SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
In what is being called the largest land return in California history, more than 17,000 acres around the Klamath River have been returned to the Yurok tribe. For more than a hundred years, the tribe was denied access to ancestral lands, and timber companies managed the lands instead. The land has now been renamed Blue Creek Salmon Sanctuary and Yurok Tribal Community Forest, and now the tribe plans to restore the landscape through traditional indigenous stewardship. Barry McCovey is Yurok Fisheries Department director, and he's here to tell us about the changes. Welcome to the show.
BARRY MCCOVEY: Hey. Thanks for having me.
DETROW: I mean, this has been a long battle. What does it mean to you to have this land back?
MCCOVEY: It's incredible. You know, Blue Creek and the forest surrounding the creek - the whole area is really important to us spiritually, culturally. And then also, it's a really important stream ecologically to the lower Klamath River ecosystem. So it's a big win for the tribe.
DETROW: For people who haven't seen it themselves, can you tell us a little bit about what it looks like, what it feels like to be there?
MCCOVEY: Yeah, so Blue Creek flows out of the high mountains and then down into the Klamath River near the coast of Northern California. The headwaters are very pristine, and so water quality in the creek is still really good. Of course, a lot of the watershed has been industrial timber lands, as you explained in the intro there. So there's a lot of damage that has been done to the ecosystem, but the creek has been resilient, and it has maintained a high level of really good water quality. It's just a really magnificent stream.
DETROW: So like you said, there's been logging. By and large, Blue Creek remains in good shape, but there's work to do. Tell me about how the tribe is going to approach land management here because it's going to be pretty different, huh?
MCCOVEY: Sure. So our idea is to have a more holistic view of land management and try and return some of the balance back to this watershed that existed there before it became industrial timberlands. So we have ideas about work we want to do down in the stream - restoration work that we want to do to kind of enhance fisheries habitat. But we also want to do a lot of work on the upslope and in the forest. So a big part of that is introducing - or reintroducing good fire back onto this landscape. Fire is a tool indigenous people throughout the world have used to holistically manage forests.
DETROW: Yeah. You know, you mentioned fisheries. I want to specifically mention that California salmon have been having a real hard time. I mean, it's been a huge, ongoing problem in a lot of different watersheds. I understand the salmon stock is low. Can you walk us through some of the specifics about how you try to address that, how you try to turn that around now that you're taking charge of this land?
MCCOVEY: Yeah, specifically to Blue Creek, the idea there is that over time, with the timber harvest kind of aspect of things, the wood flow of the area has been depleted. So streams and forests, you know, they convey wood down the stream, so logs fall in. Dead trees fall in.
DETROW: We're just talking about natural wood falling here, not - nothing to do with the logging from before.
MCCOVEY: Naturally, yeah - since time immemorial, since the beginning of time, these streams have been recruiting this naturally fallen wood. And then that wood kind of makes its way through the system. But as it is, it's creating log jams, and it's slowing the creek down. And it's creating this complex habitat within these streams. And when logging comes in and timber harvest practices, that whole system is disrupted. And so now we don't have the amount of wood in these streams that we used to. So a big push that we've been really interested in and actually have been doing in a lot of different places is adding wood back into these streams. They create habitat for adult fish, adult salmon as they're migrating upstream, juveniles as they're migrating downstream.
DETROW: You need the more still water, right, for either of the eggs or just for the younger fish.
MCCOVEY: Yeah, for the younger fish, they create cover, and they create areas where they can rest and feed. So there's a lot of benefits to that wood loading type projects that we plan to do up there.
DETROW: That's Barry McCovey, the Yurok Fisheries Department director. Thank you so much.
MCCOVEY: Thank you for having me.
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