When Does Beaver Reintroduction Make Sense?
TÁSMAM KOYÓM, U.S. — “It’s a little wet!” Ben Cunningham shouted over his shoulder as he slipped knee-deep into one of the unseen rivulets spidering through the hip-high grasses and willow galleries around us. Up until that point in our walk, Cunningham had been agreeably taciturn, contemplative about the return of this meadow to the Mountain Maidu people in recent years, and their efforts to bring beavers back as part of the tribe’s work to restore its health.
“Next time, you’ll have to bring your boots,” he said, chuckling over the din of rushing water that seems to be both everywhere and nowhere under a thicket of green peppered with yellow-eyed, purple-petaled asters.
Above, a young osprey circled in low loops above our heads. The bird dropped periodically, flying past dragonfly armadas, their abdomens glowing orange in the August sun.
Our feet thoroughly soaked, we came upon a mound of sticks and mud nearly to eye level: a lodge. It had taken this beaver family a little less than a year to build, said Cunningham, a Mountain Maidu elder and chair of the nonprofit Maidu Summit Consortium. They’d been released here in 2023, California’s first beaver translocation in decades.
The meadow was once mostly dry. Each year, mountain snowmelt in the spring and summer carved deeply gashed “incised” creeks through this landscape, allowing the water to run swiftly through the meadow and on downslope toward the Feather River.
Today, meltwater from the ridges at the northern end of the valley flows into the beaver pond, slowing its gravity-hastened hurry and spreading it out on Tásmam Koyóm, as the Maidu call the meadow. Even in late summer, clear, burbling streams meander out from the pond.
By curbing the rush of water from the heights with their dams, beavers can help lower fire intensity, create habitat for plants and animals, and blunt the effects of droughts.
“They are really powerful ecosystem engineers,” Emily Fairfax, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Minnesota, told Mongabay. “The number of services they provide to us and ways that they build resilient landscapes is honestly too much to just rattle off all at once.”