I hope by now patient readers are getting a good sense of the connectedness of all things: how reintroducing wolves in yellowstone can improve forestation on the lower wetlands, or alligators nesting can make mud pools for ibis. Well here’s a great story from the Goat Blog of High Country News by Terray Sylvester of a particular researcher interested in the shrinking habitat of Sweetgale and its relationship to the decreasing salmon population.
Greg Hood is a researcher in western Washington who knows a few things about salmon habitat — a few surprising things. When Hood talks about preserving threatened populations, he doesn’t mention in-stream flows, fish ladders or water temperatures. Instead, he brings up a mostly-vanished ecosystem than once lined significant portions of the Puget Sound. It was composed of a shrub named sweetgale, tidal marshes and… beaver ponds near the seashore. That’s right, some beavers stake out seaside territory, and according to Hood, their ponds make excellent homes for juvenile salmon. Problem is, most of that tidal habitat has been destroyed over the last century or so. So little of it remains today that he thinks most people have forgotten — or have just never realized – how important the beaver ponds once were to the endangered Puget Sound Chinook.
Sweetgale (bayberry, dutch myrtle, chevalier) is a low growing, willow-resembling, and fragrant marsh cover that used to grow all over the salty creeks near the sea side. In older days they used the branches as a replacement for hops in Yorkshire, and Gale Beer is supposedly very thirst quenching. In addition to its intoxicating properties, it also attracts many insects which in turn attract greedy fish and its blue grey leaves give the fish more cover because they can hang around in deeper pools and not get snapped by equally avaricious heron. And who makes those deper pools? – wait for it – beavers who tolerate salty water.
Apparently as salty as 10 parts per thousand (salt water is 35 parts per thousand). How salty is Alhambra creek? (We just spent the last hour looking up the salinity of Carquinez Strait, which now is reported in Practical Salinity Units PSU and not PPT…an exciting “sea” change that happened in the 1978 and is based on the conductivity of the salt rather than the weight, which is interesting but hardly the point. The internet can be very distracting.) Back to our story. So the testing for our section of bay ranges between 0-2 PPU depending on the time of year and depth of the water test, which means that we are sayyy under 10 PPT.
Which is why our beavers can go all the way down to the train tracks and grangers wharf and out to the straight and be okay. Dispersers can go down stream to crocket or Richmond and set up shop without difficulty. And which is why, if you love salmon and you want our schools to improve so that we can have a salmon season again next year. you had better make friends with some beavers.
Now whose going to break the good news to Scotland?
