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SALMONID SAVIOURS
‘Spider excavator’ helps weave Lynn Creek recovery BRENT RICHTER
brichter@nsnews.com
There’s an Amazing SpiderMan, of sorts, coming to the rescue of fish on Lynn Creek.
The North Shore Streamkeepers have brought in a rarely-seen spider excavator, which “walks” on four legs, to restore a once robust but now almost defunct piece of salmon habitat. Left to its own devices, a wild river will become scattered with logs, boulders and channels that create ideal conditions for fish to hide from predators, rest, eat and spawn. A side channel of Lynn Creek just north of Highway 1 once provided all of that. But the creek has been heavily manipulated by humans through logging, nearby development and armouring of its banks and today, the creek’s flow has changed, clogging the channel with gravel and choking it dry in the summer. With the spider excavator, the Streamkeepers and their partners are now beavering away on an “engineered log jam” that should correct the creek’s flow.
North Shore Streamkeepers volunteers and their partners use a spider excavator to move rocks and boulders on Lynn Creek in North Vancouver to help restore damaged salmon habitat, Aug. 10. BRENT RICHTER / NSN “We’re putting back some of the habitat that we’ve destroyed over the last 150 years,” said David Harper, an instructor in
BCIT’s Ecological Restoration Program, a partner on the project. “We’re not going to solve the problem overnight, but this is
one important step to help give a home for salmon when they come back to freshwater.” Hiring a spider excavator costs
more than double what it would to bring in a more familiar piece of heavy equipment on tracks, but Streamkeepers treasurer Glen Parker said there’s nothing like having the right tool for the job. The spider excavator’s arm is much more sophisticated in how it can pick up and manoeuvre the hundreds of rocks and boulders into carefully selected positions. And because of its legs, this one can easily walk to where it’s needed while making minimal disturbance to the creek bed and banks. “We carried 100 logs and boulders. You go walk on the paths and you wouldn’t know we were here, whereas if we would have went with 100 trips with a track excavator, we’d have a quagmire on both sides,” Parker said. “They’re a very specialized piece of equipment. There’s only a handful of them in British Columbia.” When the project is complete, Parker foresees the channel as a “paradise” for salmonids once again. Every salmonid type except Continued on page 22
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