#fish passage

[galaxseacreature]

Please tell me about fish taxi and what's a culvert

Absolutely! Allow me to set the scene:

Two salmon are swimming upstream when they smack directly into a huge concrete wall. One turns to the other and says, "Dam."

...that one definitely works better out loud, with a nice flat delivery. But it's a good starting point. Unlucky salmon are doomed to deliver the punchline to this terrible dad joke. Really lucky salmon are blessed with wild rivers with no dams at all. Medium lucky salmon have to ride the salmon cannon, navigate a fish ladder, or catch the fish taxi to get upstream. These are all fish passage solutions put in place to make up for those most intimidating barriers to migration: dams.

A quick note: I'm going to continue to focus on salmon in the Pacific Northwest, because that's what I'm familiar with. Different locations with different species of fish may have other concerns or solutions related to fish passage. But it's a big deal here because salmon have to migrate upstream to lay their eggs and continue their life cycle and everyone wants there to keep being iconic and delicious salmon around.

With that out of the way, and seeing as this post is already getting long, buckle up for the fish taxi details with a side of culverts under the cut! I promise a video and a meme to liven things up before we wrap.

Fish ladders are old news. Boring. And, frankly, expensive and challenging to design well and impossible to implement at all above a certain size.

Enter the fish taxi. The idea is as simple as it is ridiculous. Just round up your fish on the downstream side, put them in a truck with a big water tank, and drive them upstream of the dam for release. Easy peasy!

In practice there's a little more to it. Puget Sound Energy operates two dams on the Baker River. Their fish trap below the lower dam is pretty fancy, and even includes an "aquatic elevator" to raise fish up into the sorting facility. There's a whole series of gates and chutes and moveable walls that direct fish into the right holding tanks before finally being loaded into the trucks.

Not to boost corporate talking points about their mitigation strategies, but it is objectively a pretty successful site and this video shows the process well:

An extra cool thing about the Baker River fish taxi is that it also runs juveniles downstream. That may sound obvious but it's a huge improvement over old strategies like "hopefully some of them survive tumbling down the spillway or through the turbines." Ok, most dams have some form of bypass around the turbines, and the spillway is often the safer-than-it-looks intended route, but it still seems rough being a small fry. Getting rounded up in the floating collector and taking a taxi ride downstream starts to sound pretty good, all things considered.

Whew! That's the story of the fish taxi!

I'm going to try to keep culverts short (for now) because they're much less sexy. Normal people almost never think about culverts, but they cross them every day. Culverts are the pipes that carry water under roads. Although they aren't just pipes, they can be box or arch shaped structures and made of a variety of materials...but I digress! Basically any time a road crosses water that doesn't rate a bridge, there's a culvert. Some are just to drain runoff. Many driveways have a small culvert for the roadside ditch. But some are larger and allow entire streams to pass under the road. If they're sized appropriately, set at the right height to prevent a water surface drop, and not sloped too steeply, culverts can be completely passable and fish friendly! Alas, they often are not. Dams may be the largest structures that act as fish passage barriers, but culverts are by far the most numerous.

Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife inventories fish passage barriers to salmon and steelhead and estimates some 18,000-20,000 statewide. This is almost certainly on the low end. I mean, just imagine how MANY roads there are, and how MUCH water there is in Washington, a famously wet place. They intersect a lot. If you want to get a sense of the scale, there's a public facing, interactive map of WDFW-identified barriers here. Most of the points are culverts. Only the green points are fully fish passable. There are probably lots more points that haven't been surveyed at all yet. So yeah

[ID: "X, X Everywhere" Meme of Woody and Buzz from Toy Story reading "Culverts. Culverts everywhere." End ID]

Anyone who made it to the end has my gratitude and is welcome to use the very unofficial title of "Junior Fish Passage Nerd" any time they want. And if you made it here and are still interested in hearing about culverts or fish passage more generally...well, you know where to find me!

[usfwspacific]

Let the Dirt Fly! Making Muddy Waters in the Methow River Valley Clear Passage for Fish

By: Julia Pinnix, visitor services manager, Leavenworth Fisheries Complex

Photo: Putting the dirt to work! Katy Pfannenstein (left), Robes Parrish (center), and Kristen Kirkby (right, CCFEG Project Manager) on the first day of construction in the channel.

My friend and colleague Katy Pfannenstein sent me a photo July 11 of her first day working at Hancock Springs.  She and her co-worker, Robes Parrish, are liberally spattered with mud.  “We have A LOT of mud out here!” she wrote, and I could hear her laughter bubbling in my imagination.

Katy is a member of the Habitat Restoration team at Mid-Columbia Fish and Wildlife Conservation Office (MCFWCO).  She’s diving in this summer, more or less literally, on a project that started back in 2001, known as Hancock Springs.

Photo: Bird’s eye view to help the fish - this aerial view of the project site shows a restored portion of Phase 1 on the right, the middle shows the excavated new channel of Phase 2, and the left shows the unrestored portion of Phase 2, Credit: USFWS 

The spring in question was part of a dairy farm in the Methow River Valley in the early 1900s.  The farmer built a structure over upwelling water to make a place for storing milk and keeping it cool.  Dairy cattle enjoyed the spring water as well, trampling through the stream channel, which wound some 4,000 feet to empty into the Methow.  They ate the vegetation on the banks, and their heavy hooves widened the unprotected stream to as much as 100 feet, turning it to a slow backwater that looked more like a pond than a creek.

Hancock Springs has multiple seeps feeding cold water into the Methow River, which have remained consistent even as temperatures steadily rise and other water sources dry up.  Fish reliant on cold water, like salmon and steelhead, urgently need water sources like these to survive.  Hancock Springs was seen as a unique opportunity to completely restore a place to its historic form.

Photo: We dig it! Digging the channel and placing logs with the excavator.  The water in the pool is from all the springs and seeps within the channel, Credit: USFWS   

The Cascade Columbia Fisheries Enhancement Group began work in 2001 with a culvert replacement, fencing, and surface water-to-well irrigation conversion.  In the mid-2000s, the Methow Conservancy began negotiating for what would eventually become a 180-acre easement, encompassing the whole stream channel from the source to the Methow and allowing further work to proceed.  In 2008, the Yakama Nation completed a pilot project to create spawning habitat, which later became a much more ambitious construction project in 2011.  Together with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, they reconstructed the upper 1/4-mile of the stream from its source, while keeping the lower reaches untouched for a five-year effectiveness monitoring study.

Photo: Lining the streambank with the sod mats, Credit: USFWS

The restored upper section was immediately used by steelhead and Chinook salmon, which the data showed to occur at extraordinary densities.  Even bull trout, a species of fish that only thrives in the coldest water, frequented Hancock Springs.  It was clear that restoration of the full length of the stream would yield great benefits.

Robes designed both the 2011 restoration, and this most recent effort. The site, he said, “is a rare, rare system in the Upper Columbia Basin.  Even Methow residents who have lived their whole lives here are unaware that a gin-clear, cold spring originates beneath the old milk barn and dumps up to 20 cfs into the Methow a mile later.”

 Photo: Sometimes you gotta sling a little mud! The slinger in action - note the sod mats folded in half to support the bank as the new fill is added, Credit: USFWS

For two years, volunteers helped collect native wetland seeds which were sent to North Fork Native Plants in Rexburg, Idaho.  They were grown and placed into 405 coconut fiber sod mats and trucked to the site. “It is key to have these for building banks,” said Katy, describing how the mats were laid along the new channel and used to support the fill added to reconstruct the streambanks.  A specialized off-road, remote-control “slinger” machine shot the topsoil up to 150 feet away to narrow the channel from 100 feet to 8 feet wide.  Additional gravel and rock was also used to create ideal salmonid egg-laying and juvenile habitat. The new channel now has deep pools and riffles, is over 75% longer, and has much faster flow to keep the streambed clean of fine silt.

For six weeks this summer, Robes, Katy and several local contractors worked hard to see Hancock Springs restored.  It was “a back-breaking labor of love, literally,” said Robes, who added that he is glad to be back in the office, no longer waking up at three a.m. stressed about seeing the project through.  He expressed gratitude for all the partners on the project, and especially for the support of landowners and the salmon recovery community.

Photo: Pay dirt! Kate Terrell and Jim Craig, USFWS program and project leads, visited the site to admire the on-the-ground restoration project. They did all the hard work finding funding for the project, Credit: USFWS

Now it’s time to sit back and wait for the fish to come evaluate their efforts. When I visit the Methow this month, I’ll be watching for the now-winding path of the Hancock Springs stream glittering in the sun.

[crudlynaturephotos]

[crudlynaturephotos]

[fishgeekery]

Here's your chance to help give the endangered pallid sturgeon a fighting chance in the Yellowstone River! The Army Corps of Engineers is considering their options along the Yellowstone River. The option that they're currently leaning toward - building a larger dam with some sort of fish passage system - has fisheries biologists skeptical, as no artificial passage has proven effective for the endangered pallid sturgeon. The other main option on the table would help the fish regain access to former spawning habitat AND still let local farmers use some of the river's water for irrigation. Seems like a win-win to me. If you agree, please follow the link below. If you have the time, handwritten letters have a SIGNIFICANTLY higher impact, so while we can get thousands of people emailing the ACE about this, a few heartfelt handwritten letters would be great as well. Please don't just copy the digital version, though. Policy makers can spot a form letter within seconds.

[nycparkscommissioner]

On Friday, I cut the ribbon on the first of three fish passages coming to the Bronx River. This “ladder” will allow river herring to swim uphill to cross the East 182nd Street Dam, allowing them to reach their spawning grounds for the first time since the dam was built in the 17th century! These passages will increase biodiversity in our waterways and provide another opportunity for the local community to experience nature at work in their urban backyards.

NYC Parks is committed to the health, enjoyment, and safety of all park users – from school trips to schools of fish.  Please use caution when you visit waterfront parks this summer.

[sustainableyadayadayada]

fish passage on the Mekong

According to NPR, Laos is building several dams on the Mekong and there’s an argument about whether the fish passage systems that have been designed will be effective.