Fixing Little Fall Creek

LOWELL — Several men peered into Little Fall Creek from a bridge one day last week, marveling as a salmon hen in the stream below them thrashed from side to side, using her body to gouge out a gravel nest while her mate hovered nearby.
Visible in other areas of the stream were the carcasses of several salmon, placed there a week earlier by some of these same men. Stacked alongside the road at one end of the bridge was a pile of large logs.
All of these things — the logs, the volunteers and the salmon, both living and dead — are key elements in a cooperative effort to turn upper Little Fall Creek into prime spawning and rearing habitat for threatened native spring chinook salmon.
The men, members of the Coastal Conservation Association or the Northwest Steelheaders, had come to the creek to do the opposite of what fishermen normally do. They were here to put fish in the water, not pull them from it.
They spent an afternoon tossing more than 400 salmon carcasses — from which eggs and sperm had been removed at a local hatchery — into the creek.
In the wild, salmon die after spawning. Placing fish carcasses in the water is man’s way of mimicking Mother Nature’s method of adding nutrients to a creek. Biologists say dead salmon are a key link in the aquatic food chain on which salmon fry and fingerling will later feed.
And those pre-spawning rituals observed below the bridge mean there will soon be salmon fry in upper Little Fall Creek.
The spawners were among about 80 adult chinook released there by state fish biologists. Offspring of the spawners are being counted on to help jump-start a run above the falls.
Salmon already use lower Little Fall Creek, but they have not been documented above a fish ladder built around the falls in the 1980s. The ladder is used by steelhead, however.
Upper Willamette River chinook salmon are listed as “threatened” by the federal government. So the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife would “like to extend their range into the area upstream from the falls,” said district fish biologist Jeff Ziller. “We’d like to establish a naturally reproducing population up there.”
An annual run of 100 or more chinook spawners would “make a difference in terms of wild fish health,” Ziller said. “Every little bit we can get contributing adds the kind of evidence needed to delist the fish.”
Chances of establishing a run will be improved if the upper reaches of the creek are made more habitable for salmon, biologists say.
That’s where the stack of logs come in. They will be used to help build “log jams” that form deep pools and gravel beds fish need for spawning and rearing.
The Weyerhaeuser Company and the Willamette National Forest, which own Little Fall Creek above the falls, are cooperating on in-stream habitat improvement work.
The Forest Service toppled several old growth trees with root wads into the stream. Those will be used to help anchor additional logs to be helicoptered in from that stack near the bridge.
“This is a place that is going to see, hopefully, a whole lot of restoration activities during the next decade — and we’re excited about that,” said Bob Danehy, a Weyerhaeuser Company aquatic biologist.
“One of the keys to this river is that it’s free-flowing — no dams,” Danehy said.
“So the fish don’t have to deal with that problem … that’s why a place like Little Fall Creek, in my view, should be a high priority place” for rehabilitation.
Early-day logging practices — including the use of splash dams to “flush” logs down the creek — gouged the creek down to bedrock and destroyed a lot of fish habitat, Danehy said.Adding woody debris to the stream will reverse some of that damage.
Adding fish carcasses, meanwhile, will make the creek even more productive, said Dan Raymond, a Coastal Conservation Association officer who helped spearhead the volunteer carcass distribution effort.
Raymond was motivated by the success Gary Loomis, founder of the CCA’s Pacific Northwest Chapter, had with a project that used fish carcasses to produce a huge salmon run in a stream written off as “dead” by Washington Fish & Game officials.
Danehy agrees fish carcasses are important.
“Think back 100 or 200 years ago when we had huge salmon runs,” he said.
“All those fish died, and the marine nutrients that they brought up here fertilized the system.”
Raymond was very familiar with the Little Fall Creek drainage, having worked there as a log truck driver for Weyerhaeuser and other timber companies for many years.
“I’ve been poking at Fish and Wildlife a long time,” said Raymond. “It just looked like there should be something done here.”
Raymond knew from personal experience that the creek had potential.
Before angling was prohibited above the fish ladder, he said, “I came in and made one cast and caught a nice 16-inch cutthroat and the next cast I caught an 8-pound steelhead.”
The ODFW welcomed the availability of volunteers to handle the dirty (and smelly) work of scattering fish carcasses.
“I could use these fish on the McKenzie and help it out a little bit or work on this and help it out a lot,” said Erik Moberly, district Salmon Trout Enhancement Program biologist. “It’s great to have people who are excited about working on systems like this.”
The volunteers distributed about 1,225 salmon carcasses over nine miles of stream during three different work parties this month, Moberly said.
Meanwhile, Raymond is looking forward to seeing salmon surge up the fish ladder into upper Little Fall Creek.
“If this were to turn into a real high producing stream,” he said, “I’d sit down there day and night just to catch one — even though I’d have to throw it back because it’s not fin-clipped.”