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Warden’s report -Visit to ER #76 – Fraser River Islands, April 30 2005

Posted April 30, 2005 | Categories : 76,BC Parks,Human Disturbance,Restoration,Species List,Warden Reports |

Visit to ER #76 – Fraser River Islands, April 30, 2005

Focus of trip was to clean up garbage on lower south island and so our trip was made in Provincial Parks 18′ motor boat with seasonal Park Ranger.

Note on attached real-time hydrometric data, how high the water level was and how quickly the water level had come up in the past week. On April 21 it was around 1 metre and had risen by April 30 to 3 metres. This was unseasonally high and was due to the extremely warm weather experienced by the entire province from April 18 onwards.

We launched at 11:00 pm at Island 22 and motored downriver in main channel, keeping an eye on the depth sounder. The internal channels of the EcoReserve were all flooded with moving river water. We motored to the downstream tip of the EcoReserve and very cautiously and slowly rounded the tip where we saw three heron feeding. We tried to enter by motoring upstream into the internal channel between the two downstream islands. The depth sounder went down to 2 ft and it was not possible to motor in.

We next motored back upriver in the main river channel to the upriver end of the island with the garbage on it, and tied the boat up in a back eddy. There was loud chorus of singing frogs coming from the internal slough waterway of the EcoReserve. We walked to the site to assess the extent of garbage, did some preliminary ‘packaging’ of the garbage, determined that it was best to carry the debris across island to the outer side (south) where the island was eroding (but looked possible to tie up the motor boat to load in the garbage) and then returned to the boat for lunch. A heron walked along in the channel there and caught and swallowed several small fish as we were eating our lunch.

We worked at the site for 2 1/2 hours, and carried all garbage to the south side of the island, ready to be loaded into the motor boat. Next we motored the boat down to the eroding and steep island bank, tied up the boat there. With the garbage all quickly stored, we motored back to Island 22 and were on land there by 4:00 pm.