LEITCHES CREEK, N.S. — It didn’t take long for a few fish to show their appreciation for a group that is restoring streams across Cape Breton.
Members of ACAP Cape Breton’s Stream Team were in Leitches Creek on Tuesday where they are helping raise the water level of a tributary to Georges River. They had finished installing baffles — essentially wooden dams with small openings for fish to pass through — and were fitting a chute that will join a large pool to the upstream portion of the waterway when a few curious onlookers decided to check it out.
“We didn’t even have the fish chute in there, we were just testing it, and the chub and even a little trout got up it right away because their instinct is always driving them upstream to that cooler water,” Jordan Strong, habitat restoration co-ordinator at ACAP Cape Breton, told the Post while explaining some of the work they have done under a culvert that runs beneath Route 223.
The baffles slow the flow of water, allowing the water to deepen. The goal is to create a series of pools with riffles — smaller areas where the oxygen is added — in between so that fish can once again swim freely.
“The point of this is to reconnect this part of the stream with the upper stretches,” he said.
“It’s healthy for the stream itself because it moves the nutrients from the heavy nutrient loading areas up in the tributaries. Things like leaves and dead organic material feeds the bugs — stuff like stone flies, mayflies and caddis flies, they kind of grind up that detritus, so when there’s more of those, then there’s more food for the fish to eat.”
One of the main problems is undersized culverts.
It seems counterintuitive, but as the frequency of so-called 100-year storms increases, many streams across Nova Scotia are getting choked off along roadways where water from overwhelmed culverts moves so quickly it creates craters called onion blooms.
“The stream will get cut off at both ends, you’ll have a small pool of water and it will eventually shrink up because there will be nothing feeding it anymore,” said Strong.
Project lead Jonathan Pretty has been restoring streams with ACAP for more than 10 years.
He said Cape Breton has “more than its fair share” of streams that no longer flow properly.
“The habitat has to be connected. You have salmon and eels and they get hatched in a stream like this upstream and make their way all the way out to the ocean, they grow up for a couple of years and they try to come back and they hit a situation like this — game over. They can’t go any farther.”
The Georges River tributary is just one of the many habitats the ACAP Stream Team, which also includes Cape Breton University bachelor of arts and science in environment student Rory MacNeil, has helped bring back to life this summer.
With funding from Cabela’s Canada Outdoor Fund, the Nova Scotia Salmon Association adopt-a-stream program and the Cape Breton Island Wildlife Association, they’ve already removed debris that was clogging fish ladders in Big Brook and Grantmire Brook, and deepened the tailwaters downstream of culverts in Beechmont Brook and Crawley Brook. Later this week they will travel to McNabs Brook where they will install a digger log that will help form a deep channel, create curves and infuse oxygen into the stream.
“The more you increase that aquatic connectivity, the more nutrients will move through the system therefore there’s more bugs and therefore there’s more fish,” said Strong. “And when you have smaller little tributaries that have smaller fish, they often feed the bigger fish. You can see when the chain falls apart, everything falls apart, but when you have it moving properly it takes care of itself.”
