VALLEY HEAD, W.Va. — The old adage says when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. For fisheries managers at the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources, when nature gives you twisted and broken timber, make fish habitat.
Superstorm Sandy and the 2012 Derecho left parts of Kumbrabow State Forest a tangled mess. Much of the downed timber from the two events landed in Mill Creek within the forest which is a well known native brook trout stream.
“The timber was thrown helter skelter in the stream and in some cases formed pretty large debris jams that became sediment traps,” said Steve Brown with the DNR. “In some places these things became silted in like a dam.”
The agency already had its eye on Mill Creek for restoration, but the damage left from the two major storms prompted them to make the stream their next project. Beginning in June Brown and a handful of employees from the DNR, WVU, and Division of Forestry went to work to tear out the debris jams and use pieces of the debris to create self-sustaining pools. The design created larger riffles and deeper pools which will encourage larger growth among the brook trout population in the creek.
“There are structures you can build that encourage the stream to do that,” said Brown. “We looked at Mill Creek and said, ‘Here’s all the construction material anybody could want just delivered by the storms.’ So let’s take some of that and make the stream do what we want it to do, which is dig pools.”
Armed with chainsaws and a track-hoe the handful of workers got busy and spent a good bit of the summer pulling apart the large debris piles and carefully placing the logs into the waterway in a manner which will facilitate a more productive flow.
“We put in about 65 structures over portions of six miles of stream,” said Brown. “We didn’t do all six miles, some of it was already great habitat as it was, so we sort of did triage and determined where we needed to work. We hit most all of what we wanted to hit with the equipment.”
There’s a stretch between the campground and the cabins in Kumbrabow State Forest that had to be done by hand. Some of that work is not yet complete. However, Brown said they timed the work to be in the stream when water was at the low point. The low water enabled them to place the structures properly in place to endure the higher spring flows.
Brown said it was a learning process.
“Even though we knew what we were doing when we got into this, there’s a world of difference in the structure we built the first day and the structures we built later in the summer,” he said. “You learn from everything you build and watch how the stream reacts and how the fish react to it. It’s an evolutionary process.”
But Brown said the results were starting to show. Although the DNR is yet to do any scientific stream monitoring, which will be forthcoming in future years, anecdotally Brown is hearing from anglers who said the work has helped. He was showing off the work to some people when a 10 inch brook trout broke water an attempted to swim upstream.
“It was really cool. He didn’t make it up over the structure that time because the flow was too high, but he will,” said Brown.
The aim was many brook trout will make that leap and with adequate habitat will start to grow and spawn into a much more productive waterway. The deeper pools are expected to allow for habitat which will enable fish to grow larger in the stream and somebody fish well beyond ten inches will be making the leap.