Emily Howe roots through the bed of her pickup. “Let’s see…” she says from the depths of the canopy. “We’ll need a couple of the small tubs and eight poles and two stands, and the corer and some jars, and we’ll bring the tow net, too.” She extracts all these things from large plastic tubs and distributes them among the assembled: Anne Beaudreau, a fisheries biologist and professor at the University of Washington; Molly Bidwell, Beaudreau’s graduate student; and Bob Oxborrow, a research biologist, also from the University of Washington.

Once everyone else is suitably laden, Howe, an aquatic ecologist with The Nature Conservancy, turns to me. “Maybe you could carry the butterfly net?” she asks.

“Sure,” I say, taking what is without a doubt the lightest piece of equipment. With that, we all strike out to the mudflat, although to say “strike out” is to imply a direct, purposeful gait. Ours is anything but. For one, we are all wearing chest waders and heavy wading boots. These conspire to transform our walk into something more like a high-knee stomp-skate. For another, the ground we are stomp-skating across is soft and slick and squelchy, and will swallow footwear if one is not mindful. So one stays on one’s toes, so to speak.

Our struggles are a sign of Howe’s and her colleagues’ putative success. Until a little more than ten years ago, this spot on the shore of Port Susan Bay was farmland, high and dry. Howe is working to turn it into something else. She is helping to oversee a project to convert this acreage near the mouth of the Stillaguamish River into functional tidal marsh habitat for salmon—especially young Chinook. The river’s summer and fall Chinook runs are among the most imperiled in Puget Sound. Both were listed as Threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1999.

Having more intact marsh should help the fish as they make their way to the sea. But to restore land so that salmon will use it, Howe is finding, is neither a simple nor necessarily straightforward act. Even at these smaller scales, restoration is an exercise in extended attention and care. In a sense, then, this trip in March is anticipatory. Howe has come not to see salmon—they will not be here for another month or so—but to see if the things that salmon might like are here, setting the table, she hopes, for when the river’s younger older denizens arrive.

Critical habitat

Port Susan Bay is a modest body of water tucked between Camano Island and the mainland a few miles north of Everett, in Snohomish County. Its main tributary is the Stillaguamish. The Stilly, as it is known, is the fifth-largest river that feeds Puget Sound. Its headwaters are high in the Cascades, from which it flows nearly seventy miles in two forks, which join about eighteen miles from the river mouth. With the Skagit and Snohomish rivers, the Stilly contains more than 70% of Puget Sound’s historical delta habitat. Today, only about 30% of that area remains functional estuary. The rest has been paved over, filled, diked, farmed, or otherwise developed.

Tidal marshes like the one on Port Susan Bay are crucial for regional salmon recovery efforts. They serve as a kind of connective tissue, or nursery. Young Chinook will spend months growing here as they migrate from the freshwaters where they hatched to the ocean where they will spend most of their lives. But marshes are among the most fertile lands in Washington, and humans also make use of them for their own productive purposes; and since European settlers coming to the area in the 1800s had fixed ways of thinking how lands should be productive, very little estuarine habitat has been left intact.

Sometimes, though, people get a chance to try to undo some of the changes wrought. Such was the case at Port Susan Bay. After purchasing the land in 2001, The Nature Conservancy began work to restore 150 acres in 2012, from Hat Slough north. At the time, the restoration project on Port Susan Bay was one of the largest in Puget Sound.  The principle means of restoring the land was to remove more than 7,000 feet of a dike that had blocked Port Susan Bay from entering and inundating its former haunts. With the old dike gone, water began to flow in and out with the tide through two breach points, and started doing its own work, as water will. (A new inner dike protected farmland farther inland.)  

The question was whether removing the dike was enough to carve tidal channels, revegetate the marsh with native sedges, and reconnect Chinook with nursery habitat; or whether the space would have to be engineered more heavily to recover its natural character and dynamism. For five years, TNC scientists watched the marsh to see if those spaces were truly effective as salmon habitat, and resilient over time. They were, sort of. “We saw that we needed to do more work to increase ecological connectivity,” Howe says. “It was really adaptive management in action.”

The Nature Conservancy thus initiated the project’s second phase, completed last summer. For it, contractors set about trying to approximate more how a functional marsh looks and acts. Using heavy machinery they dug deeper channels in the mud, and more of them. Not only did the increased depth mean juvenile Chinook could spend more of a tidal cycle in a marsh, but also the greater number provided more connections between the marsh, the bay, and the river. Some of these new channels are distributary, while others are blind. The distributary channels — the ones that join marsh, bay, and river — help move water, sediment, fish, guarding against sea level rise, and preventing too many young fish from occupying the same space and competing. Blind channels are essentially channels that lead inland, ending in a wall of mud. That does not mean they are not important. “One of the things we’re learning is how everything plays a role,” Howe says. “Coho love these sorts of blind channels.”

The benefits at Port Susan Bay will be manifold: quiet water and food and refuge for salmon during a critical life stage, habitat for other animals (birds, mammals, insects, aquatic invertebrates, others), flood protection for neighboring lands, a bolstered resilience to climate change and its predicted regional impacts. The question at hand, then, is to figure out whether all that work has worked.

Signs of success

When we reach the first site on Howe’s list of five, everyone sets their gear on the mud and has a look around. Even if no salmon are here yet, the site shows many signs of use. Red-winged blackbirds are singing nearby. A killdeer flies overhead. On the walk out we saw the dimples of coyote paws in the mud, the paddle-feet of ducks, stick-like heron toes. Those tracks are not what excite Howe the most. The ground is covered with the broken, dead stalks of last year’s vegetation. At one point, Howe knelt near a lip in the ground just a few inches tall, a kind of miniature dike. The vegetation on one side of the dike lay flat, all in one direction. “That means water was flowing from one side to the next,” Howe said. “Just like we wanted.” She stood up, pleased, and gazed at what was left of the bullrushes. “This stuff will all be chest-high by the end of the summer.”

Then we set to work. Oxborrow jams a little PVC platform stand in the mud. Around it we push four tall, skinny PVC posts as deep as we can. These we have placed through the metal rings attached to the corners of the small plastic tub that for now sits atop the stand. A bit of black foam, like a mini pool noodle, goes around the rim of the tub. The idea is that when the tide rises, the tub will rise with it and so not get inundated; because of the metal rings, it will not float away, either. Finally, Howe fills the tub with water and splashes a little biodegradable dish soap into it. This will capture whatever insects land in the water.

Beaudreau and Bidwell watch and take notes. This will be Bidwell’s project for the next couple of months, and she will be back out tomorrow to collect their bodies. Now she gamely hops into one of the freshly-dug channels, a blind one that looks more than five feet deep. Howe hands down a long fine-mesh net with a plastic container at the bottom. Bidwell begins to trudge up-channel, towing the net behind her, gathering all manner of organic material. “This is getting heavy,” she says after a couple of minutes.

“It’s probably filling with sediment,” Howe says. She takes a foot-long PVC tube and walks to another part of the channel bank. She jams the tube deep into the mud and withdraws it, emptying the mud into another bag. This core will show what benthic invertebrates are buried in the muck.

Bidwell finishes her tow and hauls the net up. She empties its contents into a large sieve. She, Howe, and Beaudreau begin to finger through, plucking out every biological entity they can identify—insects, amphipods, a small type of stick-like shrimp called a mysid. “Staghorn sculpin,” Howe says, indicating a small fish with a big head and a somewhat put-out expression.  Save for the sculpin, all the creatures go into a little plastic bag, where they will later be identified more formally and their caloric worth determined. The tiny organisms struggle against the plastic. The look on Howe’s face shows that she feels some guilt in their dispatch, but, as she says, this is for the greater good.

All of these gatherings—the insects that succumb in the tub, the inhabitants of the mud from the sediment core, the organisms from the net tow—help Howe and her colleagues build a profile of the smorgasbord available to whatever salmon come here. How much are all of these bugs worth in terms of energy? What is the species diversity? “In the summer, these plants will all be covered in bugs,” Howe says. “It will be like a black carpet.” A lot of those bugs will fall in the water for one reason or another to become “a salmon feast.” Howe is trying to collect every type she can see—adult bugs, young bugs, spiders scuttling over the ground, leaf hoppers flinging themselves around. Salmon eat leaf hoppers? “They’ve shown up in Chinook diets,” Howe says, dropping one in a bag.

Before their precipitous declines began, as many as 46,000 Chinook between the summer and fall runs may have returned to the Stillaguamish every year to spawn. The recovery goal for both runs combined, according to the approved plan from 2005, is 33,000 returning adults. That number has not been seen since 1976. According to the most recent models, the current spawning population is at most about 7% of what it once was. Habitat restoration is just one part of what is hoped will bring salmon back. Every year, two hatcheries operated by the Stillaguamish Tribe release over 400,000 juvenile salmon into the north and south forks of the river.

All of those salmon need a place to go; or, rather, a place to leave from. The recovery plan for Stillaguamish Chinook has a target of restoring 80% of historic estuarine habitat. That historic habitat totaled more than four thousand acres. Recall that the project here is 150 acres. Clearly much work is still to be done. But, as Howe points out, estuaries are places of deposition, slow accretion. So, too, is restoration. The Stillaguamish Tribe owns land parcels immediately adjacent and surrounding the TNC land. One parcel is 240 acres, the other 500. Tribal biologists will begin to restore those sites in the coming months. So the project at Port Susan Bay is a small piece, true, but it will soon join larger pieces, and together all of these pieces will in time become something that approximates a whole.

Will the salmon come?

Morning turns to afternoon, and then late afternoon. Howe takes us all to four other sites, and we repeat the procedures at each: the PVC poles, the stand, the floating tub, the water, the soap, the quick search for bugs via net, the sediment core, the promise to return in due time and see how things go. Each site is different in its way. Some are muddier, one is grassier, one is immediately adjacent a bank of the Stilly, one back among some trees. In this, they act roughly as temporal treatments: one site has been restored recently, another engineered several years ago, another left largely as it was for reference purposes. “This is what we call natural,” Howe says of that last one. “But nothing here really is.”

When the last site is done, and we’re driving back to Seattle, Howe is ruminative. Back in 2012, when the Port Susan Bay site was first restored, the expectation—the hope—was that the channels would develop on their own. They did, but slowly. Nature works, but sometimes that work is slow. Modeling showed that channel formation could take eighty years.

That was time, everyone felt, that the Stilly Chinook did not have. Thus the massive intervention. Now the wait begins, again, to see how the salmon respond. “We build the marsh to what we think the salmon life state is, but did we do the right thing?” she asks, as she navigates through that most modern of wending rivers, the interstate. “And was it worth it?” She is quiet. These are difficult questions that stray outside of ecology, into sociology, into different types of values. But those questions, in their way, are also a bit beside the point. The right thing, the wrong thing—those are binary distinctions in a space where boundaries between land and water are fluid. Howe and her colleagues will do what they can, and then see if it is enough.