Tulalip

Read more about the article Beavers relocated to improve salmon habitat

Beavers relocated to improve salmon habitat

Beaver familyThis summer, raceways at the Tulalip Tribes’ Bernie Kai-Kai Gobin Hatchery were renovated into temporary beaver condominiums.

Six beavers nestled together in a furry cluster in one of the manmade lodges, confirming wildlife biologists’ suspicions that this was a family unit. Tribal staff, along with biologists from the University of Washington (UW), had captured the beaver colony in Duvall, where they were flooding a blueberry farm.

“The mother beaver is more than 50 pounds,” said Jason Schilling, wildlife biologist for the Tulalip Tribes. “And there’s one kit that’s about the size of a football and pretty cute.”

The beavers were pioneers of the Skykomish Beaver Project, a partnership among Tulalip, UW, U.S. Forest Service and other agencies. The project is relocating certain beavers from the Snohomish lowlands, in places where they are considered a nuisance, to public land in the Skykomish River system.

Beavers are nature’s wetland engineers, instinctively building dams, lodges and underwater passages to store food and protect themselves from predators. In doing so, they create reservoirs of cool water that salmon need to survive, but sometimes their industriousness interferes with human development. (more…)

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Tribes partner to survey forestlands with LIDAR

An aerial photo is compared with a LIDAR model
An aerial photo (above) is compared with the LIDAR model.

The Stillaguamish and Tulalip tribes have partnered with the state Department of Natural Resources and three private timber companies to map forestlands in the Stillaguamish and Skykomish basins.

LIDAR, which stands for Light Distance and Ranging, uses an airborne laser to survey topography.

“The laser pulses from the plane are reflected back to record billions of points of light that measure elevation,” said Derek Marks, Timber/Fish/Wildlife biologist for Tulalip.

Elevation data was collected on working forestlands and a large area of Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. The result is a high-resolution model that enables natural resources managers to identify resources and potential risks, such as landslides.

“We can save many hours with high-resolution models,” Marks said. “We don’t have to walk the hillside; a forester would have to traverse the area to know where the streams are.”

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Tribes study chinook use of small coastal streams

Hibulb
Todd Zackey electrofishes Hibulb Creek to determine whether there are juvenile chinook using the small coastal stream.

The Tulalip Tribes and Skagit River System Cooperative (SRSC) recently completed a six-year study of juvenile chinook salmon use of small coastal streams in the Whidbey basin.

“Small coastal streams are often overlooked as potential salmon habitat because many flow seasonally and do not provide spawning habitat,” said Todd Zackey, the marine and nearshore program manager for Tulalip who obtained grant funding for the research. Derek Marks, Timber/Fish/Wildlife manager for Tulalip, was an additional principal investigator on the research.

The researchers electrofished 63 streams in the Whidbey basin and found juvenile chinook using more than half of them. The migrant fry originated from the three nearby rivers: Skagit, Snohomish and Stillaguamish.

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Marine survival research focuses on juvenile salmon, preferred prey

Nisqually tribal staff seine for juvenile fish in the Nisqually estuary.
Nisqually tribal staff seine for out-migrating chinook in the Nisqually estuary. Beach seining for juvenile salmon is one of the ways fisheries managers plan to research marine survival rates.

Fisheries managers studying poor ocean survival of salmon are concentrating their research on juvenile fish and their preferred prey.

Several tribes are collaborating on studies slated to begin in 2014 as part of the Salish Sea Marine Survival Project. The Tulalip, Nisqually, Port Gamble S’Klallam, Lummi, Swinomish and Sauk-Suiattle tribes are among the collaborators that have signed on to sample zooplankton throughout the region.

Zooplankton and ichthyoplankton are the preferred prey for juvenile salmon. Researchers want to find out whether prey availability has changed in the Salish Sea during the critical period of juvenile salmon development, leading to poor growth and survival. (more…)

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Tulalip Tribes turn “gulch” into Greenwood Creek

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Tulalip biologist Brett Shattuck strolls along the recently restored, and named, Greenwood Creek.

The Tulalip Tribes recently improved rearing habitat in a small coastal stream popular with juvenile chinook.

Known to locals as “the gulch,” the unnamed stream had one of the highest densities of juvenile chinook of all the coastal streams sampled in the Whidbey basin by the Tulalip Tribes and Skagit River System Cooperative. During one electrofishing survey, natural resources staff found 280 chinook among a total of 600 juvenile salmon that also included coho and other species.

“They can live there for many weeks, so it’s more than just acclimating,” said Derek Marks, Timber Fish and Wildlife manager for Tulalip. “They’re actually rearing and growing in there.”

Despite those numbers, the tribes saw room for improvement. At the time, the gulch was little more than a ditch overgrown with invasive plants. Old county stormwater assessments referred to it as Greenwood Creek, probably named for a nearby grange.

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Tribes sample elk DNA to track population

Wildlife biologists from Stillaguamish, Tulalip and Western Washington University sample DNA from elk scat.
Wildlife biologists from Stillaguamish, Tulalip and Western Washington University sample DNA from elk scat.

Wildlife biologists from the Stillaguamish and Tulalip tribes are testing a new way to track the population of the Nooksack elk herd using the animals’ scat.

Tribal biologists have partnered with Western Washington University’s Huxley College of the Environment to determine the most efficient way to collect DNA from elk scat. Genetic material can be found in the intestinal mucus coating the pellets. This winter, biologists sampled fresh scat using toothpicks and cotton swabs, submitting the samples to a genetics lab to determine which method is most effective at providing an animal’s unique genotype.

“This is a non-invasive method that does not require collaring animals or helicopter time to survey them,” said Stillaguamish biologist Jennifer Sevigny. (more…)

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