The Musqueam salmon habitat restoration project

One of the things I appreciate the most is work that challenges me to think beyond the boundaries of the work I currently do, and habitat restoration is one of those areas that really makes me ponder what other environmental impacts are affecting the urban environment I live within. Rachel Thexton invited me to join her in a tour of the Musqueam nation’s salmon habitat restoration project last week, and I jumped at the opportunity.

I learned a lot from the site visit and several conversations with Wade Grant and a number of folks from the crew who work in the habitat restoration project. It was really interesting to me to see how they link the Musqueam elders’ traditional ecological knowledge with the scientific understanding of salmon spawning patterns. Moreover, knowing that this particular stream is the only one that is still operating in Vancouver was particularly interesting.

I had a chance to meet 26-year-old Christina Nahanee, who has been working as a volunteer in this area since childhood and at 19, officially joined the Musqueam Conservation Ecosystem Society. She is now a team leader on the Musqueam/Gateway project, which is a partnership with the BC provincial government. Right now her team is working to replace a title TIDE gate between river and stream to provide an ideal environment for salmon to spawn.

Christina is out daily with her team, doing hands on work on creek clean up, planting native plant species around the creeks to shade and protect the waters, all to maintain a protected environment for salmon. She gave Rachel and myself a full tour of the creek area, and Wade gave us a look at the upper side of the stream. From our conversations, I learned that the salmon habitat that the Musqueam are restoring is actually a project for habitat protection, since they don’t actually consume the salmon from the stream (we were talking about this while touring the project).

Really cool stuff that we don’t actually get to hear often. I’m glad I’ve had a chance to observe this first hand, particularly because my research has barely touched habitat restoration and conservation, so this was a nice departure from my work in pollution control.

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