Posts tagged: battle creek

The Underground’s Crazy of the Day: Battle Creek Restoration

June 22, 2011, by 3 comments

Your mother probably taught you it wasn’t smart to put on clean clothes before you played in mud puddles, but the state of California is doing exactly that on the Battle Creek restoration project (from the Sacramento Bee’s uber-enviro writer Matt Weiser):

Here at Battle Creek, an icy stream that tumbles off Mount Lassen, state and federal agencies are spending $128 million to bring endangered salmon back to 48 miles of water blocked by dams for nearly a century.

At the same time, another arm of state government is allowing clear-cut logging on thousands of acres just upstream, which some scientists say could jeopardize the costly restoration project.

It gets worse once you read that Sierra Pacific isn’t just logging, they’re clear-cutting:

Sierra Pacific uses a technique called “even-age management,” the California regulatory term for clear-cutting. The goal is to convert a large percentage of its acreage, essentially, to pine plantations.

Sierra Pacific has submitted 16 logging plans over the past 12 years for almost 20,000 acres in the Battle Creek watershed.

In a typical even-age logging plan, all vegetation is removed from multiple 20-acre parcels, leaving a checkerboard pattern of bare ground that may span 1,000 acres or more. One or two oaks and standing dead trees are usually left as “habitat diversity.”

Then each parcel is replanted with pine seedlings. Herbicides are sprayed to eliminate competing vegetation before planting.

The forest service land just up my road contains several “plantations” which — if you ski it in the winter and look at the animal tracks — supports a lot fewer animals than the wild stuff.

Because Sierra Pacific is just so damned concerned with the well-being of salmon in Battle Creek, they strong-armed a local conservancy nonprofit (they sit on the board) to not include a 2004 report which said that upwards of half the streams in the watershed were already compromised by excessive sediment.

Of course, Sierra Pacific has also said they’re cutting as much as they can as fast as they can now because the regulatory climate will only get tighter.

Lovely.

They’re helping to create the disasters that will eventually force the regulations they’ll then attack as being unfair.

See you on Battle Creek, Tom Chandler.

Massive Salmon Found (Dead) in Lower Sacramento’s Battle Creek

November 6, 2008, by 3 comments

The collapse of the West Coast’s salmon fisheries isn’t exactly a secret, though every once in a while, something pops up to remind you of what’s been lost (and what could exist again if the fishery was better protected). In a tributary of the Lower Sacramento River, biologists found a dead salmon that probably weighed 90 pounds:


(California Dept of Fish & Game photo)

Measuring in at 51 inches – 4 1/4 feet – long, the male salmon was likely five to six years old, Killam said. Scientists used the salmon’s girth and length to come up with their estimate of 85 pounds – and that’s dead. The salmon probably weighed about 90 pounds alive when it started its swim from the Pacific Ocean back to Battle Creek.

Of course, one of the reasons this huge fish was able to contribute its monster genetics to Battle Creek was due to the commercial fishing restrictions and closures of the past two years:

Federal and state officials called off a commercial salmon fishery this year off the state’s coast and are allowing nothing but a short sport season in the Sacramento River because of the low runs.

“A fish that big would have been caught in the fishery,” Smith said.

Sadly, the fish is simply a remnant of the kind of fish that once swam in the Upper Sacramento on a regular basis, and with habitat and environmental issues rearing up – and commercial overfishing more the norm than the exception in prior decades – we’re unlikely to see its kind anytime soon:

Although monstrous, the salmon found on Battle Creek is part of a meager salmon run on the stream that feeds Coleman National Fish Hatchery. This year’s fall-run has been about 13,000 fish, said Scott Hamelberg, the hatchery’s manager.

Average runs at the hatchery have been between 20,000 and 30,000 fish.

See you on the River, Tom Chandler.

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