Crane unloading into dumpster
Volunteers hard at work on the cleanup.
Hi Once again my apologies for not doing any updates since last August. One thing led to another with work then off I went to Oaxaca for the month of October and upon my return could not find my camera, a long story well I found it last saturday in all of the places my field vest Duh//. Anyway now I am back and will be updating on a regular basis once again.
The fall and the winter month's brought a return of our Wild Salmon to all our streams . Runs were about average for all species for our small streams Wild Coho and Wild Chum.
During the winter month's we had some very big rain events which resulted in two floods roaring down the stream beds and making some dramatic changes to habitat. Our big log jam on Bonnel was opened up releasing large amounts of LWD and SWD into the lower reaches.
A lot of this was deposited on the bends lower down and luckily the main logs were just folded back unto the banks at the jam site. It will remain to see what the effect of the flood has had on our reds both for the Wild Coho and the Wild Chum.
Our willow wattle project of last year on Snaw Naw As Creek (Nanoose Creek) at the base of a big erosion site was taken away leaving no soils to re-do the site. The floods carved the bank back to hardpan of a clay nature, too hard to get willows to root or even plant.
Many pools changed shape and location, some infilling with gravel others being gauged out deeper, again the dry summer months will tell the real tale when we can estimate our fry counts.
A quick jump ahead in time because I will be writing for a week to catch you up on all our activities, but be reassured we have been at it every Tuesday and Saturday, lots of trees have been planted and potential work planed out.
Last Saturday we returned to Bloods Creek in Lantzville to remove the garbage dump which has been slowly growing since our last visit. With a cash donation I was able to hire a 80 ton crane and 40 yard dumpster to lift up the garbage out of the gully. With some advertising on the TV A channel and local papers we got out around 60 volunteers to join the 16 stream keepers in this endeavour. Even our mayor came out with two council members and they were among the hardest workers taking on the job of cleaning off the upland slope.
With a donation of large rocks from the Gregson brothers ( Copcan) we were able along with the donation of time and an excavator to block off the main area used to dump over the bank. Later in the summer during the fish window we will go back with our newly purchased winch and pull out the big truck tires embedded in the stream bed.
Reds and emerging fry prevented us from doing it on Saturday.
See pics at top of page.
Today we were up in the bush using our winch to pull a big log back onto the bank from its position pushing up against our foot bridge, as it was not in the creek proper but suspended over the bank we felt it was okay to winch it back 6 feet away from the bridge where it threatened to push the bridge over.
Wild Salmon Versus Hatchery fish.
Mr R. Haig Brown said back in the 60's that the easiest method of increasing fish stocks is hatchery's instead of addressing the real issue's affecting their decline, loss of habitat.
It would seem that even back then some among us could see the writing on the wall, maybe some among us could not read.
Lately more and more information is coming into the public domain in regard to hatchery fish and the detrimental impacts on Wild fish. It would seem that once more information comes to light we will see that the introduction of hatchery fish into the wild has had dire consequences for wild fish. It would seem that even the small scale community hatchery's have long term effects on wild fish, in fact even the use of hatchery fish to supplement the low wild populations once or twice will contribute more to the decline of the wild fish than any other factor. In the Salish Sea it is estimated that hatchery fish are as high as 80% of the population in effect swamping out what wild fish remain with their genetics. It is time conservation and stream keeper groups took the high road and stop any further dilution of our wild stocks with the quick fix attitude of hatchery's. In effect once a hatchery comes to a stream near you that is goodbye wild salmon even if the consultant biologist tells you that oh we will only take mating pairs and produce only F 1 hybrids, next year it will be F2-F3 who knows and when they breed with wild fish then the cascade effect takes over and that may be the end of your wild fish replaced with domestic fish. Wild Salmon need to complete their sexual mating rituals and taking them for artificial breeding does not allow them to complete their life cycle . Oh they are only fish is the answer I have heard from biologists as if they are unthinking and unfeeling animals. Check out the blog from an Oregon fisherman who is not afraid of speaking out. Bakke-native fish.blogspot.com This blog will point you in the direction of information that it seems some among us would rather you did not have access to.
