Scott Boyd walks through deep mud where the Stillaguamish River empties into Puget Sound, an arm of the Pacific Ocean.
This flood-prone river mouth north of Seattle changed dramatically in October when the Stillaguamish Tribe removed two miles of earthen levee. The ridge of dirt kept the river and the tides from spreading onto nearby farmland. Once a giant excavator bit into the levee to breach it, the tribe welcomed tidewater onto the land for the first time in over a century.
"Before, it was a dairy operation, and now it's a big tidal marsh," Boyd, a Stillaguamish tribal member and fisheries manager, says while looking out at the new 230-acre wetland.
Tidal marshes are crucial nurseries for young Chinook salmon and a focal point for efforts to bring these fish back from the brink of extinction. The Stillaguamish Tribe has been buying riverfront land in its traditional territory and removing levees to turn farmland into wetland with the hope of restoring Chinook.
Boyd's tribe of about 400 people only gained federal recognition in 1976, more than a century after tribal leaders signed the Treaty of Point Elliott with the U.S. government in 1855.
"Our official reservation is pretty small, I want to say less than 100 acres," Boyd says. "And it wasn't granted to us until maybe 10 years ago."
Over the past 15 years, the Stillaguamish Tribe has purchased 2,000 acres of land for fish and wildlife habitat.
Under the 1855 treaty, the Stillaguamish and other Puget Sound tribes gave up almost all of their land but kept their rights to fish and hunt.
"It is a bit of a bitter pill to swallow to buy back the land that we essentially traded for the resource, the fish, but it's what we have to do to get things back on track," Boyd says.
What the tribe wants to get back on track is salmon.
A marsh reborn
Decades of environmental damage have left many West Coast salmon runs on the brink of extinction. Chinook salmon, the largest and most prized of salmon, is a federally threatened species in Puget Sound.
In 2025, so few Chinook salmon returned to the Stillaguamish River that the entire tribe was only allowed to catch 26 fish.
"The salmon, it has always been important to our people, to the tribe, to our way of life," Boyd says. "These habitat projects are the best bang for our buck right now."
Depending on the tide and the river level, traversing the new wetland can require anything from a small boat to tall boots.
Narrow water channels snake through the mudflats.
Whole trees, uprooted and carried downriver by recent floods, lie sideways in the mud.
A cloud of shorebirds erupts after probing the muddy ground for food. Hundreds of birds called dunlins wheel above the freshly remade landscape, moving in tight formation like a pulsing, living cloud.
"Watch these dunlins," Stillaguamish Tribe biologist Jason Griffith says. "It's a visual symphony."
The shorebirds' numbers hint at the ecological benefits this new wetland, known as zis a ba 2, could bring. Named for zis a ba, a 19th-century chief of a Stillaguamish village once located just south of the river mouth, zis a ba 2 is the second of three large marshes the tribe is restoring in the area.
"Now the river can connect to its floodplain like it hasn't in 140 years," Griffith says.
To help natural forces rebuild the marsh more quickly, restoration crews dug channels into the farmland before breaching the levee. They found old middens—piles of discarded, fire-charred clam shells—from up to 1,500 years ago, signs of long human occupation.
A changing landscape
The landscape morphed again in December, when floodwaters tore through the area, scouring some land away and delivering sediment and uprooted trees from upriver, helpful inputs for the nascent wetland.
That month, a series of intense storms deluged Washington and Oregon, causing flooding that forced thousands of people to evacuate.
Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson called the December floods the costliest natural disaster in the state's history.
In April, the Federal Emergency Management Agency approved a major-disaster declaration to help people in the two states recover from that flooding, though it denied Ferguson's request for funding for projects to reduce the damage from future flooding.
Tribal officials say their habitat projects will help people as well as salmon the next time floodwaters rise.
With restored floodplains, more of the Stillaguamish River's destructive surges can spread out and dissipate before causing harm.
The Stillaguamish Tribe built a new levee last year, farther back from the river, before removing the old levee.
"By giving the river more space, we are reducing the damage and the expense to society to maintain infrastructure. It's cheaper to maintain if you stay further away," Griffith says.
'There's only so much farmland'
Yet there are always tradeoffs with changing land use.
Along the Stillaguamish River, two groups want to grow different foods on the same land: wild salmon or farm crops.
"There's only so much farmland," Tyler Breum, a farmer from Stanwood, Wash., says. "The population of the country, of the world, it's still increasing, and they've got to get their food from somewhere."
Breum farms potatoes and seed crops a few miles north of the zis a ba wetlands.
"The levees make life in the floodplain possible," he says. "And you know, we wouldn't be able to farm or to live there without the levees."
During the December floods, Breum spent an anxious night riding his all-terrain vehicle on a levee by his farm.
"I was just out there on my four-wheeler, just riding back and forth, back and forth, I think every hour during that night, just riding the dike up and down, making sure we're okay," Breum says.
He had reason to worry. A gaping hole opened in that century-old levee, the top of which is just 2 feet wide in places, during a flood in 2021. Luckily, a duck hunter happened upon it, and repair crews patched it that night.
"The city of Stanwood could have been underwater there if it hadn't been caught as quickly as it was," Breum says.
If that levee fails, 1,100 people could be displaced, according to a Snohomish County study done in 2022.
In April, officials noticed new damage to the levee. Severe winds and exceptionally high tides had chewed into a half-mile stretch of the structure in January.
Breum has been trying to get that aging levee improved since 2010. City and tribal officials are now seeking emergency permits to repair it this summer before another winter of tides and storms knock it out.
Breum says he supports removing some levees to make room for salmon as long as farmers benefit, too.
"The people who farm down there, near where the tribe did their project, they got a brand new, world-class dike," Breum says. "I'm jealous of it when I drive by it."
Bigger floods, taller levees
Breum and his partners tried to buy the zis a ba farmland, but they were outbid by the Stillaguamish Tribe.
"I don't hold anything against the tribe for buying land whatsoever," Breum says.
The tribe's new levee stands four feet taller than the old one.
That could help nearby farms survive the larger floods and rising seas expected with a changing climate.
The Stillaguamish Tribe has restored hundreds of acres of tidal habitat so far, but it aims for much more.
Scientists say it will take thousands of acres of restored habitat to help Puget Sound Chinook swim off the threatened-species list.
"My great-grandfather, he fished these waters, and he was able to eke out a moderate living, and that hasn't been the case for these past few generations," Scott Boyd says. "I have four young children. I'm not necessarily pushing them into fishing for a career, but it would be amazing if they could do what our ancestors used to be able to do, which was fish and live and work these waters."
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