Hoy / Scott Watershed Society presented to the City of Coquitlam Council on January 16, 2023. Speaking on our behalf was HSWS president, Kyle Uno and vice-president and hatchery manager, Tyler Storgaard.
Kyle Uno also introduced other members from the society who were in attendance: Anne Woosnam, Robbin Whachell and Maya Uno.
The purpose of presenting was to introduce ourselves to the council, talk about the partnership we have with the City, and then provide some of our future vision for the Society and how we can work with the City to achieve that vision.
The hatchery rearing pond was originally constructed by the Brewer family to raise trout. In 1995, with help from the City and the Optimist Club, the pond was enclosed and converted to raise salmon and the hatchery building was constructed in 1997.
In 2002 our Society was officially formed. We have currently about 65 members from high school students to seniors and are run by a 9-member Board of Directors. All of our members are volunteers. We operate with a small grant from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, as well as any donations we receive and specific grants we apply for, including the Spirit Grant.
In partnership with the DFO and the City we operate a salmon enhancement program and raise both Chum and Coho salmon. We currently are incubating about 35,000 Chum salmon eggs and about 16,800 Coho. We do a broodstock collection of Chum and Coho salmon from the creek every Fall and do an egg take/fertilization process at the hatchery. The Chum will be released at the fry stage in a couple of months while we will keep up to 5,000 of the Coho salmon in our rearing pond until they are about 18 months old when they will be released at our Salmon Leave Home Festival.
We also operate a number of programs to support our creeks and to keep them healthy for our salmon. One of those programs is storm drain markings on nearby streets that drain into Hoy Creek. These serve as a reminder to people that anything put down our drains empty directly into Hoy Creek and many fish-bearing streams. Tyler will talk about some of the challenges we face in our creeks when residents pour illegal substances down our storm drains and the impact that can have on our salmon, both wild salmon in the creek and our hatchery salmon.
With the City’s assistance, for the last year, we have had a real-time instream water quality monitoring program that measures the temperature, conductivity, turbidity and pH of Hoy creek at our hatchery site. The system will provide us with alerts if any of the measurements exceed a certain level. So we often see the alerts if there is a spill in the creek or during periods of heavy rain in the winter time due to the road salt runoff. We also monitor the water quality in two other areas of the creek with help of DFO data loggers. This data will assist us in determining the overall health of our creek and the effect it has on our salmon population. We were also just recently successful in our Spirit Grant application to buy additional data loggers for our rearing pond. This will give us real-time data on the health of our rearing pond.
Throughout the year we maintain the trail along Hoy creek by cleaning up any garbage but every summer when it’s safe for young fish to wade through the creek we will do an extensive cleanup of garbage in or on the creek banks. For the last two summers, we have concentrated on Scott Creek on Runnel Drive across from Value Village as well as along Aberdeen Ave near Rona. There tends to be a lot of garbage in these areas most likely due to some homeless camps that we have found near the creek.
Another program we manage in the riparian areas of the creek is invasive species removal. We tend to focus on removing Himalayan blackberry along the creek banks as it can impede native plants from growing along the banks providing shade for the creek and lower water temperatures. The city assists us through its Bad Seed program and with providing native plants for re-planting these areas. We are also active committee members of the City’s Invasive Species Advisory Committee.
Partnership with the City and Future Vision
A big part of what we do is in public education and awareness of our local environment and the fact we have salmon-bearing streams in our urban environment. We co-host with the City the popular Salmon Come Home Festival every October and in May, the Salmon Leave Home Festival. These festivals were paused during the pandemic but we were pleased to have the Salmon Come Home event return to normal this past year. We also host a number of tours for school groups, Scouts, and other community organizations, like the Douglas College Ecology program.
HSWS had identified three capital projects in 2020 that will be needed to support the Society, watershed and community for years to come.
As the Coquitlam City Centre area continues to grow around Hoy/Scott Creeks, our ask is to be included in the Official Community Plan (OCP) with a new education centre.
Recognizing a new education centre is a larger long-term goal from the identification to the implementation stage, we would like to ask for support from the City to construct a chainlink enclosure onto the existing chain link lean-to.
This extension would allow for the placement of an already procured circular 6’ tub for the hatchery to support multiple species. Currently, we are not able to hold broodstock (adult spawners) or fry of both coho and chum salmon.
As the climate and environment around us continue to change, the salmon returns are more challenged. This past fall, we witnessed both chum and coho returning within the same period over several weeks and that complicates spawning of the different species.
Hoy Creek Linear Park has existing structures from the previous landowner, and one area adjacent to the hatchery is failing. The lower pond is fed from the coho rearing pond is leaking from the CIP dam and the CIP outlet channel has degraded significantly.
HSWS has taken the first step with DFO for planning/engineering and has applied for federal funding for the construction costs of the circular tub and to remove the existing failing structures to naturalize the pond and its outlet to provide fish rearing habitat for generations.
If the value of our identification stage estimate is not funded by our initial application, we will be seeking other sources from both Federal and Provincial programs. HSWS, with DFO, has targeted a construction schedule for this summer (June-August 2023) for our initial phase.
In response to the presentation, several councillors asked questions. The Society was asked to connect and meet with respective City staff to see how they can assist with this process.
Watch the video of the presentation HERE on the City’s website.