BDAs being built, I get to see parts of the land drink creek water for the first time in decades. The meadow is reminded of how wetlands used to feel, no longer as a memory to grieve but as a possible future.
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This article is the second of a series called Beaver Log. SR in collaboration with the NEC will provide updates on beaver restoration progress in the west, with the collective hope that beaver will be brought back and return as an existing keystone species. Stay tuned for news you can sink your teeth into!
If you would like to learn about volunteering with Symbiotic Restoration, visit www.symbioticrestoration.com/volunteer. To learn more about Symbiotic Restoration or process based restoration, visit www.symbioticrestoration.com and www.calpbr.org. To read updates about the CDWF North American Beaver restoration project, visit www.wildlife.ca.gov.