Aliina Lahti, WCC IP with NOSC

In addition to the crew, Port Hadlock is home to another WCC member.  Aliina Lahti is an IP (individual placement) working directly with NOSC as their AmeriCorps Intern.  She focuses on outreach, education, and restoration; you may have seen her in local schools or at NOSC volunteer events.

Counting Coho at Snow Creek!

Last Monday the crew actually got to see and handle the fish we work to preserve! The task, counting coho smolt at snow creek for the Washington  Department of Fish and Wildlife.  We were so excited to have a hands on experience with the fish, and to work alongside  Technician Cheri Scalf which always means AMAZING homemade cookies. 
    In addition to filling our bellies with oatmeal raisin goodness, Cheri showed us how to identify the coho and distinguish them from other species such as cutthroat, and steelhead.  We suited up in our waders and dipped thousands of tiny coho out of the trap!  We then commenced to counting like crazy. We counted the coho in two categories, small and medium.   Katie had the daunting task of deciphering everyone’s shouts of numbers and sizes, and recording them.  There were so many, it seemed like it might take forever, but the time flew because we were having a blast.
    Cheri took a sample portion of the coho to take scale samples and exact measurements of length.  You can actually tell a lot about a fish from it’s scales.  We learned that it’s possible to determine roughly the age and sex of a fish based on the tiny patterns on its scales. 
    The final count for monday was over 2,000 fish!  James guessed closest to the final count and won a batch of Cheri cookies, much to the envy of the rest of the crew. After counting, we returned our scaly friends back to snow creek to go about their business, and we went off to do more maintenance.  We had such a good time, multiple members of the crew signed up to volunteer with Cheri on our own time.  I’d like to add that James, being the awesome crew supervisor that he is, shared his cookies with all of us.

Learning how to ID smolt

Lou and Randy netting fish out of the trap

 

Fish ID/Count

More pictures

Fun and Festivities at the Rhody Parade

      Saturday, May 21^st was our chance to walk (or drive) alongside Fin the giant salmon with the good people of the North Olympic Salmon Coalition in the Port Townsend Rhody Parade. It was a good bit of fun all around, and the energy that could be felt coming from all the parade participants was simply contagious. We noticed people and parade floats from all over Jefferson County, and it was quite impressive to see so many representatives from various organizations.

      It was a very sincere pleasure to be out there to represent not only the Washington Conservation Corps and have a good time doing it, but to also represent the North Olympic Salmon Coalition in our common goals of conservation, restoration, and maintaining habitat especially important to salmon populations. Plus, having nearly every kid observing in the crowd yell out, “Look at the big fish!” was pretty heartwarming as well.

     We’d like to extend a huge thanks to the staff at NOSC for having us along and Fin for carrying Linda Lou around throughout the parade!

The Gang's All Here!

Just... Chillin'

Here We Observe a Salmonid Feeding

Fern and Owen; don't they look related?

Maintenance, maintenance, maintenance

I think that I've probably given you the impression that we are ALWAYS doing crazy cool projects.  While this is mostly true, we also spend significant amounts of time doing maintenance - a super important job that is routine enough that we forget to take pictures, even though we do it all the time.

Tens of thousands of trees and shrubs have been planted in East Jefferson county in a variety of sites along creeks where habitat restoration is needed.  Many of these are planted in disturbed open areas - old fields by creeks with all sorts of intense invasives such as reed canary grass and blackberries.  Most of what is planted starts out at a knee-high size at best, so they need all the help they can get to jump-start a new forest.  That's where maintenance comes in.  If we just planted and left, most things would die.  So, most grants for projects include funds for several years of maintenance.

It's summer, and invasives and natives alike are growing, so it's the time of the season to try and fight back.  We usually do this in a combo of brush-cutting circles around planted trees to eliminate competition, and then a couple of weeks later spraying herbicide around the same trees to ensure that nothing in that circle grows back, hopefully for most of the summer.  Without the herbicide step, we would have to visit some sites a couple times a month to brushcut them, taking up time and gas.

We have done a few cool projects in the past few days though and I shall post the pictures as soon as possible.  Also, look for us at the Rhody Parade in Port Townsend this Saturday...we'll be pulling Fin!

Fish traps with the Elwha and Nightshade Surveys

Much of our time is spent duking it out with non-native invasives.  Two weeks ago we took on Nightshade, or Solanum, a vine-like plant that has toxic alkaloids and a tendency to take over.  Well, actually, we were just surveying for now with the intent of destroying it later.  Chimacum Creek has had really bad nightshade problems in the past but previous herbicide sprays and hand-pulling efforts have had a huge effect.

Hiking down Chimacum Creek

Chris taking a GPS point.  You can see nightshade killed by last year's spray climbing the tree next to him.

Lou making an awesome lopper face.

Not a bad place to work

We took GPS data at each spot along our stretch of creek that had living nightshade.  This will allow us to return to spray in the summer or fall with an estimate of the herbicide required.  You will undoubtedly be hearing more about this at a later date.

Oh, and Chris, Lou, and I (Katie) all totally fell in.  And then it hailed on us.  Thanks Washington.  Thanks a lot.


Last week was another exciting week.  Not only did we trek down to Olympia for our pesticide applicator licensing, but we had the opportunity to work for the Elwha tribe.  We spend a lot of time alone in the woods/farm fields/work barn talking extensively about food, alien conspiracies, how awful the weather is, escalatingly-odd 'would you rather' questions, politics, and food.  Any excuse to hang out with other natural resource-minded folk is immediately seized.  For this project we got to work with both a Port Angeles WCC crew and the Elwha tribe putting in smolt traps.  It was a big fun group of people to work with.

Weighing the tarp down with sandbags (after smoothing the bottom of the creek with shovels and rakes)

Putting in the frames

Every spring the Elwha tribe puts smolt traps in several creeks to monitor outgoing fish.  It's a heavy process...tossing sandbags, fire-lining buckets of gravel, pounding t-posts into the creek-bottom...however, between all the people involved it was a fairly straight-forward process.  We left drenched, happy, and shamefully sore.

The finished product