Making Life Complicated

While most people strive to simplify their lives, when it comes to salmon streams, making things complex is usually the ideal. Such is the case with Salmon Creek, a tributary of the Coquille River on Oregon’s south coast.

There the Coquille Watershed Association is working to make the creek a little more complicated for Chinook and coho salmon, steelhead, Pacific lamprey and cutthroat trout. And that’s a good thing.

Salmon Creek has lots of gravel in its streambed for salmon to spawn, but few logs, large rocks, pools and side channels, components of a stream that make it more physically complex and create a greater variety of habitat for fish.

Salmon Creek is an ideal streambed for salmon to spawn. However, as pictured above, it was lacking refuges and hiding places needed for juvenile fish. In 2006, large logs and boulders were placed strategically in the stream to create a more diverse habitat.

Landowner Gary Norris saw the potential to improve his section of stream and went to the watershed association for help. “I thought it would be a good idea to create more pools and other fish habitat,” he said. The group agreed.

With a grant of $11,425 from Portland General Electric’s Habitat Support customers, they embarked on a project to add that complexity to about a mile of Norris’ creek. Habitat Support funds are administered by The Nature Conservancy.

The creek’s primary shortcoming was its inhospitable conditions for young salmon. “Salmon Creek has good spawning habitat but it doesn’t have much to offer juvenile fish,” explained watershed association coordinator Jennifer Hampel. “The idea is to create refuges and hiding places for the juveniles.”

To accomplish that, heavy equipment was brought last summer to strategically place large logs and boulders in the stream in a way that mimicked what nature might do naturally. Over time, those structures will direct stream flows to create pools and side channels where fish will find cool water in the summer and refuge from predators year-round.

The structures will also help hold the stream’s spawning gravel in place and slow the current during winter floods that might otherwise wash young fish downstream into lesser quality habitat.

With the work completed, neither the landowner nor the watershed association is walking away from the project. Said Hampel, “Every year for the next five years we’ll be coming back here to do habitat surveys to see how the stream and fish are doing.”  As long as things stay complicated, they will likely be doing just fine.

Every PGE renewable power customer can add Habitat Support to their renewable option for only $2.50 per month.