Giving Mother Nature a hand
Roberto Riveros helps guide an excavator in placing a redwood log along Grape Creek, near Healdsburg.
CHRISTOPHER CHUNG/THE PRESS DEMOCRATPublished: Monday, August 3, 2009 at 10:42 a.m.
Last Modified: Monday, August 3, 2009 at 10:42 a.m.
In a project designed to imitate Mother Nature, logs and boulders were placed in Grape Creek last week to create shelter for coho salmon that disappeared from the creek years ago.
“It’s an attempt to make the area more hospitable,” said Greg Fisher, Sotoyome Resource Conservation District project manager. “In Grape Creek, there are some great habitat features, we are just enhancing and improving them and make them that much better.”
Grape Creek, one of several tributaries to Dry Creek, snakes through vineyards with a canopy of ash, alders, willows, walnut, oaks and blackberry.
It is part of the Dry Creek watershed that is home to coho, which is on the federal endangered list, and chinook salmon and steelhead, which are on the threatened list.
The watershed is also a major part of a mandate by the National Marine Fisheries Service requiring the Sonoma County Water Agency to enhance the habitat, lower flows and change the way the Russian River estuary at Jenner is managed.
The cost to the water agency could reach $100 million over the next 15 years and impact how much water it can deliver from Lake Sonoma to its 600,000 customers.
This creek project is the first effort to meet the government’s biological demands. “These tributaries are essential to how the fish survive in the watershed as a whole,” said Dave Manning, a water agency biologist and senior environmental specialist.
Coho are native to Dry Creek, its tributaries and Russian River tributaries, but few have been found in recent years.
In Wine Creek, a tributary to Grape Creek, coho were last seen 11 years ago.
In Dry Creek, a Water Agency fish rotary trap was able to catch three native coho in April, along with 2,400 chinook and 20,000 steelhead.
The three species share the same need for clean, cool water and the pools and riffles necessary to reproduce and grow.
“What we are doing here is to lay out the welcome mat for coho so when they do return they can use this tributary as habitat,” Fisher said. “It is historically well documented as a coho stream, just not in recent years.”
The work on Grape Creek will take two weeks and involve putting in structures of redwood trees and boulders along a quarter mile stretch.
The cost is about $200,000 for the construction and to monitor the result.
The work is being done by Prunuske Chatham Inc. of Sebastopol, which had a two-man crew using an excavator to angle the trees and rocks into place to create pools and shelter.
“The log structures are designed to mimic the type of habitat in an overhanging bank,” said president Steven Chatham. “They can use it for cover, hang out underneath it so predators can't get to them, and to get out of the way during flood flows.”
A second project, also costing about $200,000, will be on Grape Creek closer to Dry Creek in two month.
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