Tag Archives: salmon stream

25 Aug

I have not been blasted

I am back from the trip to blow up culverts. We went 1200 feet away from all the explosives before setting them off, so I have all my limbs and digits, but no exciting explosion pictures. That’s okay, because I like all my limbs and digits as they are, i.e. attached to me.

Cappy the Blasting Bear

Here’s Cappy the Blasting Bear. He’s made out of used shot cord, which attaches to detonating cord which attaches to the actual bombs and explody bits. The shot cord makes up most of the 1200 feet separating people from the blasts, so there’s lots of it left over for art projects.

I’m leaving tomorrow morning for Prince of Wales, where I’ll be for about 36 hours, I’ll update more after that trip.

20 Jul

Scientific Translation

I’m working on a briefing sheet about a stream restoration project. Why am I getting paid to do this when the Forest Service already has briefing sheets on these projects?

Well, the briefing sheet on this particular watershed describes it thus:

Watershed condition indicators reflect concern for long term health and function of Aquatic Habitat and Riparian Vegetation. A high percentage of riparian area associated with alluvial wood-dependent channels has been harvested or roaded. Two condition indicators addressing In-stream Large Wood and Channel Shape/Function rate in the Class 3 range. Riparian Vegetation indicator also rates Class 3, due to historic riparian harvest level of 30%. The watershed hydrologic and fish habitat integrity is at risk due to high percentage (77%) of roads proximal to streams, which resulted in a Class 3 rating for this indicator.

Have you got all that?

After reading this and a few other source documents, I got down to business and wrote a few different chunks of text, including a timeline for work in the watershed, and sent it around to get feedback.

Let’s look at an example from the timeline.

I wrote:

Landslides change the course of Fubar Creek and cut off spawning grounds

After comments from a nonprofit partner, I changed it to:

Landslides from clearcut slopes change the course of Fubar Creek and cut off spawning grounds

And I’ve just received the suggestion from a Forest Service scientist to change it to

Numerous landslides aggraded Fubar Creek and the high volume of gravel sediments caused the stream to find an alternate route beneath the Hydaburg highway, essentially cutting off traditional fish spawning habitat.

Many scientists are able to communicate clearly with the general public, but there are enough who haven’t got the time or inclination to develop the skills to explain their work to people outside their own field. And then you need to hire people like me to translate from Science to General Public.

Also, bonus points if you can use “aggrade” in a sentence, besides the one above.

08 Jul

Restoration work: red alders



This week I spent some more time in the field, this time helping watching some folks put trees, a.k.a. large woody debris, into a stream. This makes for good habitat for baby salmon. Although it involved a lot of tromping around in the rain and a lot of no-see-ums who wanted to chew on me, it was fun because I had the right gear to be waterproof and I got to see what is involved in the restoration process.

All the trees added to the stream were red alders, a quick growing tree that takes advantage of disturbed ground in places where there were logging roads, or river bottoms that large logs were dragged through.

Red alders are tall and have white bark, and if I went by the minimal tree knowledge I had coming into this job with the Forest Service (where I have learned much about salmon, and a little about trees) I would have tried to tell you that they were birch trees.

However, once they cut a few red alders down and dragged them around, scraping off the bark, it became obvious that the inner layer of the bark is the color of a nosebleed, hence the “red” of red alder. And I don’t think you see that in a birch…


I thought it was pretty, so I took a bunch of pictures of it. In fact, I was photographing some scraped bark when they started calling my name, and suggested I leave when everyone else was walking off, so as not to leave me alone in bear country.

For the record, there was a bear spotted, but it ran off the trail before anyone but one guy saw it. I saw the tracks, but they weren’t super big.