Earth & Sky

The following individual was interviewed for today’s show. Our thanks to:

Charles Dewberry
Restoration Ecologist
Ecotrust
Portland, OR

Websites:

Fact Sheets – Coho Salmon (NOAA Fisheries – National Marine Fisheries Service)

ADF&G Wildlife Notebook Series (The State of Alaska)

BLN Builds Cascades on Siuslaw – The Register-Guard ( Eugene School District J4)

Science Alone Can’t Save the Salmon – ENN (February 22,2000)
ENN

Watershed work turning coho habitat around – The Register-Guard ( Eugene School District J4)

Office of Protected Resources (NOAA Fisheries – National Marine Fisheries Service)

Riding the Silver Cycle (Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission)

California Partners for Fish and Wildlife (US Fish and Wildlife Service)

Interview with Charley Dewberry:

ES: Please tell me a little about yourself.

CD: My name is Charley Dewberry. I am a restoration ecologist and I work for Ecotrust.

ES: I understand that you lead a project to restore coho salmon in Knowles Creek, a tributary of the Siuslaw River in Oregon. Could you tell me about the project?

CD: Well, first, I’m one of the leaders. There’s really three people involved at the beginning: Craig Burns, John Rollins, and myself. We started the project in 1992. And the objective was – we just didn’t think that the then current restoration practices were really benefitting fish to the extant they could. So we decided to take off on a whole new tack. And so what we were trying to do was look at how the landscape works, and how the fish keyed into what was happening on the landscape. And then we wanted to try to help restore the natural function of the landscape. We’ll probably have to talk a little bit about that. And then, monitor very carefully how the fish responded. And that’s really what the Knowles Creek project was about.

ES: Could you describe for me the physical location of Knowles Creek?

CD: Well, the Siuslaw River system is about 800 sq. miles, or about 90-100 miles long. And at the turn of the century, the town I live in , Florence, had three salmon canories. And they canned an average of 70,000 salmon a year, around the turn of the century. And so the run’s been estimated as high as 1/2 million fish in a good year. Recently, we’ve been lucky to see 3-4 thousand fish. So the number of salmon fish currently in the Siuslaw River are 1% or less than what they were at the turn of the century. So given that huge decline, as I said, our objective was to go out and try to figure out what coho salmon were keying in on in the Siuslaw River, and so that took us to Knowles Creek, which is a tidewater tributary of the Siuslaw. And it’s about 20 square miles. The stream is about 12 miles long. And so that was a smaller piece of landscape that we could tackle and learn where the coho spawn, were they spent a year and a half in freshwater before they went into the ocean, and then where they came back to.

ES: For the benefit of the listeners, could you describe what a tidewater tributary is?

CS: A tidewater tributary is a small stream that flows into the main river, and it flows in down low in the estuary, where there’s still tidal influence. The main river has tides – the water comes in and goes out during the day – so Knowles Creek is very low in the system. It’s right next to the ocean, so there aren’t any other major influences. Oh – one piece on the Siuslaw River I should say with regard to the salmon decline – a lot of the factors that most people think in salmon decline don’t really occur in the Siuslaw system. For example there’s no dams, there’s no major industries, the largest town in the watershed is Florence, with 5000 people. So in this large river system, a lot of the things we think about that really negatively impact salmon are just not here. Neither are there large hatcheries. There’s no coho hatchery in the basin. So, none of those factors were really responsible for the decline of coho in the Siuslaw.

ES: Why did you choose Knowles Creek as the site of the salmon restoration project.

CS: Well, it’s a fairly typical stream for the coast range of Oregon. Most of it is pretty steep. And it had a mix of ownership, which was pretty typical in the basin. The BLM and Forest Service own about 40 or 50% of the basin, and most of the rest of it is private industrial timberland. So that’s a pretty typical mix in the coast range. It was fairly close to Oregon State, and at the time I was working for a group initially at Oregon State who started to work on Knowles Creek. And then I started to work for the Pacific Rivers Council. It was close, it was typical of the coast range, and it seemed to be a good, average place to go.

ES: Speaking of places to go, can you talk about where the coho go in Knowles Creek, I mean their habitat?

CD: Coho, their preferred habitat is pools, and kind of quiet pools. They’re most abundant in streams that are low gradiant, where there isn’t cascades and ripples or even fast pools. They like slow pools beaver ponds, off channel areas, mostly slow, deep water is their preferred habitat. They like lakes, so they do well in the lakes here. So that’s really the preferred habitat of coho.

ES: One of the terms you use to describe the forces that shape their habitat as “digestive processes.” “Can you elaborate a bit about what you mean?

CD: As I said, the preferred habitat for coho is pools. But another piece of what the fish really need is of course, food. And so the question that got immediately raised for us is: well today coho are at about 1% of their historic levels. What’s really changed? Is it the habitat that changed, or how did it work? So our first question really was, how did this landscape work historically before European contact? And it took a while to figure that out. We had to go to old growth sites, we looked at historical records. But anyway, just in summary, what we found was in this landscape, we get a tremendous amount of rain in the winter, up to 30 inches a week is not uncommon. And in this steep country that generates landslides, which we call them debris flows when they hit steams. Well these landslides will trigger these debris flows. And then the debris flows will come down and set up a temporary dam. And the temporary dam would be made up of logs, and boulders. Over time that temporary dam would kind of build. As it builds, it stores sediment and organic matter, the food resources – the leaves, the twigs, the needles – that the insects eat to provide the food for the fish. And over time, we have what we call flats, areas above these debris flows forming. And then over a period of 10 or 15 years we would see the temporary dam start to be taken apart. The wood would rot, and floods would take out the temporary dam. And when that happened, the food resources from the sediment would begin to move downstream. Well, we could look at Knowles Creek as a series of these flats, like beads on a string. And all of these flats are in various stages of that succession, of going through this process of building and coming apart. Well, in a natural system, at least a few of those were in their productive state, which is to hang on to the sediment and organic matter. And so this picture, this dynamic picture of sediment and organic matter moving and setting up, and where it gets set up largely being driven by debris flows. That sort of helped us understand what was creating the real good coho habitat, and what was providing their food resources.

ES: Could you talk about the role severe weather has on coho?

CD: Well, severe weather for us means either draughts or floods. So, in the case of floods, what happens is you get tremendous amounts of rain and that can generate really large debris flows. And, especially now that there isn’t big timber any longer in our riperian zones in what are called the fans, the areas were these tributatries flow into Knowles Creek where material gets stored. If there aren’t big trees there, these debris flows just come down and set up temporary dams. But if there are not large logs and large boulders in those debris flows, they only set up for a second or two, store water during this storm, and then blow out. And what you end up with is a wall of water blowing its way down the stream channel. And that’s incredibly destructive to salmon. It scours all the leaves out of the gravel and any fish in those channels are largely destroyed when this wall of debris comes blowing down through the channel during these major storms. And so what has largely happened is, when the timber’s cut on the areas trigger these landslides, then there aren’t big timbers to hold the stuff in, so that’s when we get what we call dam break floods. And these dam break floods are really destructive for the salmon. If a dam break flood doesn’t occur, floods are not really that destructive to salmon. I mean it will take out a number of redds. It will kill a number of fish, but the salmon are pretty much adapted to floods. So what’s really happened is the debris flows we get now won’t have the big timber and boulders in them to really protect them, to keep from having dam break floods. On the other extreme, draughts. Oregon actually is pretty dry in the summer. It’s not real unusual for us to have little or no measurable rain from June till September. And so we can periodically get draughts. And of course a draught is a pretty severe environmental occurance for salmon. So, in fact, in dry years a lot of the pools are just isolated. There’s no longer any surface flow through the pools. And so maintenance of these pools, or having pools that are in these flats is really critical during the dry years also, to provide the habitat for the salmon. They’ll do fine in those isolated pools as long as the pools are deep enough where they maintain water in them and subsurface flow doesn’t drop to where the entire pool doesn’t dry up. So those are the two real environmental factors that coho have to deal with.

ES: How would you compare your strategies with what was more commonly done?

CD: At first it was important for us to realize that the activities that were being done at the time just weren’t being very successful. A friend of mine, Hyrand Lee, he calls them “random acts of kindness to the landscape.” We basically didn’t look at the watershed as a whole. And people would just go out and randomly do projects where they could get access, where it would be easy to work, or really poor areas. We really didn’t take a systematic look. And, secondly, we weren’t paying attention to these natural forces that created the habitat. So, our strategy was to basically was to say: what if we’re right about what forms coho habitat? Then, we need to be looking, not only at what’s going on in the stream channel, but also what’s going on upslope. And, one of the things that was very clear to us early was that all parts of the landscape aren’t equal to salmon. We found in Knowles Creek that in areas in years of draughts or floods, up to 80 or 90% of the fish would be in 15-20% of the habitat. And it was always the same piece of habitat. So there was a part of that basin that was much more important for coho than other parts. And so the first part of our strategy was to recognize that these critical areas, these anchor habitats as they’ve been called now, they anchor the population during these times of droughts or floods. If we aren’t paying attention to those, if we don’t protect those, then we’re losing ground no matter what else we do. And so the first step in our restoration strategy is protect these intact areas, these anchor habitats. The second stage was to reexamine those anchor habitats carefully, the uplands, and make sure that there aren’t big, major debris flows set to happen now. Since there are so few intact areas, we can’t really afford to have large, destructive debris flows coming down into these areas. So the next step is really, storm proof the roads. Make sure that culvert crossings, bridges, and those sorts of things can withstand 100-150 year storms. And so when they get debris flows, also, we want them to go right over the road, and not go down the road. If they just go over and take out the road, or the culvert crossing, that’s not near as destructive as moving down a road and then jumping off a slope and having a whole slope fail, which quite often occurred as part of road failure. So the next step is really stormproof those systems, and start with intact areas first, and then work your way out through the whole upland. The third part of the strategy is essentially the riperian management, which most people have emphasized. Until we get back these large, mature conifers, and hardwood trees, The system doesn’t have the ability to stop and dissipate the energy that you get when you get these dam break floods. A natural channel would stop them very quickly. Our channels now can’t stop them at all. So when one occurred in Knowles Creek, it went from the top to the bottom. So those are the three elements of our restoration strategy. First was, protect the intact areas. The second one was stormproof the uplands, and start in those critical, anchor habitats. And the third step was the riperian vegetation. Manage to recover those large, conifers and hardwoods that are critical for keeping the flow of sediment and energy moving through the system in a natural manner.

ES: Can you back up a second and describe what you mean by “road failure.”

CD: Throughout most of these watersheds there’s roads for a variety of purposes. A large number of them are logging roads, which might have been built in the 50s, 60s, 70s. So there’s a large road network that is maintained, not only to remove timber from the basins, but also now for recreation, a lot of them are maintained for recreation. And a number of them just provide access routes to other areas, through the coast range. So, these roads that exist, they have to go through what are called midslopes, the slopes in the middle, halfway up the mountains. A number of them can be down along the streams, and then some of them can be up on the ridgetop. But there has to be connections between the bottom and the top. Those we call the midslope roads. And it’s these midslope roads that are a major part of the problem. Because when you have a landslide coming down the hill, it’s going to cross one of these roads. And so where this landslide crosses the road, that’s turned out to be a very important point in the watershed. Because if that debris flow or landslide just goes right over the road, straight over the road, it has very little impact. But what happens sometimes is these debris flows will come to these roads, and then instead of just crossing over the road and continuing down the channel, they’ll sort of follow the road down, and then jump off. And then go over a slope. And when they do that, they start removing a whole bunch of soil and creating new channels. Often, you’ll get a big new area of roads that will slide out, and that’s called road failure. And when it creates this new channel, it can also create a slope failure, which means a whole bunch of soil and rocks just slide down the hill. Because these are very sleep slopes. So that’s what I mean by a road failure or a slope failure.

ES: Can you tell me what a typical day out in the field doing research is like for you?

CD: Well, a typical day in Knowles Creek: one, it depends on the season. For instance, this week I’m doing the whole basin snorkel survey of the creek. I’m about 3/4 of the way through it. And basically what I do is walk the entire basin, where the salmon like coho can go. Then I dive and count these juvenile fish that are essentially living in this stream system now during the summer. So during the summer I’m quite often counting juvenile fish. And in late fall and winter, we’re out looking at the adult fish. We’re watching them come back. We’re seeing where they lay their eggs in the gravel, which are called redds. So we’re counting them, we’re looking at the red location, and we’re also, during the winter, watching what happens with the major storms. Where do we get debris flows. How far do they go. How is it affecting the reds that we’ve located? So that’s the major part of the year. Oh, the other point is late summer, we also see how much water is left in the system, how much water is left in the stream. How many sections have dried up. How many pools still exist. And how are the fish doing in those pools. Also, in the spring, we have a fish trap at the mouth, right where Knowles Creek flows into the Siuslaw River. And we trap the fish on their way to the ocean. And so we’re able to count them. So we can basically follow the fish al the way through their life cycle. So we have an idea of how many eggs were deposited and where, how many fish are rearing, we call growing, basically during the year in the stream, and then we can actually see how many the draughts in the summer and the floods in the winter. So we can see how many go to the ocean. And so then when we know how many adults came back, we can begin to get an idea of their relative influence, how much are fresh water factors important in determining the number of salmon produced, and how much are the ocean conditions responsible for all of the salmon production.

ES: How successful is the project, how’s it going?

CD: Well, the evaluation of the project is a little tricky, I would say, in the short run. The reason I would say that is, I think the right view of restoration is that it’s a long term process. I mean we spent a hundred years getting to where we are, why do we think that it’s going to take us less than a hundred years to fix it? So one, it’s a long term process of slow changes over time. So we?ve only been at this 10 years. I mean 10 years sounds like a long time. There’s very few projects that have been followed for 10 years. And that’s one of the most important parts of the Knowles Creek project, being able to look at this system for the long term and see how things are going. Well, what we do know about our strategy is, we do know it’s a long term strategy, and we don’t know if it’s going to be successful. But there are hints that we’re on the right track. And those hints are that the last 10 years has shown very clearly that we’re right about the fact that all parts of the landscape aren’t equal. The critical areas that we identified we were right about where they were. And during the last 10 years, We got the largest flood on record. And we also got the largest draught on record. And in both those times, it was those critical areas we identified, where virtually all the coho were. And so that part of the strategy which emphasizes the importance of that part of the landscape, we were right about. And, I think that if we didn?t do anything else, that would be a major success story in itself, just the recognition that we’ve got to protect these intact areas, especially when the populations get low. Because if we don’t, It doesn’t matter what else we do, we’re still going to lose. And so I would say that’s been the real key. Secondly, we also tried to, at points, simulate these debris flow deposits that would come down and set up the temporary dams. And that’s a whole new way of looking restoring in channel. In other words, we’re trying to mimic how the wood and boulders came in and formed the natural habitat. That was actually a fairly new idea too. And that part’s turned out ? at least in the 10 years we’ve had to look at it ? that looks like we’re on the right sort of track, that that’s really how you can most effectively recover the fish habitat, especially for coho. So those are the two main things I would say at his point.

ES: What are some of the criticisms you’ve encountered of this project and how do you respond?

CD: Well, what most people do, is they’ll go out and look at a stream and they’ll try to find the worst areas. And so what they’ll do is they’ll go out and say here’s a reach that’s a whole lot of bedrock with no pools. And so we need to go out there and just put some wood and boulders in and cable it so it doesn’t go anywhere, because that way we’ll fix that problem. And the problem is that we don’t have enough pools for coho. And there isn’t enough cover in the pools, so we need to get wood and boulders in them. The major criticisms of what we’re doing: one, you take some time, and it will only be a year or two, but you take some time actually looking at what you have now, the criticism has been that we don’t have time to do that. We need to get out here and do something. And we know what to do. Well, I agree that putting the logs and boulders in the creek – sort of the random acts of kindness – that is a benefit. But as I say, is that really going to get you where you want to go on your own? And I say no, and they say yes. So you don’t have to monitor these projects as carefully as we do, you don’t have to go out and do these surveys to find the critical parts of the landscape as we did. And secondly, my criticism is well, landslides and debris flows have always occurred here and always will occur here. So there’s very little we can do to affect that. And so this idea of needing to look very carefully at the trees that are in the area that are going to slide, that’s not that important. And we can essentially take care of all those problems by just putting the logs and boulders in the channel. We don’t really have to pay attention to what’s going on outside the channel. Because we can essentially take care of those things. So those are most of the criticisms I would say.

ES: On a personal level, what inspires you to study salmon?

CD: Well, I’ve been interested in fish my entire life, and I somehow never seem to get away from them. So I’ve been snorkeling more than 30 years, I guess that’s about all I can say.

ES: On a random note, what’s something that surprised you during the course of your study?

CD: Well, let me talk about something before we conclude. I’ve actually been working on Knowles Creek for a little over 20 years now. And I started when I was working for the Forest Service. The Knowles Creek Project itself kind of got formalized as three partners. It was Champion International Timber Company, the Forest Service, and the Pacific Rivers Council. And so for a period of time I worked for the Pacific Rivers Council, and they provided the contract for me to continue that work on Knowles. So those were the three players that started in ’92.

Well anyway, the things that have been a surprise. One is watching how low the coho numbers got. If you would have told me in the early 80s that the coho numbers were going to get down under 1% of historic I would have thought, that’s impossible, they’re just everywhere. Coho are not going to be in trouble. I’ve watched in the next ten years the numbers just plumett. And we got down to a point where in the draught years of 1992, the draught of record, we had under 500 smolts go toward the ocean, that’s the juveniles leaving the stream and going to the ocean. Well, 500 sounds like a fair number of fish. But given average ocean survival, and we did not have average ocean survival, that meant that there were 10 adult fish to come back to the whole Knowles Creek basin. Well, coho spawn from October to April. And when they come back they only live about a week. So you had to have 2 sexes of fish, they had to find each other, and throughout the basin, and then where the reds had to survive the winter storms. They did it. And we’ve seen that group of fish come back every three years, get bigger and bigger, and basically now have recovered. That’s been the biggest surprise, is just how resilient these fish are. One sort of perverse way of looking at the last hundred years, if you will, is we’ve basically ? I’m not saying intentionally ? trying to get rid of salmon. And the shock to me is, we’ve never been able to pull it off yet. They’re just so incredibly resilient, that even all the things we’ve done – you know, the overfishing, the destruction of their habitat, damming their streams, removal of water, hatchery programs – all of these things combined, they’re still here. That’s the shock. If you give them any chance at all, really, they can rebound really quickly.