Being a good neighbor is good for trout, salmon

Most homeowners would be thrilled if a group of students armed with spades, rakes and dozens of potted plants volunteered to work in their backyard.

But the 11 students yanking up blackberries and hoeing the ground recently at Carrie Lewith Home, a retirement facility in Lake Forest Park, weren't engaged in a simple landscaping project. They were taking part in a broader program run by the Adopt-A-Stream Foundation to help homeowners make their backyard creek beds healthy for fish like salmon and trout.

As participants in an environmental-anthropology course at Edmonds Community College that partners with the foundation, the students had volunteered to restore 500 feet of Lyon Creek, a salmon stream that runs from Mountlake Terrace to Lake Washington.

"This project is small, but added up, it'll start to make a difference," said Jennifer Jones, an ecologist with Adopt-A-Stream.

The foundation is offering residents along several Snohomish County creeks — Lyon, McAleer, North, Little Bear and Quilceda, with Swamp Creek to be added soon — free environmental reviews of their property. The reviews will identify problems and solutions for each homeowner's stretch of creek.

If homeowners consent, the foundation will find the resources — such as the students' volunteer labor — to restore their areas of the creek.

All creeks in South Snohomish County have been listed by the state as unsuitable for contact recreation due to pollution, said Tom Murdoch, Adopt-A-Stream's director. The county's streams pass through urban landscapes that cause a slew of environmental problems, he said.

Runoff from roads and parking lots washes contaminants, such as lead, cadmium, zinc and other metals, into the creeks. Fecal coliform bacteria, often from dog waste, make streams unhealthy for recreation and suck up oxygen that fish need to breathe.

The bacteria, which thrive in warm waters, can be controlled by keeping stream temperatures low, Murdoch said. Salmon are also adapted to cooler temperatures and struggle to survive in overheated creeks.

Enter the students of Edmonds Community College. By removing low-growing invasive plants along Lyon Creek and replacing them with native trees and shrubs, the students were working to shade the creek and thus lower water temperatures.

The plants' roots also slow sediment erosion that can smother young salmon. The roots can even absorb some contaminants, such as nutrients from fertilizers that cause blooms of oxygen-depleting algae.

The students are members of the Learn-n-serve Environmental Anthropology Field School (LEAF) at the college, where they can trade volunteer hours for school credit.

The LEAF School has partnered with Adopt-A-Stream since the school's inception almost two years ago. The students help carry out the foundation's projects, learning about stream ecology along the way.

"[This project] makes me feel like a good person," said student Sarah Keller, 26, "like I'm useful — and actually out there making a change, rather than just dreaming about it."

Walter Rung, now a technician for Adopt-A-Stream, started his career by volunteering for the foundation as a student with LEAF founder and director Tom Murphy.

He leaned on his spade to survey the progress as he and the students worked alongside Lyon Creek.

"Some projects, you won't see the effect of until 50 years down the road," he said. But with this project, students "come out here and just see blackberries, and roots of blackberries, everywhere. By the time we leave today, we'll have native plants planted everywhere ... It's encouraging to them."

Naila Moreira: 425-745-7845 or nmoreira@seattletimes.com