Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries.
Tásmam Koyóm, a high Sierra meadow in California, U.S. returned to the Mountain Maidu people in 2019, is once again wet where once it had been dry. Rivulets now snake through hip-high grasses and willow thickets, feeding a beaver pond where a family of beavers released in 2023 has built a chest-high lodge. This was California’s first beaver translocation in decades, part of a tribal effort to restore the health of the landscape, reports Mongabay’s John Cannon after a site visit.
Once deeply incised by snowmelt channels that sent water rushing downslope, the meadow now holds water longer into the summer. Melt from the ridges slows and spreads, clear streams meander out from the pond, and a mosaic of habitats has begun to return. Advocates say such changes show how beavers can help blunt droughts, lower fire intensity, and create refuge for plants and animals, offering a template for restoration in a warming, drying state.
California officials had long denied that beavers ever ranged widely across the state. Fur trapping in the 19th century all but eliminated them, and the survivors were treated as pests. Advocacy, research and policy shifts have since produced a state restoration program. Before the Maidu reintroduction, tribal crews built dozens of structures that mimicked beaver dams to prepare the site. “We knew that the habitat was, for the most part, just ready to receive and support beavers,” Valerie Cook of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) told Cannon.
The project has increased the surface area of water at Tásmam Koyóm by more than 22%, according to an April 2025 report from the department. Yet expectations remain tempered.
“We’re always going back to the whole systems piece, honoring beaver for the work beaver can do, but not turning them into this silver bullet,” says Brock Dolman of the nonprofit Occidental Arts and Ecology Center.
Other pilot relocations, such as on the Tule River Reservation, also in California, have had mixed results, underscoring the need for careful planning and coexistence strategies before translocation. Still, the Mountain Maidu site shows how returning beavers can also return sovereignty. Centuries-old dams and acorn mortars testify to a time when beavers and people shaped this valley together.
For Ben Cunningham, a Mountain Maidu elder and chair of the nonprofit Maidu Summit Consortium, walking the meadow is more than ecological restoration. “It’s just great to be out here, to have something to work for, be proud of,” he said. “It’s your own.”
Read the full story by John Cannon here.
Banner image: A beaver explores its new home at Tásmam Koyóm in 2023. Image courtesy of CDFW.
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