Everything we’re doing, even though it’s messy looking to humans, through the fishes’ eyes, it’s like,’oh, this is beautiful’.
To sum it up, messy is good.
This area, or this watershed actually, has a very wide basin and about 20 to 22 streams that all feed this part of the river, about six miles.
And when you look at those on a map you can see that when stream and run-off and sediment are coming down
into the main North Fork of the Cosumnes behind me, it pulses through the system very quickly.
And once those erosional processes sort of have the upper hand, they kind of maintain themselves in perpetuity.
You know improving the fisheries, improving the quality of the habitat is the goal of this effort.
By restoring our rivers and streams, the Forest Service improves habitat for fish and other aquatic organisms.
When I was a small kid, I loved to trout fish in creeks and they were full of trout, or baby salmon, but they are also full of wood.
They had big, deep pools and a lot of log jams and stuff.
Well then once they cleaned them, they slicked down to bedrock with almost no fish left.
So we’re mimicking what nature used to do before people showed up and messed with it.
It was once believed that large amounts of woody debris in streams would hamper fish migration,
and these so called “log jams” or “fish barriers” were removed.
There was a lot of emphasis on fish cleaning, that if you saw a debris jam in a creek that that was a barrier to fish migration, so there was an effort to take those out.
But if you’re a fish, you have no cover, there’s no deep pools, there’s lousy spawning, the water gets too warm,
so there is a ton of things that wood does for the fish that most people don’t realize.
Mark Villers is a long-time logger who specializes in “tree-tipping”, the depositing of large trees into streams.
We’re trying to mimic a windstorm by tipping large trees over.
The wood in the stream slows the water down, so we’re hoping to build the bed-load up and deposit the gravel.
So we go around messing creeks up.
Tree tipping is a skill requiring years of experience.
We’re trying to hit that in-stream season when you’re allowed to work, when fish aren’t spawning and not rearing and they’re out of the gravel.
There’s really a lot to it from the biological side and then the safety side.
We take a lot of time and use our experience.
If you do it wrong, you can snap them off and not get the root wad or you end up with a great big tree going the wrong direction.
And you can’t just stand it up and do it again.
When you’re trying to balance restoration needs, often you go back and look at a historical perspective,
but in the face of climate change and the management activities and the history of these lands, it’s not always a practical approach.
So I have kind of abandoned trying to get back to a historical reference condition and actually just ask the question:
Where do we want to push the system towards and what are our goals?
These restoration projects are complex and often have conflicting goals,
such as the balance between supporting both fish and the threatened frog populations they prey upon.
One of the challenges we have on this forest is we also have a pretty active fish removal program to benefit some frog populations.
So we are trying to sort out where its best interest to do that work and then where we want to sort of manage wild trout populations where we don’t have those species
conflicting, where we’re trying to save a threatened or endangered species, and also trying to promote recreational sport fisheries along with Trout Unlimited.
So we started getting very involved with the Forest Service with everything they were doing from their fuels reduction projects to cleaning up the streams, you name it.
Trout Unlimited is one of the volunteer groups involved with this stream restoration work.
And we came out, did some of the data collection for the Forest Service.
We were measuring the wood that was, the logs and branches that were down in the middle of the streams.
This is all volunteer time, 1,100 hours last year. But this is a kind of thing I don’t mind putting in a little extra time for.
Restoration is a long-term process.
The results of these projects might take years, but sometimes the changes are more immediate.
We’ve seen some really impressive numbers where fish counts have doubled or tripled or quadrupled in a short time in areas that we’ve worked.
Cosumnes actually means salmon, so it really is our goal to reestablish and create more habitat more complexity and then hopefully maintain a fishery in this location.
Restoration, working with nature for nature.