Riparian recovery

Whether they’re dropped, pushed or pulled, the placement of logs in streams has become a human endeavor until nature can reclaim the fish habitat building-block process.

The tradeoff is temporary, but it may take a while. Riparian areas along creeks and streams have vastly recovered from logging’s rollicking heyday — especially the carefree days of the first half of the 20th century. But the growing trees are still decades away from their weight sending them lumbering into stream channels.

In the meantime, fish, wildlife and habitat management officials will mimic nature by overseeing the placement of logs in streams. The practice, they said, may take nature 100 to 150 years to duplicate since getting hit hard by logging before environmental rules and regulations were put in place.

“To the fish, it’s a beautiful thing,” said Craig Street, the Umpqua National Forest’s Diamond Lake Ranger District fisheries biologist, while standing atop a large-diameter tree pulled into Copeland Creek recently.

Copeland Creek, whose confluence with the North Umpqua River is just east of Eagle Rock campground, has had more than 100 logs placed in it to improve salmon, steelhead and cutthroat trout habitat.

Logs and other bulky obstacles — like boulders — dissipate stream energy. Rocks and pebbles settle in the slower moving water instead of being washed away.

Eventually the collection spreads evenly as a potential bed of gravel for fish to spawn in.

The logs also collect debris and form cover for juvenile fish to hide under from predators. At the same time, they shield sunlight from water and keep streams cool.

Street said juvenile fish react to newly placed logs immediately. Within 10 minutes, smolt and fry clamor under the logs to take a break from the swift-moving current.

The gravel build-up gives spawning fish more options for sweeping redds with their tails.

“It’ll be nothing to come here next year and see a big gravel bar there,” said Mark Villers, the Copeland Creek project’s contractor and owner of Blue Ridge Timber Cutting Inc. of Coos Bay.

PULLING TREES IN

The practice of placing logs in streams is not a new concept. But the idea of pulling existing trees on stream banks into stream channels is not so commonplace.

This summer’s Copeland Creek in-stream project — comprised of 50 pre-cut logs, 36 felled trees and 23 pulled trees — is the first on the Umpqua forest to use the tree-pulling concept.

Street said only trees on the north side of the creek’s meanderings — which never provide shade to the creek — were selected.

“We labored over which trees to select, extensively,” said Rob Burns, a fisheries biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service based in Roseburg.

Villers, who calls himself a “logging environmentalist,” said when a tree is pulled correctly, it appears as if it were pushed by strong wind or heavy snow.

With a rig mounted with a specially built winch, Villers positions his tree-pulling machinery on Copeland Creek’s nearby road. He zig-zags steel cable around impeding trees and objects with a system of pulleys to the tree marked for the stream channel. Then he sets a choker and gets ready to pull.

The result is a large tree in the stream with its base anchored by a root system.

Villers, who’s been doing this kind of work for 11 years, pulled four to five trees at five different sites in Copeland Creek.

“It becomes a key piece in the log jam we’re trying to create in the system,” Burns said of each tree.

Street said Copeland Creek’s riparian system is “by-and-large very well-stocked” and can afford to lose a couple dozen trees if they benefit fish.

The biologists and contractor said pulling trees is more natural and reliable than placing logs in streams and anchoring them to boulders with steel reinforcings that eventually rust.

“Our expectations are that these trees are going to remain stable and build up a substrate,” Street said.

Villers said the work, however, has its skeptics.

“I’ve had guys say ‘It’s all ocean and this doesn’t matter for nothing,’” he said of the in-stream work and benefits.

Yet the man who wears a T-shirt inscribed with the words “Rootwads Rule” on the front is quick to argue that it’s creeks and streams where the “seeds” of the ocean are placed.

Villers points to this year’s delisting of coastal coho salmon from the endangered species list as a result of in-stream habitat work.

Others like Burns will argue there are too many variables in the ocean to consider that coho runs improved only because of in-stream habitat work, but he feels it is extremely important, otherwise he wouldn’t put so much emphasis on it.

BY AIR

Where streams are isolated away from the conveniences of a road system, in-stream habitat work gets a little spendy.

At Paradise Creek, eight miles west of Elkton, the bulk of a massive in-stream project was recently performed by helicopter at $4,700 per hour.

From landing decks atop ridges that form the gulch of upper Paradise Creek, a Chinook helicopter hitched logs for transport. Down below, it placed them in the stream often one at a time, taking about 15 minutes for each round trip.

“All of the work accessible with ground equipment has been put in,” explained Phil Adams, a district forester for Roseburg Forest Products, whose private timberland is checkerboarded around Paradise Creek with Bureau of Land Management land of the Coos Bay district.

Of the project’s 600 logs, RFP had donated 250 and the rest were provided by BLM.

Over three days of helicopter work, 350 logs were placed in Paradise Creek.

Crews also placed 400 boulders in the creek with the logs in areas where the 14-mile project was accessible with ground equipment.

In coming months, Villers and his crew will pull trees into Paradise Creek.

Bill Arsenault, a rancher whose acreage drains into Paradise Creek, supported the work and allowed much of the helicopter maintenance work to be performed on his land.

“We’re very supportive, obviously,” Arsenault said, adding that he’s fenced his cattle away from the creek and has planted conifers alongside it for “future large wood.”

Arsenault — who’s owned his chunk of 360 acres since 1971 — said he’s seen the creek and its fishery improve over the decades.

“You can see where the juveniles are, and they’re in these conditions we’re trying to create,” Arsenault said.

He remembers when buffer zones for riparian areas were non-existent and logging to the edge of streams took its toll.

“Clearly, older logging practices were a factor” for low fish counts, Arsenault said.

DIFFERENT TIME

Arsenault also remembers when in-stream habitat work of the 1960s and 1970s meant taking logs out of streams.

Log jams were thought to be fish obstacles that could sometimes impede migration completely.

Fish biologists are reluctant to harken the days of faulty habitat work.

“We thought we were doing the right thing, but we weren’t,” said Burns at Copeland Creek.

Stan Gregory, a fisheries and wildlife professor at Oregon State University, said the belief that habitat work 40 years ago meant taking every piece of wood out of the streams isn’t quite accurate.

Gregory said logging rules and regulations required logging slash to be removed from streams — with some cases probably getting carried away.

However, Gregory is quick to admit the old logging practice of starting operations on streams and then moving uphill came with many consequences.

“The streams were a mess,” he said.

Arsenault said he can remember a bulldozer removing wood from Paradise Creek not long after he had settled on his spread.

“It’s a good change” since then, he said.

Gregory said today’s in-stream habitat work is good for immediate responses, but it will take long-term riparian restoration for Oregon’s creeks and streams to return to normalcy.

“That may take a lot longer,” he said.

• You can reach reporter Adam Pearson at 957-4213 or by e-mail at apearson@newsreview.info.