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