Thursday the 18th

 Today we were blessed and got to sleep in an extra half an hour till 6:30. Our first activity of the day was visiting the Imtwaha hatchery and getting an amazing tour from Emily Meshke and also got to talk to Bryan Startzl and Sunhawk Thomas. I have been lucky enough to visit a few hatcheries throughout Washington and Oregon, and I have to say this was by far the most technologically advanced and impressive that I have been to.

 

They also had an ODFW sorting trailer on site to clip fish. It was a 5 line and it was doing around 7,000 fish per hour with a 98% success rate. This allows them to clip all of the around 500,000 fish in about two weeks. From the SCADA machine that can run the entire system and pumps while also providing alarms to getting to see the sorting trailer it was like looking into hatcheries of the future. They aim for 500,000 spring chinook each year, and this is the first year they hit that number with only Walla Walla strain fish. They have the capacity for 800,000 eggs but raise about 550,000-600,000 to get 500,000 fish based off their mortality rates.

One big issue they are running into right now is flow. The lack of snowpack means the South Fork Walla Walla (the river feeding the hatchery) is currently at 84 CFS, when usually at the lowest flows around August-September they still get 90-100CFS. I have far too many notes written down to put everything in here so I’ll mention a few of the things I found cool. They have photocell lights that automatically give the same light intensity and timing as what is naturally occurring outside. They have a pond just for trout that they use in a whirling disease study. They are trying a strategy to release the fish at different areas (mouth of Walla Walla River, Mill Creek, and of course the South Fork Walla Walla) and are measuring the fish progress with PIT and coated wire tags that allow them to see their success both downstream and upstream.

After our wonderful tour we left for the CTUIR Tribal plant nursery and got to work with Gale Redberg. Gail was a wonderful host and gave us a great tour of the nursery. She was a well of information and could answer any question we had for her and just knew so much about each different plant. Lots of their plants are used for riparian habitat restoration, but they also do shrubsteppe and culturally significant plants. Here is a list I doubt is even complete, its just the plants she pointed out to us! Snow buckwheat, milkweed, bitterbrush, mock orange, service berry, golden currant, creeping Oregon grape, alder, wetland grasses like carex, buckwheat, tule, chokecherries, black hawthorn, sweetgrass, fescue, bluebunch wheatgrass, sumac, oceanspray, cascara, peach leaf willow, ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, ninebark, black hawthorn, Douglas spirea, Douglas maple (our only native maple), water birch, aspen, and hemp dogbane. Some of my personal favorites were the ninebark due to its flowers and Gail saying how many pollinators it can attract, the Douglas spirea for its flowers as well, and the chokecherries for their extreme vigor, they had a 5-year-old tree that was towering above us. After our tour we helped top and spread out some cottonwoods that had overgrown their area and were starting to shade each other and prevent water from reaching the pots. While moving plants, we even found a nest built between some of the trees. I am planning on returning to this nursery later this summer with my family as we are trying to grow only native plants at our house and land. While I think we have at least 10 of the plants on the list, there are many we don’t have! I need to get more sage for my little shrubsteppe restoration project as well. I had a great time getting to learn and work with Gail and I am both very happy for her but sad for the nursery hearing that she will be retiring. A busy day but a rewarding one as well.