NWIFC News reported about the project in our spring magazine:

The Upper Skagit Tribe has partnered with Bonneville Power Administration and timber company Sierra Pacific to enhance elk habitat on 20 acres near the tribe’s reservation in Sedro-Woolley.

In October, the tribe hydroseeded the area with grass and clover. Continued work includes planting native shrubs and hand-seeding places where the hydroseed doesn’t take.

The $10,000 project is part of tribal and state efforts to recover the Nooksack elk herd, which had declined in population from more than 1,700 to about 300 by 2003. The herd has rebounded to about 700 animals.

“By providing nutritious forage opportunities, we hope to allow the Nooksack herd to grow without causing a problem for nearby landowners,” said Scott Schuyler, the tribe’s natural resources director.

Area landowners have complained that elk that move into the Skagit Valley bottom lands during the winter trample fields, knock down fences, damage crops and create traffic hazards on area roads and highways.

“These elk have to go somewhere to feed,” Schuyler said. “We hope this enhanced habitat will keep them in the forest lands and away from the populated areas.”

The tribe uses beach seines to monitor marine populations throughout southern Puget Sound. You can read an article about the tribe’s nearshore research efforts in our Fall 2008 edition of our magazine.

Read more about the Smuggler’s Slough restoration.

First, Chair Cynthia Iyall:

Natural resources director David Troutt:

Here are some links on the overall restoration project:
Nisqually Delta Restoration
Turning the tide after 100 years: restoring the Nisqually Delta
The Olympian: Water flows again at Nisqually estuary
Being Frank: A Tribute To Kenny Braget
NWIFC Blog: “Welcoming the Tides” to Nisqually coverage

The tribe is working with WildLands and S & K Environmental Restoration, a division of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, which developed the rotary stinger to plant trees more efficiently than traditional methods.

View a demonstration of the rotary stinger below.

The tree planting is part of a project that began last summer to restore 140 acres of salmon habitat around Hansen Creek, a tributary to the Skagit River near the Upper Skagit Tribe’s reservation.

The restored freshwater floodplain habitat will develop 53 acres of river delta and 87 acres of forested wetlands in the Skagit County-owned Northern State Recreation Area.

The past 60 years of dredging and levee maintenance has degraded spawning habitat and interfered with natural stream processes. “We have all six species of salmon in the Skagit watershed,” said Scott Schuyler, the tribe’s natural resources director. “Hansen Creek supports chinook, steelhead, coho, chum and pink salmon, but it has been straightened, narrowed and disconnected from its floodplain fan and wetlands.”

The Upper Skagit Tribe is removing parts of the levee and building log jams that will restore natural sediment movement and improve salmon habitat. The project will restore nearly 2 miles of side channel habitat, as well as hundreds of feet of mainstem habitat to support fish productivity.

The tribe is partnering with Skagit County and several federal and state agencies. The restoration is expected to cost more than $2.6 million. In June, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) American Recovery and Reinvestment Act awarded nearly $1 million to the project. Last spring, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency awarded $105,000 to the project through Puget Sound Partnership funding.

“I think this restoration project is an excellent example of the tribe’s spirit for action, your ability to leverage resources and to create partnerships,” said Michelle Pirzadeh, EPA’s Acting Regional Administrator in Seattle. “The tribes have a long history of demonstrating their ability to care for natural resources in a way that’s sustainable and we can learn a lot from them.”

Other funding partners include National Association of Counties – Coastal Initiative funds, Washington State Centennial Clean Water and Salmon Recovery Funding Board funds, in addition to matching contributions from Skagit County.

The fragmentation of habitat in Puget Sound has resulted in the loss of freshwater wetlands important to salmon survival. The Hansen Creek restoration is an important part of the salmon recovery effort. Puget Sound chinook and steelhead are listed as “threatened” under the federal Endangered Species Act, and Skagit coho are listed by the state Department of Fish and Wildlife as a species of concern.

“Salmon habitat has suffered centuries of abuse,” said Billy Frank Jr., chairman of the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission. “The tribes are undoing that damage one step at a time. We all have to work together to get Puget Sound healthy again.”

For more information, contact: Lauren Rich, environmental planner, Upper Skagit Tribe, 360-854-7006 or LaurenR@upperskagit.com; Kari Neumeyer, information officer, Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, 360-424-8226 or kneumeyer@nwifc.org.

The tribe monitors both species in watershed and is pointing to increased numbers of both, mostly likely because of a big pink run two years ago:

A record number of adult bull trout and juvenile steelhead migrated through the Puyallup River watershed this year, boosted by nutrients from a massive run of pink salmon two years ago.

“There was simply more food in the system in the last couple of years because decaying pink salmon carcasses fed practically every sort of organism in the river,” said Russ Ladley, resource protection manager for the Puyallup Tribe. “This shows that salmon restoration doesn’t just benefit one species, because all of the species in the river are interconnected.”

Here are some recent videos of migrating pinks in the White River system:

Further up the river in the Greenwater River, a tributary to the White:

See this page to download and share this video.

Following record high temperatures this summer across western Washington, Tulalip tribal biologists noticed that chinook salmon weren’t making it all the way to Wallace River, a tributary to the Skykomish River.

The hot, dry weather likely contributed to poor returns in a couple of ways. Water temperatures were too warm and a lack of rainfall reduced water levels and flow.

The Tulalip Tribes and the state share the eggs collected at the state’s Wallace River Hatchery, but this year’s returns were far below normal. Most years, the tribe gets about 2.4 million chinook salmon eggs for its hatchery program. In the event of a shortfall, the state gets the first million eggs, the tribe gets the next 800,000, and then the remaining eggs are split evenly.

While it is still too early to tell exactly how low the run will be this year, a model used by the tribe predicted that the total egg take would be under 2 million and as low as 1.4 million, which could have left the tribe with as little as only 400,000 eggs.

Action had to be taken to make sure enough salmon return four years from now. Both the tribe and the state closed their fisheries, and the tribe opened its fish ladder in Tulalip Bay to catch the adult chinook that were failing to swim upriver.

Update (Sept. 28): The tribe collected 530 chinook in Tulalip Bay and held them at the tribe’s Bernie Kai Kai Gobin Salmon Hatchery until they were ready to spawn. The state and the tribes also worked together to capture an additional 530 fish below the hatchery on Wallace River. In September, the tribe spawned hundreds of the fish and expects to be able to fertilize more than 1.3 million eggs this year.

Returning tidal flow to former estuaries is an important step toward restoring salmon habitat. Puget Sound chinook salmon are listed as “threatened” under the federal Endangered Species Act.

On Wednesday, Aug. 19, an excavator made the final berm cut to allow full tidal flow to 200 acres of the Crescent Harbor salt marsh on Naval Air Station Whidbey Island for the first time in about 100 years.

The salt marsh had been cut off from fish access, with a minimal tidal exchange through a tide gate built in the 1900s.

Representatives from the SRSC, which is the natural resources management arm of the Swinomish and Sauk-Suiattle tribes, joined U.S. Naval officials at NAS Whidbey Island to watch the tide reconnect with the existing narrow channel.

“Our ancestors walked this earth right here before there were any non-Indians,” said Brian Cladoosby, chairman of the Swinomish Tribe. “They lived out here when all of this was marsh land, so to have the tidal flow reintroduced is really amazing.”

The SRSC partnered with the Navy in 2007, to fund and design the restoration, acquiring grants from the Estuary and Salmon Restoration Program and Salmon Recovery Funding Board. The Whidbey Island Conservation District assisted with engineering.

Marking the success of another project, on Tuesday, Aug. 18, crews removed the last of the old dikes and levees that prevented the tide from flowing into a former estuary around Wiley Slough in the Skagit River delta.

The state-owned parcel of land, known as the Headquarters Unit of the Skagit Wildlife Area, was converted from an estuary to a recreational area in 1962 – using dikes, drainage ditches, culverts and tide gates.

The 175-acre Wiley Slough restoration was proposed in 2002. It was completed in partnership with the tribes, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW), Seattle City Light and the conservation group Skagit Watershed Council, with funding from the state Salmon Recovery Funding Board, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, NOAA Restoration Center and the Estuary and Salmon Restoration Program.

For more information, contact: Steve Hinton, director of restoration, Skagit River System Cooperative, 360-466-7228 or shinton@skagitcoop.org; Kari Neumeyer, information officer, Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, 360-424-8226 or kneumeyer@nwifc.org.

For two weeks, canoe families from all over western Washington and British Columbia traveled on their ancestral highways, arriving on the shores of Suquamish Aug. 3 for another week of celebration of their culture. The purpose of the journey is to practice their traditional ways of life, as well as pass these lessons on to younger generations. The work of the older generation is catching on – many of the canoes were filled with young tribal members.

This year also marked the 20th anniversary of “Paddle To Seattle,” when several U.S. tribes and Canadian first nations traveled to Suquamish to sing, dance and share stories before paddling to Seattle. It was then that canoe families were challenged to travel to Bella Bella, B.C., in 1993.

Since then, tribal journeys have taken place annually at various sites throughout the Northwest. For more information, go to www.tribaljourneys2009.com.

Photos can be viewed at our site on Flickr. Video can be viewed here.

Daniel Kuntz, the tribe’s beach manager, explains the process of digging, counting and measuring the clams each month.

Herman Dillon Jr., the tribe’s fisheries commission chairman, talks about the various drifts that tribal fishermen use in the fishery.

Tribal fisherman Mark Bridges shows off a dangerous piece of trash that was wrapped up in his net earlier in the day.