Lesson 1: The Tyee Team
Welcome to Salmon Habitat Restoration in S’ólh Téméxw
Where our story takes place: S’ólh Téméxw, Halq’eme’ylem name for the Lower Mainland of Southern British Columbia.
What this course will cover:
•The story of where we’ve been with salmon habitat restoration
•What we’ve learned from it so far
•Opportunities for the future of salmon
Who this course is for:
•Students exploring restoration as a potential career path
•Technical people already in this field who might want to know more about specific techniques for salmon habitat restoration
•Community members who care about salmon and want to know how restoration helps them thrive
This course is broken down into 4 lessons. Each lesson is focused on a salmon “team”, grouped together based on the type of habitat they seek out:
Tyee team: Chinook Salmon
Clean Stream team: Pink, Sockeye and Chum Salmon
Water from the Earth team: Sockeye, Chum and Coho
Backyard team: Coho Salmon, Steelhead, Cutthroat Trout
Lesson 1 will take 2 hours to complete and be graded by a multiple-choice quiz.
In this lesson:
• Historical land use and salmon habitat
• Recommended reference documents
• Habitat restoration techniques
• A comparative study of the Upper Pitt and Harrison River Chinook populations
Water from the Forest
Rain Driven
Soil Given
Call the Salmon Home
Impacted watersheds and the goals of restoration.
We can’t return habitat to its pre-disturbance state.
Instead, the goal of restoration work is to give the salmon the chain of critical habitats they need to successfully fulfill their life cycle.
It’s important to stay humble and work thoughtfully: learn from others, try things and measure the results of your work.
Mature forests and stable watersheds
Optional reading: Summary of a 15-year research report on Carnation Creek, B.C. watershed looking at the impacts of forest practices on fish and fish habitat.
Big trees present on the Upper Chilliwack.
Slesse Creek without large trees to provide ideal salmon habitat.
What is a successful life cycle?
1 male + 1 female spawn together = 1500-6000 fertilized eggs
- physical trauma, predation, disease, starvation and human interference
→ If 2 survive to get back home the salmon run will remain stable;
→ If 3 get back home the salmon run will increase;
→ If 1 salmon returns the run will decline, and if this keeps up the run will disappear completely.
The ultimate reference guide.
Bookmark your copy: Fish Habitat Rehabilitation Procedures from the Watershed Restoration Program
Produced by the British Columbia Ministry of Environment, Lands and Parks and Ministry of Forests in 1997
Useful terms
Restoring Fish Access
Usually refers to fixing fish passage and allowing them to get past things like culverts, hydro dams, landslides. Sometimes refers to improving spawning gravels – spawning salmon are very particular on the size of gravel they will use for spawning.
Off Channel
Refers to the quiet side channels and back sloughs of a river that little salmon love to find and live in.
Low-level nutrient addition
This means adding a small amount of garden fertilizer to a stream to grow more algae, which feeds more insects and, in turn, feeds more little salmon. When salmon runs were more abundant, ocean nutrients were brought into salmon streams through the salmon themselves, as they spawned and died in the stream.
Log jams and boulders
These are large logs placed in piles and large rocks at least half a meter in diameter which provide a place for fish to hide under and keep away from predators.
Mainstem pools
Deep, open water pools that give salmon a better chance to get away from predators like birds and otters.
Optional reading: Stream Analysis and Fish Habitat Design: A Field Manual
Beaver management
Beaver ponds make lovely habitat for that little coho fry but can also prevent the spawning salmon from going upstream. The trick is to work with these furry engineers for the benefit of salmon.
Thinking of starting a restoration project?
Before you begin, contact:
Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO)
↳Salmonid Enhancement Program (SEP)
↳your local Community Advisor (CA)
Find yours here: https://www.pac.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/sep-pmvs/contact-eng.html
Salmon species and how they use freshwater habitats
There are five different salmon species in S’ólh Téméxw: chinook, chum, sockeye, coho, pink
(Six if you think steelhead should be called a salmon, not a trout)
They all belong to the Oncorhynchus genus
The focus of Lesson 1 will be the Tyee Team: Chinook salmon
King.
Tyee.
Blackmouth.
Quinnat.
The Chinook species can be found spawning throughout B.C. and Alaska, as far south as the Sacramento River in California, and all the way down the Asian coast to northern Japan.
Our local Chinook salmon tend to be three to five years old but some Chinook can be up to seven years old – making them the oldest species of salmon.
Only a few streams in S’ólh Téméxw have naturally occurred (not transplanted from a hatchery) populations of Chinook salmon spawning in them.
Harrison River
Lillooett River
Birkenhead River
Big Silver Creek
Chilliwack River
Maria Slough
Upper Pitt River
Little Campbell River
Considerations for a Chinook salmon restoration plan:
Each population does things a little differently – you need to get to know Maria Slough Chinook and Upper Pitt or Harrison River or the Thompson River or the Nechako River Chinook as best you can before you ask the question: what can I do to help them?
Would Chinook benefit from the removal of fish barriers? It depends.
Click to read full article.
Nearby but not the same
Streambed is highly unstable: large amount of gravel moves down the river during winter floods
Gravel in the main channel is too unstable for Chinook salmon eggs to survive over the winter – they wash downstream and die during flood events.
Chinook salmon only spawn in more stable tributaries or stable side channels of the river itself.
The major Chinook spawning area is in the lower section of Blue Creek.
This stream is a small stable tributary stream flowing into the Upper Pitt River, approximately 30 km upstream from Pitt Lake.
What makes the Upper Pitt Chinook pretty special and Blue Creek particularly interesting is that this population is deemed to be a single Conservation Unit.
Conservation Unit (CU) is defined as groups of wild salmon living in an area sufficiently isolated from other groups that, if extirpated, are very unlikely to be recolonized within an acceptable time frame
Optional reading: Click to access
Each CU has unique traits and behaviours developed over thousands of years
If we lose one CU they will not be replaced within our lifetime
Since human beings are the greatest negative pressure on these unique salmon, it is our moral duty to do what we can to keep them healthy and abundant for future generations to enjoy.
So would removing dikes and flood barriers to young salmon along the Lower Fraser River floodplain help the Upper Pitt Chinook salmon?
The small Chinook spawning population (200-500) in the Upper Pitt River is likely controlled by the amount of suitable, stable spawning habitat available to them in the watershed.
It’s the habitat available to them early in their lifecycles that likely hold their numbers back.
Chinook salmon spawn in the lower 800 meters section of Blue Creek.
The Upper Pitt River threatened to erode and shorten this spawning section by 200 meters (25%).
The threatened portion was restored and protected by a boulder berm to keep this rare spawning habitat stable.
A modest amount of work but a huge impact on this particular CU.
Upper Pitt River Chinook salmon continue to persist at somewhat stable but low numbers (200-500) in the watershed.
Restoration work has to be impactful, but also practically implementable.
The location of the Blue Creek restoration project was chosen because it was one of the only accessible Chinook spawning spots in the area.
Optional reading: Report on the conservation status of Upper Pitt River Chinook, which are the core of the Lower Fraser River Stream Summer Conservation Unit.
The Harrison River Chinook population, like the Upper Pitt River Chinook, is its own Conservation Unit.
Unlike the Upper Pitt River Chinook, the Harrison River Chinook population is the most abundant in the entire Fraser River watershed.
The number of spawners returning ranges from 100,000-200,000+ each season.
The chinook spawning section of the Harrison River is 4000 meters long section and just downstream from Harrison Lake.
What makes the Harrison River Chinook population so abundant?
Harrison Lake is large and so the water flowing out of it stays very clean, even during big floods.
Incubating salmon eggs thrive in clean water; they struggle when water gets dirty as the silt cuts off their flow of oxygen.
This large lake regulates the flow of floodwaters, gently releasing them downstream into the Harrison River.
This means that once gravel enters Harrison River, it almost never moves again unless a fish moves it and that stable bed of gravel makes for perfect spawning habitat.
The 4000-meter long spawning section of the Harrison River is up to 300 meters wide.
That’s up to 1,200,000 square meters of clean, stable, perfect spawning gravel for Chinook.
An average chinook salmon nest (called a redd) is 5 square meters in size, which means that this area could support approximately 240,000 redds or 480,000 spawners – with one male and one female per redd.
Today, there are only 100,000 – 200,000 spawners that return to these spawning dunes.
How can we help the Harrison River Chinook reach their full potential?
From late February to April every year, the Harrison River Chinook fry begin coming out of their gravel beds and swim into the 150 km of lower Fraser River Channel and accessible tributaries looking for quiet places to stop and feed.
After about eight weeks of living in these quiet Fraser backwaters the now much larger Chinook fry (70mm) decide around the beginning of May it is time to leave and go to the ocean.
If more rearing habitat was available to this Chinook population, they would likely return in greater numbers.
This means that yes, in this case, removing dikes and flood barriers to young salmon along the Lower Fraser River floodplain would help the Harrison River Chinook salmon.
Case study: Habitat restoration on the Lower Stave River for Harrison River Chinook fry
Old agricultural fields on lands of the Langley 3 Reserve of the Kwantlen Nation were restored to recreate the small tidal channels that existed before they were filled and farmed.
Aerial view of site:
Humans for scale:
Plants and other wildlife in restored salmon habitat
Pictured above is the “Sheep Paddocks” field on the lower Coquitlam River, immediately upstream from the Fraser River, undergoing some restoration work.
Planting of native plants and shrubs makes more places for insects to live, these then fall into the water and feed the young salmon.
Sedges, shrubs, and trees all have a roll to play
Pictured above is the completed restoration work at Sheep Paddocks.
Each tide brings many types of young fish to the restored tidal channels
25+ species including coho salmon and our target Harrison River Chinook fry.
Flood infrastructure and fish passage
The Fraser River floodplain is heavily populated; residences are protected by an extensive network of dike systems, pump stations and culverts.
Harrison Chinook fry are now denied access to as much as 85% of their historic rearing habitats by flood infrastructure.
Flood infrastructure can be made “fish friendly”
In 1999, the flood pump at the mouth of the Salmon and Fraser Rivers was rebuilt to include a small fish passage, controlled by an automatic gate.
When the water levels get too high, the gate shuts itself. The rest of the time it stays open for Harrison River Chinook fry and other small fish to travel through.
Optional reading:
A big, blue mystery
Where do Harrison River Chinook go next?
After fattening up in small tidal channels, Chinook fry head out to the ocean, riding along with the silty waters of the Fraser River “Plume”.
For a month or two, they hang out on shallow beaches and nearshore marine habitats throughout the southern Strait of Georgia.
Harrison River Chinook are sometimes referred to as the Lower Fraser Fall Chinook Conservation Unit
The ocean is a large place we have no control over.
It is in this mysterious place that these Chinook will spend the next 3-6 years of their life.
We have little ability to affect what happens to Chinook in the ocean, but we do know that that the number of adults that return to spawn depends on the number of smolts that make it to the ocean in the first place.
That’s what makes freshwater restoration work so valuable
Optional reading:
Chinook salmon exhibit long-term rearing and early marine growth in the Fraser River, British Columbia, a large urban estuary
You’ve reached the end of Lesson 1.
Take a few minutes to watch this video on connected waters, review your notes and – if you’re eligible for the honorarium – click below to take the first quiz.
