To our wonderful volunteers – THANK YOU for all of the reported and unreported hours spent on Land Trust properties taking pictures and generally checkin’ in!
We appreciate all of the energy and thoughtfulness that you bring to the time you share with us.
Between the beginning of January 2020 and the end of April 2021, volunteers contributed 3,400 hours to caring for Land Trust properties throughout the Nisqually River Watershed. During this year of uncertainty, you stuck with us and we are incredibly grateful for your dedication.
Here are a few “Most Of…” highlights for January 2020-April 2021: Most Dedicated Volunteer From Mountaineers: Alberto Villela Most Dedicated ‘Newish’ Volunteer: Michelle Penick Most Hours Spent Removing Invasive Weeds: Butch Hennings Most Hours Spent on Site Steward Visits / Reports: John Grettenberger Most Hours Spent Planting: James Reistroffer
As I wrap up my second quarter of service with the Nisqually Land Trust, and we wrap up our planting season, I’d like to share my reflections on this special time of the year in the habitat restoration field. In case we haven’t met, my name is Susannah, and I am the AmeriCorps Volunteer Coordinator for the Nisqually Land Trust here in Olympia, WA. As part of my service year to this non-profit habitat conservation organization, I spend two days a week (at least) outside in nature, stewarding the land and coordinating volunteer work party events. The past few months, this stewardship has included planting thousands of native shrubs and trees with volunteers and staff in the Nisqually River Watershed.
I decided to take this year and dedicate it to service when COVID-19 freed up my previous work schedule with the loss of a newly created job opportunity I had been moving toward since 2016. I’ve never worked in my past careers with an environmental organization, but I’ve spent a lot of time in nature, and I love to move in and also sit still and observe it whenever I can. I’ve learned so much the past few months, and I feel so lucky to have this opportunity to grow in an area I never knew much about previously.
Day 1 of the 2020-2021 planting season at Powell Creek-Oct. 21, 2020
What this season of planting has taught me is how meditative a process working in nature can be and how necessary that’s become for a world currently fighting to survive a pandemic. Take, for example, this excerpt from my journal during the first months of planting I participated in back in October of 2020:
“There are moments with the groups of volunteers sitting in the dirt with us that we all fall silent. The chatter about life stops while our bodies stay in motion – digging holes, tickling roots, and patting native life back into the soul of the Nisqually River floodplains. It’s there that I find a connection to all things – the breeze that kicks up reminding us we are well into fall now, the pair of eagles flying overhead as we work, the warmth of the sun peeking out from the clouds, and the shared purpose we are all working toward together in this stunning, small part of the Pacific Northwest wonderland. This work has become a moving meditation for me, and I believe for the staff and volunteers as well. It’s a time where we discover a connection to each other in these quiet moments and in giving back to the environment in a time when so much has been taken away from us.”
Volunteers & NLT Staff during the second week of the 20-21 planting season-Oct. 28, 2020
I’m so thankful to be a part of this unusual service year – to provide opportunities for the community to get out of their homes and out into nature, to find that moving meditation which contributes not only to the health of the land in the watershed but to each of us and our personal health and well-being.
As a Washington Service AmeriCorps member, part of my service duties include submitting a “story of service” each quarter of my 10 and ½ month term. These are sent to the Washington Service Corps to post on their website and social media. The purpose of a service story is to share my experience and the impact I am making at my service site and the impact it is having on me! This is something I particularly enjoy doing, documenting my time with the Nisqually Land Trust in writing and sharing it with NLT supporters as well. I will have one more story of service before my term is over, so look for that one in June 2021!
As blackberry thorns pulled strands of hair out of my ponytail, I quickly realized I would need a hat for my field days with the Nisqually Land Trust as their new AmeriCorps Volunteer Coordinator. Trailing behind the group that first day in the field, I began to wonder what I had gotten myself into by committing to a service year at 45 years old in a career field that was vastly different from any of my previous education or 20 plus years of job experience. Then, we stepped out of the riparian forest and the Nisqually River came into view. This is what it’s all about, protecting this beautiful river and as they say at the Land Trust, “connecting land, water, people, and wildlife.”
My name is Susannah, and I am serving this year with the Nisqually Land Trust (NLT) in Olympia, WA where I help organize and facilitate volunteer events, which is a part of the stewardship of the 7,736 acres in the Nisqually River Watershed that are protected by the NLT. I feel lucky as a volunteer coordinator in a pandemic year. Why? Because since the start of my service year in September, I’ve been a part of an organization that continues to offer socially distanced outdoor habitat restoration events, such as planting trees and pulling invasive weeds at our protected areas in a time when many non-profit organizations have had no choice but to cancel all their volunteer opportunities. Of course, our volunteer numbers are limited for the health and safety of all involved, and many new safety protocols have been put into place, but that has simply made it more special because it allows us to get to know each other and our volunteers even better as our small, masked groups work together to conserve the lands in the watershed.
My service the last few months has not only provided me with a chance to be a part of a conservation organization protecting land and water for the benefit of wildlife and the local communities, it has also educated me about the impact I have on nature and that nature has on me. I love being in nature and always have, but prior to this it was, if I’m honest, only for my benefit. What was I giving back to nature to ensure we could continue to work together for the betterment of this world? Nothing, not really. Now, I can say I’m doing something that makes a difference for generations to come, ensuring nature is preserved for my children to enjoy. I’m also educating others, such as the families who come out to volunteer, so maybe they will understand the connectedness we all have to nature a little earlier in life than I did and consider the impact their footprint has on it and how they can help protect and preserve it for the next generation.
As an Washington Service Corps AmeriCorps member, part of my service duties include submitting a “story of service” each quarter of my 10 and a 1/2 month term. These are sent to the Washington Service Corps to post on their website and social media. The purpose for these stories of service are to describe our service experience and the impact we are making at our service sites, including a photo of ourselves in action! This is something I particularly enjoy doing, documenting my time with the Nisqually Land Trust in writing and sharing it with NLT supporters as well, so watch for my next story of service coming out in March 2021!
*The photo at the top is an ‘after’ shot of me with some newly released native Oregon Grape. This is just one spot where I’ve been pulling Scotch broom so that the native plants can grow freely!
This summer, we said goodbye to one of our favorite lunch spots, an old farm bridge across Ohop Creek. The bridge was not so good for driving, at least not anymore. It was made out of wooden planks resting on the metal frame of a flatbed railroad car, and as the planks rotted over time, a former landowner seemed to have simply piled on more, creating a layer cake of wood decking in various stages of decay. But it was still walkable and made a great lunch spot with a lovely view of Ohop Creek passing underfoot.
Still, the bridge had to go. Located on the middle reaches of Ohop Creek, the bridge’s footings were causing the creek banks to erode. During the floods this past February, several feet of both banks were swept away. One more flood like that, and the bridge might have been washed away too.
Erosion like this can reduce water quality and clog salmon spawning gravels with fine silt and sand. This reach of Ohop Creek contains important spawning habitat for Chinook, chum, Coho, and pink salmon; and provides important rearing habitat for steelhead trout. Salmon spawn in gravel, where fresh water can easily make its way between the stones and eggs to keep the eggs well-oxygenated and healthy.
So, for the sake of the salmon, we pulled out the bridge. And before the bridge was removed, we partnered with the Nisqually Indian Tribe to get a jump start on restoring floodplain forest on the south side of the creek. The Tribe’s Restoration Crew planted over 10,000 native trees and shrubs; an Eagle Scout built 20 bird boxes, many of which have been installed on the south side of the creek; and a culvert was removed from the south end of the old farm road to eliminate a seasonal fish passage barrier on a tributary channel. These restoration activities have been supported through funding from the Natural Resources Conservation Service and Washington Recreation and Conservation Office.
The Big Day, as we called it, was preceded by months of paperwork and weeks of preparation on the ground by our contractor, but the removal of the bridge itself was pretty fast. Within an hour, the bridge was attached to a very, very large crane, lifted up, and put on one of the longest truck beds I’ve ever seen, and that was that.
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As we head into the rainy season and start to see the salmon returning, it feels good to know that we’ve taken one more small step towards reducing the pressures faced by our watershed’s salmon.
Still, though, I can’t help feeling a little bit sad about losing that lunch spot.
Paddlers should be aware of spanning logs along the Nisqually. This log, located a couple of river miles upstream of the Centralia Diversion Dam, spans half of the river.
As the end of summer approaches, you may be thinking of doing some boating or floating on the Nisqually River. With its relatively undeveloped shoreline and impressive natural landscape, the Nisqually is a popular river for kayakers and rafters. However, some of those natural features that make the Nisqually desirable for recreation can also lead to dangerous situations.
Earlier blog posts described some of the shoreline changes that happened along the Nisqually during the February 2020 flood flows. Over the last few months, we’ve received several reports of spanning logs that are across the river along the same reach of the river – the 6 mile stretch above the Centralia Diversion Dam – starting a bit upstream of river mile 26 and extending upstream to river mile 32 (just above the confluence of the river and Tanwax Creek).
Before your next trip on the Nisqually, be sure to research these potential hazards and talk with experienced paddlers who have been on the river recently.
The passage of time is confusing for a lot of us right now, but let’s try to do some mental time travel. Can you remember what you were doing six months ago?
If you are a Nisqually Land Trust volunteer or staff member, you were likely planting live stakes!
Last winter was the first time I encountered a live stake. I didn’t plant any during the 2018-2019 planting season, and though I’d heard people talk about them and seen evidence (in the form of surviving live stakes planted in years past), they seemed somewhat mythical. When I took the truck to pick up the first round of live stakes from Sound Native Plants and saw several bundles of sticks waiting for me, I wasn’t entirely convinced they would become plants.
Live stakes are branches that are harvested from mature hardwood trees and shrubs while they are dormant during the winter. Usually, live stakes are planted along stream banks and in wetland areas. The stakes we planted last winter—black cottonwood, Pacific willow, and Sitka willow—were three feet long and cut diagonally on one end. The goal is to insert the sharp end into the ground so only half the stake protrudes. The nodes underground become roots, and the nodes above ground grow leaves and eventually, branches. Species that do well as live stakes have naturally high levels of the plant rooting hormone indolebutyric acid (IBA).
In practice, planting live stakes feels a bit silly, like you’re just shoving a stick into the ground. If the soil is wet enough, you are sometimes able to push the stake deep enough without a tool. If the soil is too compacted, you can use a tool that looks like a pogo stick made of rebar (known as a dibble bar) to make a pilot hole, and then drive the stake in with a mallet. We planted 1450 native trees using this method last winter.
Last week I went to check the growth of our live stakes, and was delighted to see that they are thriving throughout the watershed!
When we planted these willow live stakes in the Lower Ohop, some volunteers were skeptical they would grow well due to compacted soil conditions. Despite this challenge, and surrounding grass that’s taller than me, the plants look great! Even stakes with frayed tops from the impact of being hammered into the ground during planting are shooting out green leaves and new stem growth.
This willow at the Mashel River Protected Area was planted several years ago as a live stake. Hopefully, the live stakes we planted last winter will continue to thrive and look like this in a few years!
Thanks to the rain this spring, the sites at Lackamas Flats and Van Eaton are wetter than when we planted them. Even in the Lower Ohop north of Peterson Road, where it was difficult to plant even with the pogo sticks due to compacted soil, they are shooting out leaves and new growth like crazy.
At Brighton Creek the reed canary grass is taller than me, but the live stakes don’t seem to care. They’re on their way to growing taller than the grass, so they can eventually reach the sunlight and shade it out.
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.
We all know that it’s been an unusual year so far. Even before a virus introduced us to a new world of teleworking and bleach wipes, winter floods had already caused radical changes for the Nisqually and many other western Washington rivers.
Along the Nisqually River mainstem, the Land Trust property that has seen the most dramatic shoreline changes is our Lackamas Flats Protected Area. Back in 1996, flooding here cut a 70-acre island off from the mainland. This island persisted through these most recent floods, but now has a log jam made up of hundreds of logs on its previously open shoreline. Here are pictures from approximately the same spot on the south edge of the island taken in January and March 2020. The first two are looking upstream and the second two are looking downstream.
January 2020 – View upstream from south edge of the Lackamas Flats island.
March 2020 – Stewardship Assistant Courtney peers upstream from her perch on the new Lackamas Flats log jam.
Although difficult for us humans to clamber around, log jams like this one are beneficial to the Nisqually River ecosystem. Log jams improve habitat quality by creating pools and providing cover. Wood also increases the retention of organic matter and nutrients and helps create islands and new channels. These river features provide additional refuge and habitat, especially for rearing juvenile salmon and trout.
January 2020 – View downstream from south edge of the Lackamas Flats island.
March 2020 – View downstream at log jam deposited during February flood.
Across the river and less than a mile upstream, the flood’s impacts were less positive. Here, one area lost 30 horizontal feet of bank, with the river creeping ever closer to a life estate residence. And just downstream of this area of bank erosion, we now have the opposite problem: too much land. Some of our newly planted native trees and shrubs, including some that are hundreds of feet from the river, are now covered in a foot or more of sand and mud deposited by the river when the floodwaters retreated. Hopefully, some of these plants will tough it out – but many probably won’t.
March 2020 – Gravel beach widened by flood.
Further upstream, at the Powell Pastures, we found that the river had shifted east, doubling the size of a gravel beach there and cutting a side channel off from the river. And further downstream, at our Thurston Ridge Protected Area, we found the opposite situation. The side channel along the toe of the bluff there is now deeper and wider than before.
It’s sometimes hard for me to take the long view on this flood when I’m looking at our scraggly baby trees covered in dirt or hearing about the flood’s human impacts. But flooding on the Nisqually is normal. We can see signs of this in the land. The floodplain is marked by countless old channels that the river has abandoned, often by carving a new path during a flood. The Nisqually River has been flooding and wriggling around in its basin for as long as there’s been a Nisqually.
Floods bring challenges and dangers, for sure. But I also feel lucky to work around an ever-changing river—one that will keep surprising us with new twists and turns, new places to explore, and new giant piles of sand.
Imagine you’re walking and you come across a plant or creature that looks unlike anything you’ve seen before. You don’t know what this thing is- but its bright colors and sharp features set off some internal alarm. You feel as if this unknown thing is out of place, is threatening to the norm, could it be a new invasive species?
A few of us had this experience while working in the Ohop Creek Protected Area a few months ago. We were focused on adjusting some bird boxes in the trees and were distracted by an unusual plant on the ground. It was February and there were several stalks standing tall, taller than the trees and shrubs planted a year ago. It had a bright red stem and long, drooping, sharp, bright green leaves. It looked out of place, downright alien. Instinctively, we knew not to touch it.
Caper Spurge at Ohop Creek Protected Area.
Fortunately, we live in a time where we can access seemingly limitless information from devices in our pocket and as they say, ‘there’s an app for everything’. To identify the strange plant we’d found, we enlisted the help of a smartphone app called Seek by iNaturalist. This app uses a photo and crowd-sourced data to instantly identify plants and animals. Amazingly, we were able to name our unknown plant within minutes of finding it.
According to Seek, what we found was called Caper Spurge. Other names for the plant include Euphorbia lathyris, Paper Spurge, Gopher Spurge, and Mole Plant. Our suspicion that the plant was invasive was confirmed, the Caper Spurge is native to Southern Europe, Northwest Africa, and Western Asia.
All parts of the plant are toxic, which is the origin of the name ‘Mole Plant’. It is planted in gardens to repel pests such as moles. This is also the reason it was brought out of its native range.
It’s always exciting to learn to identify a new species; the instant gratification provided by the Seek app is fantastic. This new tool gave us the information needed to immediately control the new weed, and is a great addition to our stewardship tool box.
And it turns out that the Caper Spurge is easy to remove. The shallow roots easily come up with a shovel. We donned gloves for handling and disposed of it in plastic bags to prevent any vegetative regrowth.
AmeriCorps Story of Service – Quarter 2
by Susannah Prenoveau | December 2020
by Addie Schlussel | September 2020
by Courtney Murphy | June 2020
by Sarah McCarthy | April 2020