Coos Watershed Association group nears completion of Kentuck Creek project

The Coos Watershed Association is a nonprofit organization that develops and carries out collaborative watershed rehabilitation projects with interested groups and landowners.

Many community members know the Coos Watershed Association for the events they put on throughout the year, but not everyone gets to see the work they do behind the scenes to restore the local watershed.

Members of the Coos Watershed Association recently got together with a local landowner and project partners from the Wild Salmon Center to reflect on their Kentuck Creek habitat restoration project.

The Kentuck Creek sub-basin, east of Coos Bay, has been heavily impacted by agriculture, forestry and mining. Yet, these tidal wetlands are critical for many fish and wildlife species.

“It’s difficult to maintain a good balance between the health of the streams, the creeks and the ponds that are here, and also run an Ag-heavy operation on this land,” said Steve Colberg, the owner of the Kentuck Creek project land.

“I’ve always been a little restoration minded and conscious of our impacts here. So, I partnered with the Watershed Association to see what we could do,” he said.

Dan Draper, restoration project manager for the Coos Watershed Association, said the Kentuck Project fit well within the organization’s goals.

“This project had two landowners that were really in alignment with what we wanted to do when we started talking about it in 2021,” Draper said.

“We try to align the restoration techniques with the landowner’s future goals. I think in this project we’ve nailed that,” he said.

More than 60 percent of tidal wetlands in the Coos River Estuary have been diked, drained or filled.

This resulted in channelized streams and ditches that are not good for fish habitat. Tide gates and dredging have also degraded water quality and altered habitats where fish spawn and rear.

“Salmon work their way through the rivers and bay at the bottom of Kentuck Basin. Then they work their way through this middle ag-operation area. Eventually, those adult fish move up into spawning areas,” Draper said.

“A lot of this property had areas that were difficult for fish to pass and get to the upper habitat to spawn. We worked a lot on connections to get the salmon back to where they once were,” he said.

Some of the goals for the Kentuck project were to improve fish passage and floodplain connectivity by developing three freshwater ponds, increasing shade with native plants, creating buffers between livestock use and stream habitats, and improving water quality.

Over the past three years, the terrain at the Kentuck Project has changed drastically.

What was once open fields and a channelized drain, is now a landscape teeming with birds flying over ponds, and a healthy stream with culverts for fish to pass through. Woody debris and pools within the stream provide habitat for fish rest and hide.

Freshly planted trees and shrubs – dogwood, willows, red cedar, maples and other native species – sprinkled throughout the grounds provide a buffer between natural and agricultural land.

The Kentuck project is now about 90 percent complete.

Once the crossings are installed and the riparian buffers are established, this project has the potential to improve and increase summer and winter fish rearing and access to spawning habitat.

Those involved with the project have already seen an increase in Coho salmon.

“I’ve been with the Watershed Association for 21 years, and I did aquatic habitat surveys on this property when it was a sheep farm probably back in 2007 or 2008,” Draper said.

“It was neat to return back to this project more than a decade later and start looking at how to restore this landscape,” he said.

Kentuck project landowner Colberg said the restoration process changed how he views his land. When he bought the property, he had goals to run a small agriculture operation.

“Since the project started and we’ve worked through it over the last couple of years, that goal has changed a lot. I don’t think I have as much of a desire to run the ag-operation. To me, it’s become far more important to leave this in a restored state,” Colberg said.

“I saw the changes that were being made, how important it was to do that restoration work, and to keep it in that state post-restoration. That was what changed my mind,” he said.

Although Colberg personally decided not to pursue agriculture on his ecologically restored property, he was able to see how restoration and agriculture could work together.

“Sometimes I think these projects are looked at as removing functionality – taking away the ability for lands to produce from an agricultural perspective. What we found is even though we lost some of the bottom land that was viable for grazing during the summer, we gained so much more functionality for the rest of the property through the wintertime,” Colberg said.

“We are not wiping out the ability for those lands to produce from an agricultural perspective. They can still produce very well. Also, this was a huge benefit to the watershed, which in turn, becomes a benefit to all the generations that come after us,” he said.

The Kentuck restoration is one of the projects led by the Coos Basin Coho Partnership, a 15-member group dedicated to the recovery of Oregon Coast Coho salmon in the Coos basin. It is funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a focused investment partnership grant from the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board.

For more information about the Coos Watershed Association and their restoration projects, visit their Facebook page, or go to their website at www.cooswatershed.org.

For more on the Coos Basin Coho Partnership, visit cooscoho.org and for the Coast Coho Partnership, managed by the Wild Salmon Center, go to coastcoho.org.