How can you tell a healthy stream or lake?

I did not know until this morning that there’s an organization devoted to “PROTECT, PRESERVE, AND RESTORE WILD NATIVE FISH POPULATIONS THROUGH STEWARDSHIP OF THE FISH AND THEIR HABITATS.” It’s the Native Fish Coalition and it has chapters in a number of states, mostly along the east coast with a few southern chapters. No chapters yet in Minnesota or Wisconsin which I find surprising since brook trout are native to both of those states and are facing significant challenges related to the effects of climate change.

It is the belief of Native Fish Coalition that no stream, river, pond or lake is truly healthy or “restored” until its full complement of native species is intact and it is devoid of nonnative species and hatchery-raised fish.  While clean water and healthy riparian zones are a necessary foundation for establishing healthy aquatic ecosystems, they are not an absolute indication of overall ecological health.

 

Northern Minnesota brook trout water?

Photo by J. Harrington

If you read this posting and are interested in exploring the establishment of a Minnesota Chapter of the NFC, please add a comment so we can get in touch. I happened to come across the NFC web site while I was checking out the Sea Run Brook Trout coalition web site. The watershed association of my home waters in Massachusetts is working on the restoration of native fishes in the North and South Rivers. That’s a wonderful improvement over the situation when I lived there decades ago. Perhaps there are reasons to be hopeful.

The Disappearance of the Duwamish Salmon

By Duane Niatum

How long have they laid buried

in the sludge and grime of industry

erasing the river's breath

and almost erasing the Duwamish people

who once paddled their canoes down

its current swift as the wing of kingfisher?

Walking beside the river in 2009 you can

still hear the dreams and laughter

of children picking serviceberry

with their grandmother teasing a crow

stealing berries from her basket.

You might glimpse ancestral villages,

longhouses yards from the riverbank

before settlers burned them to the ground ,

drove the small tribe to the city's outskirts.

Seattle, too easily the age slipped a false-face

mask on you, a glass and concrete fashion cone

to give roaches the run of skyscrapers.

Although an alien in Salish country,

you were destined to become Raven's cousin,

Killer Whale's distant, ambivalent friend,

the many-mountains'-on-both-sides

adopted daughter when just an agate cut

from volcano and sea.

Seattle, my old salmonberry moon under a sky

as light as a tossed net, who remains,

leaping with salmon for old emotions?

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