Restoring Creeks Is Key to Survival of Salmon : Environment: Logjams that trapped floating leaves and twigs created a complex habitat that has been radically altered by human activities.

Charlie Dewberry used to hate to come to Knowles Creek.

A century of Paul Bunyan-style logging had practically wiped out the salmon and steelhead that had survived for 10,000 years in the Northwest.

Now he is all smiles as he shows off the way he has tossed huge logs and root wads in the water to create pools, capture floating leaves and twigs, and restore the web of life in this Coast Range tributary of the Siuslaw River.

“You want it to get messy like this,” said Dewberry, stream ecologist for the Pacific Rivers Council, an environmental group dedicated to restoring the dwindling salmon runs of the Northwest. “You want it complex with stuff sticking out all over the place.”

In recent years, fishing authorities have steadily cut back ocean fishing in a vain attempt to stem the decline of salmon runs.

But the future of coho, chinook and steelhead runs depends on what is happening in little creeks like this.

Salmon, steelhead and cutthroat trout are known as anadromous fish. That means they are born and start growing up in freshwater, migrate to the ocean to mature, then return to their native streams to spawn.

In recent years, natural cycles have made life tough on salmon in the ocean. Meanwhile, freshwater habitat has been severely damaged by dams, heavy logging, agriculture, drought, urban development and pollution.

Since no one can do anything to change the cycles of the ocean, the people fighting for the survival of salmon in the Northwest are focusing on getting back to nature in the forests where the cycle begins.

“Any of the stuff we do is just a Band-Aid until that is a 200-year-old tree,” Dewberry said, pointing to a cedar seedling. “That is what it is going to take to restore the streams. All we are doing is we’re just buying time.”

The Siuslaw River once produced enough salmon to keep three canneries busy in Florence. In the 1890s, scientists estimate, the annual run was 218,000 fish. That’s nearly as much as the entire commercial catch from the Columbia River to Mexico last year. Knowles Creek contributes about 120 adult fish.

The American Fisheries Society has identified 214 runs of salmon, steelhead and cutthroat trout in the West that are in danger of extinction.

“The most pervasive factor causing these declines is habitat damage caused by human activities,” said Willa Nehlsen, lead author of the report.

Over the past 100 years, Knowles Creek has seen everything bad that can happen to a stream.

Before the turn of the century, loggers floated timber to the mills by building splash dams. When the dams were dynamited, the torrent of logs and water scoured the life out of the creek.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the Forest Service and Oregon Department of Forestry ordered loggers to yard out--or haul out--the logs that fell into the water under the misguided notion that logjams were roadblocks to spawning fish.

Under the Oregon Forest Practices Act, logging has been allowed to come within several yards of the river’s bank, leaving up-slope soils prone to erosion and removing trees that would otherwise fall into the creek to make new logjams.

Knowles Creek flows through lands managed by the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and The Campbell Group, a private timberland manager. They have joined in partnership with Pacific Rivers Council to restore the creek at a time when these parties are often in conflict.

“We are going to be as environmentally aware as we can,” said John Rollin, southwest Oregon manager for The Campbell Group. “We think the only way these (environmental) issues are going to be resolved is through partnership.”

The idea of restoring fish habitat is not new, but efforts in the past 10 years have failed more often than not, said Jack Williams, former head of fisheries for BLM and now science adviser to the BLM director.

Neatly mitred logs and square wire cages filled with rocks were tied into creek beds with cables, making them look more like Japanese gardens than salmon streams. Storms washed them out. Unable to float up with the rising water, they couldn’t trap the leaves and twigs vital to the food web.

Dewberry has gone back to the journals of Hudson’s Bay Co. trappers to learn what salmon streams used to look like. The MacLeod party in 1826 turned back on the Siuslaw after hitting a logjam that stretched clear across the valley and more than a mile upstream.

“The channels used to be very complex and braided,” Dewberry said. “The organic material that was stored in flood plains, ponds and pools wouldn’t go very far. Once the logjams are removed, the stream forms one channel that downcuts to bedrock.”

The leaves, twigs and carcasses of spawned-out salmon are part of the food web. Without logjams, they wash out to sea with the first storms of fall. The rising waters from melting snows in spring wash out the young fry before they are ready.

There is no way Dewberry can restore the vast logjams that Hudson’s Bay trappers saw, but he hopes to string together enough beads to make a necklace.

On a larger scale, the Pacific Rivers Council is proposing a comprehensive program of protecting the best remaining freshwater habitat in the Northwest and restoring key watersheds.

Pacific Rivers Director Bob Doppelt recently joined Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt for a box lunch on a bridge over a creek flowing out of the Cascade Range.

Competing with the roar of rushing water, Doppelt made a plea for Congress to appropriate $30 million for initial work to assess the state of watersheds on public lands and start a few restoration projects sitting on the shelf in Forest Service offices.

Over the next 10 years, he figures it will take $644 million to finish the job.

“If we don’t do it here, it will not happen,” Doppelt said.