The Salmo Watersheds Stream Keepers Society continues their work restoring fish habitat in the Salmo River and roughly $150,000 from the Columbia Basin Trust will help them on that mission. The latest project will restore four sections within a 600 meter area. Society Coordinator Gerry Nellestijn calls it a re-complexing of the habitat.
“About one third of one bank of our river has been altered in some way, shape, or form by either bridge building, or road building or rail road building or something along that line, so that the natural complexity of that river system has been compromised.”
Bull trout and rainbow trout should benefit, explains Nellestijn, who hopes there will be increased population generation from the work. “Bull trout is a blue listed species and certainly in our watershed we have one of the very few watersheds in the upper basin here that has that cold water species still available to it and sort of in terms of scraping the edge of a viable population.”
The Society does annual rainbow trout monitoring as well as bull trout fish nest counting to get a sense of the adult population numbers. It’s not the first habitat restoration project for the Society and it’s not the last as there’s years of work ahead, but Nellestijn hopes to see the task become more consistent and affordable.
“I think if we could generate a habitat enhancement program that wasn’t so sporadic, as sporadic as it has been in the past and builds a team that’s comprehensive, a team that we can deploy on a regular basis, that we would end up building more habitat for less dollars.”
Nellestijn also highlights the importance of the CBT’s funds in making the work possible and applauds their commitment to ecosystem enhancement. Some federal funding was also received to help with the project.
In the long term, another one of the Society’s goals is to see salmon return to the watershed, which is called their Image Salmon Campaign.
