From an email forwarded to me:
PUBLICATION: Times Colonist (Victoria)
DATE: 2005.11.20
EDITION: Final
SECTION: Islander
PAGE: D9
BYLINE: Goody Niosi
SOURCE: Special to the Times Colonist
ILLUSTRATION: Photo: Artist Ken Kirkby, left, monitors spawning salmonwith Rod Allan, who spearheaded restoration of Nile Creek.; Photo: Rod Allan, a founder of the Nile Creek Enhancement Society, examines the incubator in the hatchery built on the shores of the creek where the group now raises its own salmon.
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Nile Creek's Restoration Puts Community In the pink: Thanks to the determination and perseverance of a small band of fishermen, an almost dead stream is once again teeming with fish and a thriving tourist attraction
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In 1991, Nile Creek was a stream almost devoid of life. Years ago it swarmed with salmon -- so many that it was called "The Pink River." But by the early 1990s it was essentially fished out. Today, pink salmon are once again spawning in it so thickly the water boils in the pools.
Dr. Paul Kariya, executive director of the British Columbia Pacific Salmon Foundation calls Nile Creek a triumph of people sticking up for salmon.
"If salmon are ever going to survive it's people who are going to be the solution. Nile Creek is a great example of stewardship -- people being active and making sure that fish are coming back and that they are protected."
The transformation of this creek near Bowser on Vancouver Island owes much to the fact that Rod Allan liked to fish for cutthroat trout.
"I used to fish in Nile Creek in the early '80s and there weren't any more cutthroat trout left. So I wanted to raise them," Allan says.
But when Allan and another man approached the department of fisheries, they were told they couldn't raise cutthroat trout. They would have to raise pink salmon because the pinks would bring all the other fish back.
The two men formed the non-profit Nile Creek Enhancement Society. Their first job was to take measurements of the entire creek -- width, length and depth of every bend and every pool.
"I had no idea I would have to walk all up and down the creek and get all of this evaluated and go through all this red tape before some guy would say, 'OK, you can build a hatchery on Nile Creek,' " Allan says.
As the work progressed, the two men recruited more people until the ranks of the society swelled to 10. They built an incubator on the banks of the creek and went to the Quinsam River Hatchery in Campbell River to get one million pink salmon eggs. But getting the eggs wasn't quite as easy as popping them into the back of a pickup and driving off.
"We had to strip all the eggs from the fish and that is a chore in itself," Allan says. "It's a full two days work -- eight hours a day -- and it's cold, dirty and slimy."
The volunteers brought back the eggs and put them into the incubator. They duly hatched and took off down Nile Creek into Georgia Strait. Two years later, more than 6,000 fish returned to spawn. As predicted, the cutthroat trout followed.
That first return of salmon to Nile Creek started the restoration cycle. When pinks hatch, they take nothing out of the river; they go straight to sea. After they spawn, they die and their bodies fertilize the river, providing food for insects, which the Coho require because Coho live and feed in the river for a year before heading to sea. Pinks, as the biologist had told Allan, are the basic building block.
While the first pinks were out at sea, the members of the Nile Creek Enhancement Society had also begun a much larger project, building a side channel where they could control the flow of the water. Like most creeks that flow into Georgia Strait, Nile Creek dries up in the summer and floods its banks in the winter and with the spring run-off, washing fish eggs out to sea. By building a channel, they could control the level of the water by opening or closing the taps from Nile Creek.
The work on the channel took enormous amounts of time, energy and money. Ken Kirkby, the internationally known artist (and dedicated fisherman), began helping financially while he was still living in Vancouver. When he moved to Bowser in 2001, he pulled on his gumboots and plunged into the labour of love with the rest of the group.
They brought in heavy equipment to carve out the curving channel but at the same time, they were meticulous about not damaging the land. Over more than 10 years, they built the channel in sections and raised money -- $306,000 -- to finance the immense project.
"Where I could scrounge money I did," Allan says. "I scrounged from B.C. Hydro, from logging outfits. I got money wherever I could get it."
As the work progressed, Allan lost sight of the original purpose. He questioned the biologists with the fisheries department and, in his words, "picked their brains" but much of what the Nile Creek Enhancement Society did, they did by observing nature.
"I fished all my life," Allan says. "A lot of this is common sense."
Kirkby adds, "If you sit down and watch a creek that is in good shape, it's a master teacher."
When they excavated they thought it made good sense to throw old logs and stumps into the pools and channel to give the fish a habitat. The idea was to make the channel as natural as possible. Wherever a new development was taking place, they asked the builders if they could haul off the stumps and they scavenged downed trees wherever they could. Then they seeded the banks of the channel with grass and planted trees.
The work was backbreaking.
"Most of us who have been fortunate to fish a lot and catch a lot have also killed a lot," Kirkby says of their motivation.
"There comes a time in your life to stop that and you start to do the opposite. You realize that too much of this has gone on. The greatest conservationists in my opinion are those who fished and hunted and used nature for their benefit -- they understand it best. It is they, even the roughest of them, who have more sentiment towards nature than people who live in the city and wear a three-piece suit."
The pinks are back in Nile creek and so are the Coho, the cutthroat trout and other species of fish. The return of the fish to Nile Creek has also spawned a tourist industry. Dave DesMeules, owner of Bowser's Georgia Park Store says that 10 years ago there was no salmon fishery after the beginning of September. Today, he can come to the store on an October morning and see 20 or 30 fly fishermen out in the bay. The pinks have extended the season by at least a month and that means more money spent on tackle, groceries, restaurant meals and local hotel rooms because people are coming from the United States and the lower Mainland to fish at the mouth of Nile Creek.
But in early 2004, it all came within a hair's breadth of being destroyed. A local couple who own a woodlot were quietly approached by a developer about selling their land. The couple investigated and discovered that Nile Creek and the neighbouring Thames Creek, which the Nile Creek Enhancement Society had also begun restoring, was slated to be developed into four major golf courses and up to 2,500 homes. The crown land was about to be sold off.
"No one had any knowledge of this," Kirkby says. "No one was talking."
The society went to Freedom of Information but were told it would take time to get them the information they wanted. Kirkby didn't wait.
"I decided to pick up the phone and talk to my dear friend, the Honorable John Fraser and invite him to come over for some fishing."
Fraser, the former Speaker of the House, former chair of the Pacific Fisheries Resource Conservation Council, director of the British Columbia Pacific Salmon Forum and chair of the Pacific Salmon Foundation toured Nile Creek and listened to the story Kirkby and Allan had to tell. He calls Nile Creek a classic example of what can be done if you get a community involved.
"This is something of incredible value, not just to that community but to the concept of conservation itself," he says.
"This is something that should be well known because this gives hope to people ... and at times it takes courage to stand up to government or to developers and to anybody else and say, 'What you are planning to do is going to diminish the quality of the place we live in.'"
Fraser wrote to Ron Creaver, manager of Land and Water Administration for the province, enclosing the history of the work on Nile Creek. He asked that if any development was contemplated in the area, the first consideration should be for the fish and their habitat. Within days the British Columbia Pacific Salmon Forum was informed that the application had been withdrawn in the spring.
Allan and Kirkby say they feel assured that the battle for Nile Creek has been won but the work of the Nile Creek Enhancement Society continues. They are now rehabilitating Thames Creek and 15 other creeks in the mid-Island area. The Society is also lobbying for a corridor of crown land on either side of the creek.
It's certainly not about fishing for cutthroat trout any more, Allan says. "It's about bringing the salmon back to the West Coast. I've seen what one creek can do.
"There are creeks that logging has destroyed. We can bring them back. It's possible."
Melissa Vance
Recovery Science Officer - Interdepartmental Recovery Fund /
Agente du rétablissement scientifique - Fonds interministériel pour le rétablissement Environment Canada / Environnement Canada
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Topic: A feelgood story for a change (Read 2356 times)