We’re keeping busy with work at home and Volunteer Coordinator Sarah McCarthy compiled these photos of volunteers and staff to share with you. We look forward to sharing time in the field with you later this year!
Snapshots of Volunteers and Staff Caring for Nisqually Land Trust Properties

by Courtney Murphy | April 2020

In February, the Nisqually River reached a flood stage of 12.09 feet, the highest since the historic flood of 1996, when the river rose to 17.13 feet at the McKenna gauge.

The shorelines of many Land Trust properties underwent significant changes—the river cut away 30 feet of bank at one site, created gravel bars, gathered massive log jams, established new side channels, and put old ones out of commission. But perhaps the most common sign of the flood I’ve run into are large swaths of sand and silt the Nisqually left behind when it receded to lower levels. Two feet deep in many places, these deposits tell the story of the river’s trajectory as it swelled over its banks and flowed over the floodplain, leaving debris and the forms of ripples behind.

These sand deposits have been fun for stewardship staff and volunteers to explore, and have given us insight into the possibilities of the Nisqually’s behavior. But they’ve also given us a chance to learn about our neighbors, both human and animal, and the ways they interact with our properties and with the river.

When I came across one of these deposits at Lackamas Flats, the first thing I noticed were the tracks scattered across the sand.

Stewardship staff are used to seeing certain types of tracks—we never pass up the opportunity to follow an elk trail as an alternative to bushwhacking through thick brushy forest, for example. Or maybe we see the stray deer or coyote print where the ground is soft. But the number of species and individuals crossing the flood deposits to access the river was incredible.

On the Lackamas Flats sand deposits, we identified the prints of deer, racoons, squirrels and other small rodents, many types of birds, as well as the tracks of a human neighbor and his dog. A Lackamas Flats site steward saw a paw print that another neighbor identified as a cougar track.

When I see these tracks, I can’t help but imagine scenarios surrounding who put them there. Are the many raccoon tracks a family making their way to the river to take a drink or eat insects in the sand, several unrelated raccoons throughout the night, or one individual who really knows their way around the riverbank? At another sand deposit on the Yelm Shoreline Protected Area, I saw the tracks of raccoons, deer, and an animal with very large paws using the same narrow winding trail, their prints right on top of each other. Was there a pursuit of some sort going on? Or was that somehow the most efficient trail?

I was struck by how the animals crossing the sand deposits seemed to ignore and skirt around our white tree protectors. While one of our primary land management goals is restoring riparian forest for fish and wildlife, the resident animals often have differing or even antithetical land management strategies.

Resident beavers love to harvest our young willows and cottonwoods as soon as they get to a healthy, well-established size so that they can create pools and dens. Elk diligently maintain trails throughout supposedly-undeveloped properties, and often don’t mind if their paths need to cross directly through a planted area. As much as it brings me joy to know animals are thriving on Land Trust property, it can be frustrating to these impacts.

However, seeing the tracks on the sand deposits, in addition to just being an interesting field experience, gave me an opportunity to think about the collaborative and ever-changing nature of our work. The recent deposits of sand and sediment preserved the ways wildlife, neighbors, and Land Trust staff interacted with and explored a landscape altered by the river, previous property owners, and our land management.

There are a lot of moving pieces when it comes to stewardship and we can’t expect things to always be consistent. As much as we try to plan for the future, sometimes the river floods and dumps two feet of sand on top of our new plantings. And sometimes stewardship staff who usually spend the majority of their time in the field must learn to work from home due to the global situation.

Despite these challenges, Land Trust staff, volunteers, neighbors, and Nisqually Watershed wildlife continue to come together to learn, explore, and grow through new experiences.

 

by Addie Schlussel | February 2019

One of my favorite aspects of working in stewardship is the newness of everything.  Although I’ve been exploring Land Trust protected areas for the last year and a half, there are still so many places that I have yet to visit, and so many more that are always changing in beautiful and unexpected ways.  Nature is constantly surprising me—and I love it.

One site that recently surprised me was our Lackamas Flats Protected Area.  Lackamas Flats is located on a dynamic stretch of the Nisqually River, where flooding in the 1990s carved a side channel through a shoreline neighborhood and created a 70-acre island.  Although I’ve visited the mainland section of Lackamas Flats many times, the island was like a bit of Land Trust lore to me: something that I’d heard of and told many people about, but that I’d never seen for myself.

So when it came time to plan a monitoring visit to Lackamas Flats, getting onto the island was top priority; we just needed a way to bridge the side channel.  Although prospects looked bleak at first, we eventually found the fallen log of our dreams and balanced our way across, carefully avoiding the cloudy blue water below.

And what wonderful new treasures we found!  Unlike the mainland’s brushy and sometimes sparse forest, the island was full of moss-covered maples, lush sword ferns, and towering cedars.  Dips in the land were crowded with salmonberry and snowberry, and on the banks of the Nisqually, we found trees several feet in diameter that had been gnawed at by an overly ambitious beaver.  Walking around here, I was struck by that special feeling of being in a place so rarely visited by people, yet even on this island, signs of humans weren’t completely absent.  On the shoreline, we found a new patch of a non-native vine that had likely floated downriver, and in the forest, we found a padlock embedded deep in the bark of a tree, a reminder that parts of this land were developed just a few decades ago.

Sometimes, the surprises that we find out in the woods aren’t exactly what we’d like to see. Even in places that we like to imagine as untouched by human hands, we still find weeds and trash and quirky tree padlocks, reminding us that humans have had and will continue to have an impact on all land, urban or remote.  But I’m also constantly surprised by evidence of positive change: of healthy forest thriving where a subdivision once loomed, of beavers with grandiose plans for habitat manipulation, or of trees outcompeting all of the weird stuff that people like to attach to them.  That’s the kind of newness that I love about working in the woods.

 

by Charly Kearns | October 2017

When the rains start falling again, one of the first things I think about is culverts. – specifically, the 100+ culverts that carry water under forest roads on Nisqually Land Trust lands. Granted, culverts might not seem very exciting to most people, but it’s critical to make sure that we keep them clear of debris and functioning properly. Each fall, I spend time at the Land Trust’s Mount Rainier Gateway Forest Reserve, checking the property’s roads and culverts.  The property encompasses over 3,000 acres and was historically managed for timber production. Part of the legacy at this site is a network of roads on steep terrain and these require regular maintenance.

While we’re committed to maintaining roads where they are needed for current and future management, we are also decommissioning roads that are no longer needed.  Removing roads reduces forest fragmentation and improves stream conditions. The Land Trust is managing the Mount Rainier Gateway property for northern spotted owl and marbled murrelet, endangered species that rely on old growth forest habitat and are sensitive to forest fragmentation.  With funding from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, we were able to abandon 1.7 miles of roads this year, bringing the total to 7 miles since 2012.

Abandoning these roads involves removing all of the culverts to restore more natural water drainage; roughening the road surface to promote rapid revegetation and improve water infiltration; and blocking the entrance to the abandoned road with a “tank trap” to prevent vehicle access.  A tank trap is essentially a mound of earth in front of a ditch – something that even a tank would have trouble with.

We have been working with Tim Surface, an Ashford contractor, on this work since 2012.  He’s a wealth of knowledge, and a great resource.  Tim has been working in Ashford for 30+ years, and actually built a few of the roads on the property that he is now helping to remove.

It’s very satisfying to visit each stretch of abandoned road, it means that there are fewer culverts to check and maintain; and I have to admit that I’ve always felt that there are too many roads. It makes me happy to help remove a few miles of them. And over time, individual forest stands will merge and there will be greater forest connectivity and resilience.

 

 

by Charly Kearns | May 2017

 

 

There’s a lovely stretch of the Mashel River, just a few miles above its confluence with the Nisqually, where several old growth trees still stand along the bank. Land Trust volunteers have helped clear Scotch broom and blackberry, and plant native trees and shrubs along shoreline nearby. This is a great spot for contemplation and once the habitat work is done for the day, we always spend a little time just sitting on the riverbank, watching the water flow by.

Last February, after a morning of planting trees, we started to talk about one particularly huge Douglas-fir on the opposite bank. The sort of tree that would take at least four people to reach all the way around – more than 5 feet in diameter and about 250 feet tall. We noticed that the bank was being rapidly eroded, exposing the roots. We mused about the earth shaking event that was destined to come, and how we’d love to witness it from a safe distance.

Sometime in the past few months, this event has come to pass. This ancient tree fell directly across the river, spanning from the opposite bank to the bluff on the Land Trust side of the river. With little sign of damage to the trunk, I imagine this log will be here for quite some time.

Events like this have the power to change the course of rivers, and I immediately began to fret about all the trees we’d recently planted downstream of this log. I knew that we were planting in a channel migration zone, but the reality of that didn’t sink in until this tree fell. The area that we planted may end up underwater or scoured away, so I will have to rest assured that Scotch broom can’t grow in those conditions.

Although the life of this ancient tree may be over, its role in the ecosystem is far from finished. It will most certainly collect logs and debris and create new and diverse habitat features for years to come. Over time it will continue its journey down the river, adding nutrients to the water and food for insects and other animals. For the short term though, this will definitely be my favorite lunch spot!

The importance of large logs in river systems has been well documented in recent years and in some places it’s necessary to design and install engineered log jams to increase instream habitat complexity where there are few opportunities for natural log jams to develop. In places where large, old trees still grow along the shoreline, sometimes we can just let nature take its course.

by Katie Kirdahy | February 2017

Over the past few years, one of the projects coordinated by the AmeriCorps member serving at the Nisqually Land Trust is a conifer salvage event that is hosted in partnership with the Center for Natural Lands Management (CNLM). Organizing this salvage and participating in it was a highlight for me during the last few months.

At the plant salvage, volunteers dug up small Douglas-fir and Shore Pine from prairie habitat and then they potted these tree seedlings in 1-gallon pots, so that the trees can be planted on Land Trust properties next winter. This is a great way for CNLM to remove trees, which are considered weeds in South Sound prairie habitats, and a way for the Land Trust to acquire trees at a low cost. These native conifers are used to restore riparian forests throughout the Nisqually River watershed. It is also an opportunity to connect the Nisqually Land Trust volunteers with another local habitat restoration organization and its volunteers.

This year more than twenty volunteers attended this event, representing CNLM, the Nisqually Land Trust, and the Olympia Mountaineers. We collected one thousand trees, which will find new homes in clearings, former pastures, and abandoned roads on Land Trust properties. Many of the dedicated volunteers who helped at this volunteer event will join us again next year to replant the trees they rescued this year. These tree seedlings seem so small now, but I’ve had a chance to see the growth of the trees planted over the last 10 years on Land Trust property and it’s amazing to think about the visual impact these tree seedlings will have on the landscape. As well as the benefits they will provide to fish and wildlife in the years to come.

On salvage day one particular volunteer’s experience stood out, a man in his early twenties who had never volunteered to do any kind of habitat restoration activities before. He decided to come to the salvage as his second volunteer event with the Nisqually Land Trust. It was great to see him connect with the other volunteers, and enjoy the process of collecting the trees. I’m glad that after this extra-long day of volunteering he continues to attend volunteer events and plans to bring his younger sister along as well.

My favorite part of serving as the Land Trust’s volunteer coordinator is connecting people to the land. Volunteers are critical to the Nisqually Land Trust. Each time they attend an event, take on new responsibilities, or share their service with the people they care about I see how their investment of time and energy is improving these wild places. My AmeriCorps service experience has helped me to realize how much I enjoy serving with volunteers and how habitat restoration is a powerful way to engage people with the environment. I look forward to continuing to connect others with the natural world in the future.

by Charly Kearns | January 2017

For the past few years, the Nisqually Land Trust has chosen to celebrate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by focusing on habitat restoration in our watershed, rather than take the day off. It is evident by our huge volunteer turnouts, that many in our community feel the same way.

Since the holiday falls in the middle of our planting season, we have typically had volunteers help plant native trees and shrubs. That was the plan for this year too. Our Stewardship Team loaded our truck up with 300 potted plants, shovels, and plant protector tubes; and we headed to the site to meet the volunteers. There was just a thin blanket of snow on the landscape making the sunny morning extra bright.

Upon arrival, we discovered that recent freezing temperatures had frozen our plants into solid blocks of ice! While this shouldn’t damage the plants, it did affect our plans for the day. No matter how hard we tried, we weren’t able to get any of the trees out of their plastic pots! With 40+ volunteers expected, and no way to complete our day’s project, we had to come up with an alternative plan.

Thankfully (sarcasm intended), there is a large patch of invasive English ivy nearby. With no special tools, other than sheer volunteer power, we removed more than 1,000 pounds of ivy from the site in just 3 hours! Additionally, volunteers cut away ivy vines from all the trees that were getting smothered in the area. This will make a big impact on slowing this plant down, and limiting its spread into other nearby areas. We are very thankful for all of the energy that volunteers provided. At the end of the day, the truck was piled high with bags of ivy headed for the landfill.

In the afternoon, we took some time to harvest some willow and cottonwood cuttings and plant them onsite.

While the day didn’t go as we originally planned, we were still able to accomplish an incredible amount in a short time. This gives me one more reason to be thankful for our volunteers. They are flexible and good humored – two very important characteristics when it comes to working outdoors in Washington’s winter weather. Here’s a big “Shout Out” to our volunteers, from this event and every other event. You Inspire Me!

And a Special Thank You to those who were willing and able to give up a holiday to come do hard physical labor for one of the special places in the Nisqually Watershed.

by Charly Kearns | December 2016

Last week I was fortunate to witness an inspiring event, the release of 10 healthy fishers at Mount Rainier National Park.

Fishers are a large member of the weasel family, a bit bigger than a housecat. Because of their valuable pelts, fishers were hunted to extinction throughout much of their western range during the Great Depression. Populations have persisted in California, Southern Oregon, and British Columbia, but fishers were extirpated from Washington State. After more than 15 years of work by dedicated individuals, the fisher has returned to our state and the Nisqually Watershed for the first time in nearly 75 years.

Endangered species recovery often feels overwhelming, if not impossible. The list of major challenges includes habitat loss and degradation, invasive species, economic forces, and lack of scientific understanding. The case of the fisher is unique, in that there is actually quite a vast expanse of suitable habitat available for occupation in Washington, and the level of protection of these areas is greater today than ever before. The fisher faces competition from other species, but is a generalist, eating a variety of birds, mammals, reptiles, and even plants. These factors should be a key factor in the success of the reintroduction.

This year’s release is one stage of a multiyear reintroduction program, which started in Olympic National Park. The plan includes releasing 80 individuals into the southern Cascades and Mount Rainier, before moving to the North Cascades for further releases. The fishers were captured from First Nations Lands in British Columbia, where there is still a healthy population. Several elders and First Nations members attended the release, and members of the Nisqually and Cowlitz Tribes were present to welcome the fishers home.

Four female and six male fishers were released from their crates by children, something that has become a tradition during the course of this project. As these young people opened each box, a dark furry torpedo erupted and quickly disappeared into the dense forest. They were definitely not posing for photos. All the while, Tribal members welcomed the animals home with drumming and singing.

While I am sure the event was stressful for the animals, it was an opportunity for the public, and especially children, to become engaged with wildness. I am positive that this lesson will remain with those youngsters throughout their lives. I will certainly remember it. The value of an individual species is impossible to quantify, but we are poorer for every one that slips away. It is so heartening to see people work together to make things better. Wolves are returning to the southern Cascades, and who knows, maybe grizzly bears and wolverines will follow. The return of fishers is a great place to start. I hope that we’ll start seeing signs of these creatures throughout the region, maybe even on nearby Land Trust property in the future.

by Charly Kearns | November 2016

For the past three years, we’ve had the chance to partner with Joint Base Lewis-McChord on their October Day of Service. This program matches groups of volunteers from JBLM with nonprofit organizations in the community.

From a land stewardship perspective, it is hard to top a group of 25-30 young men and women who have been through basic training! Every time that we host this event, I am amazed at the energy, respect, and efficiency shown by the volunteers – this year was no different.

We spent the day at the Land Trust’s newest property in Yelm, a ten acre Nisqually River shoreline property. I had a long list of tasks identified, including: removal of several small, dilapidated sheds; invasive plant control, and fence installation. I was sure that would keep us busy for the day.  After providing an introduction to the site and overview of the day’s activities, I turned the group loose. It was all I could do to keep up with giving out new assignments as tasks were completed – I hardly had time to pick up a hammer or pry bar!

By lunch time, two sheds were on the ground, with salvageable materials separated from the trash, and all the nails removed. Another group had cleared all the Scotch broom on the property, and had put a big dent in the blackberry population. My biggest challenge for the day was harnessing all that energy and not run out of things to do!

As our initial task list neared completion, I ran back to our plant nursery and grabbed some salvaged Douglas fir seedlings. By the end of the afternoon, the entire site that had been cleared was also filled with baby trees. This was one of those days on the land that I like the most. It isn’t often one gets the chance to watch a site transformed so quickly. To see the result of hard work change the future of even a tiny piece of the planet is so rewarding.

Many thanks to this group for all their service, both on duty and off!