View our latest posts: From the Field

The salmon days aren’t over

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To help me reflect on my time here at the Skagit Fisheries Enhancement Group, I looked back at my timecards for the last 10 months.  Planting parties, nursery maintenance, spawner surveys, grant writing, Earth Day planning, conferences, teaching, planting database management, potting parties, culvert surveys, vegetation monitoring, the list goes on and on and on.  I have had the opportunity to do SO MUCH during my service term and I am so grateful for every minute of it.

As a northern Californian, I knew nothing about the Skagit River watershed when I began my term in September.  I knew nothing about the immensely beautiful places that I would get to work in or the passionate people I would meet who dedicate their careers or their Saturdays to restoring the critically important salmon runs that call this watershed home.  Whether I was walking through Ennis Creek on a spawner survey with coho whipping through riffles around my boots, or watching flocks of snow geese fly above me as I worked at our native plant nursery, or driving out highway 20 to project sites in the fall under the brilliant oranges and reds of the deciduous tree leaves, or even planting willow stakes in the middle of a snow storm, I have fallen in love with this watershed.

This position with SFEG has taught me so much and confirmed my desire to pursue salmon habitat restoration as a career.  Going forward, I would like to get my graduate degree with a masters thesis focusing on restoration efforts in the Skagit.  In the past week or so, I have been reaching out to fisheries scientists who work in the watershed to identify unanswered research questions to help us better understand the effectiveness of restoration strategies and the specific life histories and habitat requirements of our Pacific salmon.  In the meantime before graduate school, who knows what I’ll be doing. What I do know is that I love working in the fisheries field and my term with SFEG has been a transformative experience that I wouldn’t trade for the world! Thank you!

Whale, it’s o-fish-ally over!

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The last 10 months have been filled with demanding and inspirational experiences including but not limited to teaching over 1,100 students, handling dead (and living) salmon and other creatures with said students, designing new outreach materials and activities, and identifying my next pursuit in life. And it’s that last experience that will stick with me long after I’ve left Skagit Fisheries Enhancement Group. 

While engaging children and adults alike this year, I have reaffirmed my love for learning and educating. There’s something addictive about all the new things we discover about our universe and the feeling only gets more addicting as you can share these discoveries with others so the knowledge multiplies again and again.  Nothing is as satisfying as the “a-ha!” moments on people’s faces when they make connections or experience something amazing. I love that feeling and want to be familiar with it always.

As a second-term AmeriCorps volunteer, I am so appreciative that Skagit Fisheries Enhancement Group provides others like me the opportunity to get dirty, get involved, and get educated. I am planning on going back to school to finish my bachelor’s degree and work towards a Middle School Science teaching accreditation. I’ve been “the Salmon Lady” for the last two years and maybe in the future, I’ll use the other nickname I was given this year, Ms. V. 

Thank you to my students. Thank you to all the teachers I’ve worked with. Thank you to this amazing salmon community. 

Thank you thank you thank you, 

Ms. V the Salmon Lady

A Glimpse into the Corps Experience

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by Tessa Marie

The Washington Conservation Corps has given us a unique opportunity to make an impact for our local streams and wetlands. We work together with Skagit Fisheries to plant trees, remove invasive species, and work on a variety of construction projects aimed at improving our environment for future generations.

There have been some surprising lessons along the way. For example, I never knew of a planting technique called live staking. To live stake, we cut off a limb of a mature cottonwood or willow tree and stick it about a food deep directly into the ground. Doing this in the winter months allows the dormant limb to focus all of its energy into growing roots and then presto! It becomes a new tree! I had no idea that starting a baby forest could be so easy.

Going into WCC, I also had no idea how much work goes into prepping planting sites, let alone the actual planting process. At a site known as Marietta Creek, we spent several weeks in October building about one mile of fence through a cow pasture to keep the animals away from the stream. We returned for several more weeks in December to transport 4,099 potted plants and stage them in our planting area.  We rented a UTV to help us transport plants across the pasture, and also crammed hundreds of plants into a Skagit Fisheries truck and trailer.

Our restoration crew coordinator Joe pulled up to the fence and hopped into the trailer filled with spruces in 2-gallon pots. He picked one up, turned toward my colleague Nathan, and asked, “Are you ready?” Nathan readied his stance. Joe tossed the pot into the air, over the fence, and into Nathans’ arms. I watched in awe, “You’re kidding right?” No, no they weren’t kidding. That’s an actual spruce flying through the air. Nathan set the spruce down just in time to catch the next one that Joe flung towards him. Once I took a moment, watched a few more tosses to reconcile my disbelief, I got ready. Joe pivoted towards me and tossed me a spruce. Next thing you know, Joe is hurling spruce after spruce over the fence with precision, giving Nathan and I just enough time to set it down and get ready for the next plant. That was an exciting and efficient offload! I was completely out of breath by the time we had the trailer emptied. I will probably always chuckle to myself when I think back on this project.

I am one of six members of a Washington Conservation Corps crew based in Mt. Vernon. We work with Skagit Fisheries Enhancement Group to restore habitat near streams that feed into the Skagit and the Sauk River. In the fall we focused on construction projects and some site maintenance to prepare for the planting season in the winter. Now that it’s springtime we are focusing mostly on invasive species removal with brush cutters. Before this position, I had no experience with power tools and very little planting and construction experience. I feel super empowered to be able to run a brush cutter, chainsaw, a drill and other construction tools. It is extremely rewarding to know that our projects are a result of our hands and our pure hard work.