How a community is using Ecology grants to help salmon return
Ohop Creek is an important spawning habitat for Chinook salmon. Photo by NOAA.
For almost 20 years, the Nisqually Land Trust has been steadily improving habitat in and around Ohop Creek – one of the largest stream-restoration projects in the state. The project is also a great example of a successful community collaboration between the Nisqually Land Trust, the Nisqually Indian Tribe, several non-profit organizations, landowners and volunteers. The Ohop Creek restoration is one of 37 state wide projects we have funded through our competitive streamflow restoration grants program. Funding for these grants was authorized by the state legislature in 2018 to help public entities improve rivers and habitat throughout Washington.
Read the entire blog post on collaborative salmon recovery here.
NISQUALLY LAND TRUST ACQUIRES TWO KEY PROPERTIES ALONG OHOP CREEK
Purchases Protect Spawning Beds and Set Stage for Restoration
The Land Trust has permanently protected two more properties central to the restoration of Ohop Creek, one of the two main tributaries to the Nisqually River.
They include 45 acres of floodplain and over one-half mile of Ohop Creek shoreline used by four species of Pacific salmonids native to the Nisqually Watershed, including threatened Chinook salmon and steelhead trout.
The Land Trust purchased the properties from two families with long ties to the Valley.
The Land Trust purchased ten acres in the lower Ohop from Marcia Berger, who has owned the property since 1983. The Land Trust worked with Marcia and her daughter, Cindy, to allow Cindy and her family to retain a residence on high ground while the Land Trust acquired the land along the valley floor.
The Berger property adjoins 90 acres the Land Trust purchased from the Pruitt family in 2019 and helps set the stage for the next phase of Ohop Creek restoration. Ohop Creek was ditched over a century ago to drain the valley for dairy farming. This had devastating impacts for fish, reducing the creek’s capacity for Chinook salmon, for one, by some 80 percent.
In 2015, the Land Trust, the Nisqually Indian Tribe, and a team of local, state, and federal partners completed the first phase of restoration, re-converting 1.6 miles of ditch back to 2.4 miles of meandering, salmon-friendly stream and planting 186,000 native trees and shrubs in the floodplain.
“We’re grateful to Marcia and her family for helping us to secure one more piece of the puzzle for the next phase of the Ohop Creek restoration,” said Land Trust Executive Director Jeanette Dorner. “It’s been a high priority in the Nisqually salmon recovery strategy for the last two decades, and this brings us one step closer.”
Further up the Valley, the Land Trust purchased 35 acres from the Litzenberger family that include over 2,200 feet of Ohop Creek shoreline along the heart of the creek’s salmon-spawning beds.
The purchase secures the property for floodplain restoration and eliminates development of up to 37 residences, which would have severely impacted the spawning grounds. The Land Trust will continue to lease a home to a young family with a small livestock operation on a portion of the property outside the floodplain.
Funding partners for the two purchases include the state’s Streamflow Restoration and Puget Sound Acquisition and Restoration programs and the Nisqually Delta Environmental Mitigation Trust.
For more information, please contact Nisqually Land Trust Executive Director Jeanette Dorner: (360) 489-3400 x105;
It’s a hot day. But deep inside the Nisqually Community Forest, there’s no shortage of shade as my photographer and I work our way around skinny trees and toward a pair of researchers.
A familiar cracking and popping sound echoes around us as we walk over old branches that have fallen to the forest floor before it’s interrupted. Read the full article here.
Land Trust Purchases 6 Acres of Upper Mallard Cove
By Daniel Warn /
The Nisqually Land Trust recently purchased 6 acres of undeveloped forest at the top of the Mallard Cove west bluff to protect the land in perpetuity.
The land, obtained from Douglas and Julia Hart in a sale for just under $200,000, features forested wetlands, which supply freshwater to feed Mallard Cove’s pocket estuary year-round through groundwater flow.
“Pocket estuaries in the Puget Sound are critically important for juvenile salmon that are migrating out from the rivers where they were born and getting ready to head out into the ocean to live their adult lives,” said Jeanette Dorner, executive director of the Nisqually Land Trust.
The Nisqually Land Trust’s first project to protect Mallard Cove was completed in 1998, which protected 46 acres of the cove’s nearshore forest, mudflats, and beaches.
Photo Point Monitoring in the Lower Ohop Valley – May 2020
The Land Trust’s Ohop Creek Protected Area is the site of one of the largest restoration projects in the Pacific Northwest. Ohop Creek runs through the heart of Eatonville’s Ohop Valley and is a key salmon-producing tributary of the Nisqually River. In the nineteenth century the creek was ditched and the valley drained. But for the past 15 years the Land Trust has worked closely with local landowners and watershed partners to restore the creek’s natural channel and forest cover.
We rebuilt 1.6 miles of ditch into 2.4 miles of curving, salmon-friendly creekbed. And we replanted over 180 acres of floodplain with 200,000 native trees and shrubs to enhance water quality and instream habitat.
Since 2009, the Land Trust has taken photos each spring at photo-point locations throughout the Ohop Creek restoration area. These photos provide a record of how the replanted vegetation in the valley is changing year by year.
This video was taken by Sarah McCarthy, our Washington Service Corps AmeriCorps Member, as she visited the photo points on the east side of the Lower Ohop Valley in May
Lower Ohop Valley Creek Restoration Project
The initial phases of the Lower Ohop Valley Restoration Project, an intensive channel and floodplain restoration effort, started in 2009 and were completed in 2017. Habitat restoration activities include removing derelict structures, controlling invasive plant species, replanting over 180 acres in the floodplain with native trees and shrubs, and realigning over two miles of Ohop Creek to mimic its meandering, pre-settlement location in the center of the valley. This restoration project is enhancing water quality, streamflow, and instream habitat for many aquatic species, including salmon and trout, and floodplain habitats that are utilized by a wide variety of wildlife.
Here are more photo point pairs from the restoration area.
You can check out a video that shows a 2018 winter view of the restoration areaprovided by Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.Lower Ohop Video
And for those who’d like more info about the restoration, here’s a link to the phase 3 Lower Ohop Creek Restoration blog (2014-2016).http://ohop.nisquallyriver.org/
We are taking our Notes from the Field blog virtual! Our Stewardship staff spend most of their week outside and in nature, tasked with managing and restoring over 7,500 acres of conservation lands from Mount Rainier to the Nisqually Delta. Here, Stewardship Assistant Courtney Murphy gives us a peek into her workday out in the field.
See the Nisqually River floodplain, where the Land Trust, Nisqually Indian Tribe, students, and volunteers are planting 12,350 native trees and shrubs on this site alone. Then visit Ohop Creek, a main tributary to the Nisqually River and the site of one of the largest restoration projects in the Pacific Northwest!
Courtney took these video clips on May 1, 2020 on properties at our Powell Creek Protected Area and our Ohop Creek Protected Area.
The activism around the Nisqually watershed — the 460,000 acres surrounding the Nisqually River, from Mount Rainier to the Sound — in the last 60 years has resulted in one of the most pristinely preserved environments in the state. Still, the Nisqually Tribe and its allies worry for the future of the watershed, especially for the salmon that depend on its health to survive. “Excerpt from South Sound Magazine Article, March 16, 2020” Read more here!
Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, we postponed our Annual Dinner & Auction, which was scheduled for Saturday, March 14.
Instead, we’ll be holding our event in late September. We’ll keep you posted. And we’ll take the liberty of assuming that folks who have registered would like to remain so. If not, let us know, and we’ll send you a refund. Feel free to contact us by phone (360.489.3400) or email ().
We hope this crisis passes soon, and that we see you this summer. Watch for announcements of our volunteer work parties and Nature Walks, which we will resume as soon as it’s safe to do so.
Meanwhile, thank you for your kindness and understanding. We wish you all the best of health.
When the going gets tough, call the Girl Scouts: Four scouts from troops in Olympia and Steilacoom are tackling the restoration of a critical but much-abused shoreline property the Land Trust recently acquired along the main stem of the Nisqually River, near Yelm.
The Girl Scouts and a team of volunteers will plant 500 plants on this acre of shoreline land, which has been torn up over the years by dirt bikes and off-road vehicles.
“These girls are incredibly ambitious,” said Courtney Murphy, the Land Trust’s Stewardship Assistant, who has been working with the Scouts for much of the last year. “They’ve worked hard – researched what kind of plant diversity they need, raised money to buy plants, salvaged plants from other sites, prepped the site. They’ve done it all.”
The four Scouts – Cassidy Chaney, from Steilacoom Troop 45261, and Maya Hanson and Maggie and Addie Barker, from Olympia Troop 40116 – are middle-school students and Girl Scout Cadettes. They’ll earn the Girl Scouting Silver Award for their project. It’s the highest honor a Cadette can receive.
In November and December, the Scouts and a team of volunteers will plant 500 plants on an acre of land that has been torn up over the years by dirt bikes and off-road vehicles. The property anchors one end of a ten-acre habitat block in the Nisqually River’s McKenna Reach that is salmon-rich but highly vulnerable.
In particular, the McKenna Reach contains spawning grounds used by Nisqually Chinook salmon and steelhead trout, both of which are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
A Silver Award project must demonstrate a Scout’s “understanding of sustainability and the wider world.” In addition to the restoration project, all four Scouts have completed the rigorous six-week Nisqually Stream Stewards class held by the Nisqually Indian Tribe and the Nisqually River Council.
New Ohop Acquisitions Protect Spawning Beds, Set Stage for Further Restoration
The Land Trust recently executed a rapid series of transactions to advance a two-fold strategy for salmon recovery in Ohop Creek, one of the two main salmon-producing tributaries to the Nisqually River:
Planting native trees and shrubs along Ohop Creek helps restore the spawning area. Ohop Creek is used by all five species of Pacific salmon native to the Nisqually Watershed
One, secure safe passage for salmon by restoring the lower four miles of the creek. (Ohop Creek was ditched over a century ago to drain the Ohop Valley for dairy farming, with devastating impacts to the fish population.) Two, secure the spawning beds immediately upstream of the restoration area to reduce streambed depredation from livestock and residential development.
All five species of Pacific salmonids native to the Nisqually Watershed use Ohop Creek, including Chinook salmon and steelhead trout, both of which are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
To secure the spawning beds, we recently acquired 33 acres of floodplain and upland forest along Ohop Creek just outside of Eatonville. The property adjoins 32 acres we acquired in 2016. In total, they contain almost two thousand feet of the creek in the heart of the spawning area.
In turn, these two properties are linked to 160 acres of upland forest owned by the state’s Department of Natural Resources. Together, they form a substantial corridor of protected habitat that is also used by a wide variety of other wildlife, including cougar, elk, black bear, and many bird species.
The purchase was partially funded by the state’s new Streamflow Restoration program and has been ranked for future funding by the Salmon Recovery Funding Board. The Land Trust advanced internal reserves to take the property off the market before the remaining grant funds are approved. “It’s a risk,” said Executive Director Joe Kane. “But a bigger risk is losing those spawning beds.”
In October, we added another four hundred feet of Ohop Creek spawning shoreline by acquiring a property auctioned by Pierce County.
Meanwhile, in two transactions downstream, in the lower Ohop Valley, we acquired 90 acres and 1.1 miles of Ohop Creek shoreline from the Pruitt family. The Pruitts are longtime residents and conservation leaders in the valley, and perhaps best known as the owners of the nonprofit Pioneer Farm Museum.
We acquired 90 acres, which includes 1.1 miles of Ohop Creek shoreline, for the next phase of the Lower Ohop Creek Restoration project, one of the largest stream-restoration projects in the state.
We acquired these properties for the next phase of the Lower Ohop Creek Restoration project, one of the largest stream-restoration projects in the state.
In 2015, the Land Trust, the Nisqually Indian Tribe, and a team of local, state, and federal partners completed the first phase of restoration, re-converting 1.6 miles of ditch back to 2.4 miles of meandering, salmon-friendly stream. The $8.7 million project included the planting of 186,000 native trees and shrubs across 180 acres of floodplain.
“The Pruitt family properties will help us set up the next phase,” said the Land Trust’s George Walter, who completed many of the land transactions that made the first phase possible. “It took us fifteen years to acquire the properties for Phase I. We don’t know when Phase II will take place, but one lesson we learned is that you acquire the land whenever it becomes available.”
The properties were acquired with a land donation from one of the sellers, Tim Pruitt, and grants from the state’s Salmon Recovery, Puget Sound Acquisition and Restoration, and Streamflow Restoration pro-grams. The newly protected land adjoins 72 acres that the Nisqually Tribe and the Land Trust have already secured for Phase II.
The activism around the Nisqually watershed — the 460,000 acres surrounding the Nisqually River, from Mount Rainier to the Sound — in the last 60 years has resulted in one of the most pristinely preserved environments in the state. Still, the Nisqually Tribe and its allies worry for the future of the watershed, especially for the salmon that depend on its health to survive. “Excerpt from South Sound Magazine Article, March 16, 2020” Read more
