Bald eagles and American dippers flitted through trees and low-hanging clouds along the South Fork of the Nooksack River on a foggy December morning while staffers from the Whatcom Land Trust (WLT) traipsed through mud and overgrown blackberry bushes at their newest property.
The trust, which manages, preserves and protects natural lands across Whatcom County, purchased the 8-acre parcel off Saxon Road in mid-November for $350,000, adding to its growing collection of properties along the Saxon Riparian Corridor.
“It’s a property that we own and manage between Saxon Road and the South Fork of the Nooksack River,” Alex Jeffers, the land trust’s conservation director, said during a site tour on Monday. “It’s continuous, so [this purchase] adds another 800 feet of shoreline and 8 acres to the corridor.”
The property, which currently has a house, a shed and several other small structures on it, will eventually be restored to natural habitat through a stewardship plan instituted by the WLT.
Much of the restoration work will be geared toward supporting salmon habitat along the South Fork, which historically struggles with low stream flows and high temperatures in the summer.
“The South Fork, historically, has been a really important salmon watershed, and one that struggles more than the north and middle fork with things like flow and temperature,” Jeffers said. “It doesn’t get the year-round glacial melt from Mount Baker.”
Despite ongoing efforts, the river is rife with health concerns, particularly related to water temperatures, which continue to test higher than healthy for fish populations. Restoration of riparian zones, planting trees and developing logjams in the water can help lower temperatures, as well as provide natural habitats along the river for salmon protection and spawning.
“All that nice, natural, vegetated shoreline gives habitat for the salmon that come up and down the South Fork to be able to hide from predators and find areas that the water is not moving so fast,” Jeffers said. “These natural shorelines that have vegetation and down, woody debris are so important for salmon habitat.”
Other groups concerned with salmon health, like the Nooksack Indian Tribe and the Lummi Nation, are working to protect habitat in the south fork using logjams. Just last week, the tribes received a combined $3.2 million from the Washington State Salmon Recovery Funding Board to construct logjams across the middle and south forks of the Nooksack, in addition to restoration grants earlier this year.
With the latest addition, the Saxon Riparian Corridor now comprises more than 460 acres of property along the Nooksack’s South Fork, all of it dedicated to environmental health and conservation.
The land trust announced the acquisition last week.
“I think this property is a really great example of just how contiguous shoreline can be really beneficial,” WLT’s communications director Claire Johnston said. “The whole riparian corridor totals 466 acres now, so when you’re getting that much land and that much shoreline managed for wildlife and river sprawl, it just makes for a lot of security in habitat, and salmon habitat in particular.”
The Saxon Riparian Corridor is part of a much larger network of properties in Whatcom County, managed and owned by the WLT. In total, the group manages more than 20,000 acres across the county, with more acquisitions planned. The trust is looking forward to adding another 5,000 acres to its portfolio over the next few years as part of the Steward Mountain Community Forest Initiative.
“It feels good for the Land Trust to be able to play our part in the larger picture of salmon restoration in the Nooksack Basin,” Jeffers said Monday. “There are other basins that have lost their salmon already. We haven’t lost ours, but they’re struggling, and we still have an opportunity to make sure they’re able to rebound.”
