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<\/a>Volunteers place salmon carcasses in Douglas Creek in January, an annual tradition since 2002, though organizers skipped one year when no dead fish were available. Photo by Shanna Baker<\/p><\/div>\n
Time has been unkind to Douglas Creek, which flows down the flanks of Mount Douglas\u2014also known as PKOLS in the SEN\u0106O\u0166EN language\u2014and empties into the Salish Sea off southern Vancouver Island. Over the past eight generations, much of the creek\u2019s 5.6-square-kilometer watershed (Vancouver\u2019s Stanley Park is about four square kilometers) has been transformed from forest to farmland to suburbia. The upper reaches are now entombed in underground culverts and only the final 1.1-kilometer stretch, which lies within the forested enclave of Mount Douglas Park, ever sees daylight. Even this remnant has suffered much abuse. Pollution from roads, lawns, and residential oil tank spills is now largely curtailed, thanks to municipal regulations and the construction of a weir and settling pond at the head of the creek. But storm surges fed by runoff from paved surfaces and roofs still threaten the creek\u2019s integrity, eroding its banks and scouring the channel.<\/p>\n
Biologist Peter McCully helped assess the waterway\u2019s potential. \u201cWe did a pretty significant inventory,\u201d he says, \u201cand the only thing we found was a scud,\u201d a notably hardy little crustacean. \u201cWe didn\u2019t turn up any fin fish, any amphibians, nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Most people would have given up at that point. The Friends of Mount Douglas simply got to work\u2014just as they\u2019re doing when I join them for their 15th salmon carcass transplant, an annual tradition (though they missed 2007, when no carcasses were available). The ceremonial casting of deceased and potentially putrid salmon into the creek is only one part of the process of creek rejuvenation, and it\u2019s surely the most raucous, the most fun, and the most visceral. But luring life with death has deep roots in overlapping ecosystem management practices. For millennia, up and down the west coast, indigenous peoples ritually honored each year\u2019s first-caught salmon, returning its carefully cleaned bones to the river. And scientists today recognize that a vibrant salmon creek needs an annual influx of dead fish for overall ecosystem sustenance and, more specifically, to provide a hefty meal for aquatic invertebrates, which in turn nourish juvenile salmon. Distributing dead salmon is now part of stream restoration programs in various west coast communities.<\/p>\n
Before the carcass toss, Wick and I meet at an unmarked entrance to the park, off a cul-de-sac just up the street from his home. A short walk takes us into the shade of towering Douglas firs and cedars, and down a fern-lined path to the creek. \u201cYesterday,\u201d Wick says, \u201cI met a man who remembered being here in the early \u201960s, when this creek was full of salmon and cutthroat trout.\u201d Those days were gone by the time Wick moved to the neighborhood in 1973, but this vision of the recent past\u2014and a possible future\u2014hooked him and hasn\u2019t let go.<\/p>\n
<\/a>Darrell Wick leads the Friends of Mount Douglas Park Society and is hopeful the creek will return to the salmon-friendly habitat it once was. Photo by Shanna Baker<\/p><\/div>\n
Inspired by the old-timers\u2019 stories, he and his group are intent on giving the creek a full makeover, restoring it to a salmon-friendly habitat that entices females searching for the perfect nursery with gravelly beds for eggs and protected pools where juveniles can eat and grow big enough to survive the ocean. This monumental repair job, supported by approximately CAN $95,000 of funding from the Pacific Salmon Foundation, has involved strategically distributing truckloads of gravel to create spawning habitat and cabling scores of massive boulders, tree trunks, and rootballs along the banks to hinder erosion. Work on the creek\u2019s final section, a meandering 136 meters just downstream of the weir, will be completed this summer.<\/p>\n
As early as 1997, the group was seeding the creek with salmon, releasing fry raised in local schools and at the nearby Howard English Hatchery. Five years later, they began the annual fish toss, with the hatchery providing the carcasses.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy on Earth would we put dead fish into a creek in order to try to get live fish back?\u201d McCully\u2019s question sends a ripple of laughter through the crowd that has gathered at the park entrance. Coffee and doughnuts, the dazzle of sun on the frosty grass, and the warmth of Wick\u2019s opening remarks have put everyone in a relaxed and cheerful mood. An equal mix of grown-ups and kids, the group includes Friends of Mount Douglas members, Howard English Hatchery volunteers, municipal government politicians and employees, and curious neighbors. The veteran salmon tossers have heard McCully\u2019s homily before, but they listen to the grizzly-bearded biologist\u2014the hatchery\u2019s technical adviser\u2014just as attentively as the novices.<\/p>\n