Island Dispatch | Spring 2024

On a sunny, crisp March morning, a half-dozen Island Conservation Corps (ICC) crew members fanned out across a puddle-pocked meadow. They carried buckets of planting tools and bundles of willow tree saplings. By midafternoon, the crew had planted several hundred willows and other native trees and shrubs along Crow Valley Creek on Orcas Island.

It was a good day’s work. To be honest, though, the results didn’t look like much: a patchwork of bare sticks protruding from grassy mud along the creek’s straight, thinly wooded banks. But if you put on your virtual-reality goggles and look 10 or 20 years into the future, you’ll see a jaw-dropping transformation: an expanding young forest with meandering creek channels running through it, pooling in places where beaver activity is evident. Focus your attention on and around one of the beaver dams for a while and you’ll see a striking number and variety of insects, birds, amphibians, and small mammals. You might even catch sight of spawning salmon or small fry glimmering in the clean, naturally filtered water. (Salmon DNA has, in fact, been detected in Crow Valley Creek.)

This vision of watershed renewal is currently propelling major planting projects along riparian areas—meaning wetlands adjacent to rivers or streams—on three Preservation Trust-owned preserves: Crow Valley Creek on JB Farm Preserve, Orcas Island (described above); San Juan Valley Creek on Sundstrom Farm Preserve, San Juan Island; and False Bay Creek on Red Mill Farm Preserve, also SJI. The projects are the fruit of a four-way partnership between SJPT, the state of Washington, San Juan County, and the San Juan Islands Conservation District.

“The county has provided money for these projects, which came from a state Department of Ecology grant,” SJPT Stewardship Director Dean Dougherty explains. “The Conservation District has also provided funding, plus they are providing ICC work crews to plant the sites as well as maintain them. That’s crucial—you can’t just plant these things and walk away. It takes several years for the plants to get well enough established so you can then let them maintain on their own.”

The original impetus for the projects came in the form of a mandate from the county. High bacterial levels were frequently detected in False Bay Creek, which feeds into the sensitive marine habitat in False Bay. A major culprit was livestock grazing in the creek. With potential regulatory penalties looming (and with the help of state and county funding), SJPT fenced cattle out of the creek on Red Mill Farm, installed a new water system for the cattle, and planted the riparian zone inside the fencing with more than a thousand native trees and shrubs.

The Sundstrom Farm and JB Farm sites followed a similar pattern—robust planting  combined with (eventual) livestock-excluding fences. An additional site on Fase Bay Creek is in the planning stages.

“It’s so much fun to do things like this,” Dougherty says. “Instead of just building fences to keep livestock out of streams, we’re also doing long-term restoration work. The forests, increased biodiversity, and cleaner, healthier waterways that we are nurturing are going to be around for hundreds of years.”