Todd Woodard, a Samish Indian Nation natural resources technician, paused near Thomas Creek to show a group of eighth-graders a recently excavated channel. It was dug to provide fish with a place to shelter when the stream is running high.

“We’ve had a ton of waterfowl here already,” Woodard said.

The birds are a sign that land beside the creek is returning to a more natural habitat, a process that is helped by the native-tree plantings.

The 40 eighth-graders took a bus from Allen Elementary School on March 11 to help plant 100 shore pines as part of the Samish’s $110,000 restoration project to improve salmon habitat and water quality in the creek.

The water-filled channel Woodard indicated is one of three channels cut into the south bank of Thomas Creek near the intersection of Kelleher and District Line roads.

The Samish, which acquired the land about five years ago, worked with a number of stakeholders, including the dairy farmer who leases the tribe’s 47 acres along the creek.

Sidney DeBoer, the farmer who leased the land for 50 years, said the land the Samish wanted for the project wasn’t the best for farming.

“It was lower ground, which wasn’t too valuable to me — a lot of water standing there,” DeBoer said.

Crews removed the blackberries that once acted as a buffer between the creek and the nearby field, where dairy cows grazed in silage. Saplings and starts of spruce, western red cedar, big leaf maple, ash, alder bitter cherry, willow and hard-hack were planted along the channels and creek.

The trees and brush will shade the water, cooling it to temperatures that salmon prefer, and buffer the waterway from manure in nearby fields, Woodard said.

Thomas Creek is used by coho and chum salmon and steelhead and cutthroat trout.

The project took roughly 10 acres out of farm production. DeBoer said he doesn’t have any problem with the restoration project as long as it uses swampy land that isn’t good for his needs.

Removing acreage from farm production has been cause for consternation in Skagit County. This project, however, has buy-in from the agricultural community.

The project is part of the Skagit Drainage and Fish Initiative, an agreement that allows drainage districts to continue to maintain waterways used by salmon and other migrating fish and allows tribes and environmental groups to restore habitat, said Steve Sakuma, a commissioner for Drainage District 14. The district maintains drainage in the Thomas Creek watershed to prevent farm fields from flooding or becoming too wet to grow crops.

“It was a very collaborative effort,” said Sakuma, who also is a member of the Puget Sound Partnership Leadership Council, which is focused on improving water and habitat quality. “We gain from the standpoint that the overall drainage system is better, and they get fish habitat and a restoration project that makes sense.”

Getting all the players on board, planning the project and seeking funds took about three years, said Christine Woodward, Samish director of natural resources.

This type of project requires patience and an understanding that drainage must be done differently, Sakuma said.

All sides have to give a little to get what they want, said Steve Hinton, director of habitat restoration for the Skagit River System Cooperative, which found funding for the project and provided the engineering work. The cooperative is a natural resources agency of the Swinomish and the Sauk-Suiattle Indian tribes.

Mike Shelby, executive director of the Western Washington Agricultural Association, said farmers’ concerns about high-water events were worked out.

Prior to the drainage and fish initiative, officials at the state Department of Fish and Wildlife and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers took a dim view of some of the maintenance work done by the drainage districts, Shelby said. The laws protecting fish and drainage districts were both strong, and conflicts between the statutes had not been resolved either in court or in the Legislature, Shelby said.

“Prior to the agreement, we kept getting shut down by the Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Army Corps,” Shelby said.

Dike district commissioners have had standoffs with state and federal officials along side waterways, Shelby said.

“That’s what prompted us to say we can’t keep working like this,” he said.

Similar projects are in the works. Shelby said it’s hoped some of these other restoration projects may prevent ongoing problems and reduce the need for drainage maintenance, Shelby said.

The Samish are participating in the federal Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program, which pays farmers to take environmentally sensitive land out of production to restore wildlife habitat and safeguard water quality.

The work along the creek has prompted at least two other landowners in the area to consider the federal enhancement program, Samish and cooperative officials said.

“Farmers and environmentalists don’t have to fight,” said Woodard, the Samish natural resources technician. “Dairy farmers don’t want to feel like they have a target on their back.”

DeBoer said he’s been contacted by the federal enhancement program but hadn’t decided whether he will participate. If he agreed to be part of the program, it would just involve a narrow, swampy strip along the creek where blackberries are growing, he said.

Woodward, the Samish natural resources director, gestured at the freshly planted saplings of shore pine and the other trees, which have bright green shoots of new growth. 

“In 10 years, this will be a forest,” she said.

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