The Spruce City Wildlife Association has recently completed a project that will bring more fish to Cottonwood Island Park.
This past weekend, the Cottonwood Island Side Channel was reconnected to the Nechako River, bringing new habitat back to this part of the watershed.
“Cottonwood Island Side Channel is actually a highwater side channel, so that means it allows water in only during highwater events, such as freshet or STMP when they release the water for the sockeye to migrate up,” said Project Lead Jesi Lauzon.
“Those high water events allow salmon and other fish to get into the channel, but then the water drops so fast that it actually traps those fish in isolated pools, and then those pools become void of oxygen.”
Lauzon said these pools can become too hot in the summer and dry up completely, and if they do last, they can freeze solid in the winter.
“This channel has been an area of salmon stranding and mortality for decades,” she explained.
Lauzon added the project started as an academic assignment for a class she was taking at the University.
“When I had spoken with Spruce City, I had just started volunteering with them kind of at the same time, when I spoke with them, this project seemed like it could be way more than just an academic assignment, that we could actually maybe do something,” she said.
“In order to do that, we had to kind of create a plan to get the data, to show us what was really going on in the side channel,” she explained.
Lauzon said she hopes this will allow year-round water flow into the side channel.
“One thing that people didn’t realize was that there was thousands of fish in that channel all the time when people are going there,” she explained.
“Knowing that made it look even less healthy of an ecosystem, of an area, so opening that channel up does provide an opportunity for people to be able to see fish, because the water that’s coming through the channel is clean.”
In terms of what species Prince George residents can expect to see in the channel, Lauzon said there’s a variety.
“Over the last several years that we’ve been in there, we have seen quite a few different species,” she said.
“Chinook salmon fry, of course, rainbow trout, we’ve seen burbot in the channel, we’ve seen lampreys, there’s been lots of pike minnow, red sided shiners, suckers, that kind of stuff, but seeing things like the lamprey and sculpin, they’re unique fish, so they’re really cool to be able to see, and hopefully, with the water being as clear as it is, we’ll actually get to see those species a little more often.”
Spruce City Wildlife Association Volunteers will be continuing to monitoring the side-channel to see what fish are coming in, as well as water quality.
“The most important part of this project, from Spruce City’s perspective was the collaboration that it took to have this project happen,” she said.
“This project has been something Spruce City has been working for several years, and having so many different groups, I believe it was 14 different organizations that came together to make this project possible.”
Lauzon added any area that was disturbed throughout the area during construction will be replanted and healed in the spring.
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