Small stream restoration

[martin_b]

About eighty percent of the entire country of Denmark is cultivated and farmed, resulting in a massive need to drain the land. In the fifties most of our streams and rivers were converted from meandering and highly productive trout and salmon streams into straight, deep channels in order to quickly lead the water from the farming fields away and out to sea.

This obviously pretty much killed the foundation for our then healthy wild populations of fish, due to the fact that the gravel needed for trout and salmon to spawn their eggs in was dug up as well as sand/dirt covering what was left of spawning beds in the streams due to way too fast flowing water, now that the streams were straight channels.

Now, to make a long story short, nowadays the government has realized their mistake in the fifties and is now pumping lots of money into restoring the streams to what they used to be. So far things are going in the right direction and the fishing is pretty good in many places. There is still a need to stock a lot of streams, since they still can't produce the amount of wild fish that they're supposed to naturally. But the official policy is to end the stocking of our streams completely by bringing back the streams to their former glory.

The local fishing clubs help with this restoration. I spent the weekend learning how to do this properly. I had an awesome weekend learning how to lay out gravel spawning beds for trout, sponsored by the national sport fishing association which holds these courses to educate us anglers how to restore streams locally. The stream you can see in the video below is one of the only streams where NO stocking is taking place. We're laying out a spawning bed to help the brown trout population in a dammed section of the stream. This stream needed a lot of stocking up until five years ago, so this laying out spawning beds is really paying off. The world class sea trout fishing we have nowadays is a direct result of stream restoration by private clubs and individuals. I'm restoring a small trib of my home stream this fall hoping for similar results :)

Martin
[youtube:mjw310et]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqZsRMZJwkE[/youtube:mjw310et]

[Danny S]

Kudos to you and all those taking on this venture. I do have a question. Do the restored streams still drain farmland or has another method come about to drain them?

[greyfox]

With the lost of so much natural habitat, it's always nice to see something being done, good luck and thanks for posting .

[martin_b]

Danny, yes, the streams still drain farmland to some extent, but putting back gravel and rocks and undoing the straightening in some streams is possible now because we found out that the farmland would become "too drained". Therefore everybody will do better with slower drainage. If you understand what I mean.

The farming industry IS a huge problem for nature, not just for our streams, but there's only so much you can do when farming is such a big part of our economy.

[Ernest]

Excellent work, and I'm betting, well worth the investment.

In parts of the American Upper Midwest we went from very fine natural trout streams to waterways degraded by towns, industry, homes and agriculture. People didn't think about what they were doing to the streams, and the degradation was a result of "progress." Now we are moving back toward more productive streams with wild trout.

No doubt the geology, gradient, and history of our streams are different from yours in Denmark. There's also no doubt that a wild trout is preferable to a stocked one. Once the stream resotration is done, the wild fish take care of themselves, and the huge annual expense of raising the hatchery trout is over.

Here, rather than resoration, we call it habitat improvement, or HI. In many streams the HI goes beyond restoration, improving the stream to a point beyond what Mother Nature had provided. In many of our streams the fishing has never been better.

I expect you'll have the same result, and I'm hoping that you do.

[martin_b]

The way we are "taught" to do the restoration is to bring back the streams to the state that nature intended them to be. That means that some streams can never be more than "so good" - ie. if nature for some reason ended up creating a stream that can hold, say, 100 trout per 200 meters, we will not try to restore it to any other state. That way we can get government funding for it, since the policy is to bring back the streams to a "natural state". I guess that's the way of politics.

During the course of the weekend we went to look at a stream that was restored in 1991. The small stream (or beck/brook) was back in 1991 led away from a huge dammed lake and a new course for it was dug and gravel and rocks were put in. We electro fished it in the weekend and the stream now holds 76 trout per 8 metres all these years after. Before the restoration it held 2 trout per 50 metres. That's some improvement I'll say!
Here's a picture of that little stream which is a major provider of trout to a larger stream with only wild (sea)trout:

[Brooktrout]

nice work. do the projects include bringing back native atlantic salmon spawning?

[martin_b]

Indeed they do, Brooktrout. It is in fact a high priority to bring back the native atlantic salmon in the streams where it is naturally present. So far is has been revived and is spawning in all the streams that historically have been home for it. It is present in all the streams where it should be, but it is being kept alive with stocking since many of the streams are dammed and therefore the salmon doesn't have access to all its spawning areas. There is currently much debate about shutting down a big water powered electricity plant that only produce electricity equivalent of a couple of wind mills, but also is the foundation for jobs for an entire city...

[rossa]

Good work, it's great to hear about things like this instead of ecological disasters.

[soupmix]

That's a feel good vid. Kudos!