By Hanna Michaud
Washington Conservation Corps Crew Member
My name is Hanna Michaud, and I had the opportunity to work with the Nooksack Salmon Enhancement Association (NSEA) as a part of the Washington Conservation Corps Crew (WCC), from October of 2020 until September of 2021. During my time with NSEA on the WCC crew, the work we did was primarily in the field, focused around restoring riparian habitat for salmon and other wildlife along rivers and creeks. In the fall, winter, and spring seasons my crew spent most of our time planting native trees and shrubs along riparian banks of rivers, creeks and surrounding wetlands on NSEA sites, to improve erosion and provide eventual creek cover to create colder waters for salmon. The summer months were primarily spent removing invasive species from the same sites where we had recently planted native species, to help the natives thrive! Other projects my crew worked on (often hand in hand with the NSEA field crew) included participating in in-stream salmon enhancement projects like fish salvage in dry summer creek beds, helping remove significant fish passage barriers, and improving creek channel structures for optimal flow patterns and salmon habitat. We got to work directly with landowners who were often equally as interested and motivated to make improvements to their backyard salmon habitat, which was exciting! One of my personal roles with NSEA included aiding in the native plant nursery organization and mapping, taking inventory counts and updating this data in the database to keep track of ingoing and outgoing plants, and potting bare root plants for the nursery.
I was glad to be able to work with NSEA as my crew’s sponsor for my second and final year in the WCC. Our crew was lucky enough to work based out of NSEA’s beautiful campus, as well as getting to work hand in hand with many of the amazing NSEA staff. As an environmentalist, it’s clear that NSEA’s values are extremely relevant and the work that they do is endlessly important, especially in this day and age. It was fulfilling to work with an organization that shares my values and that puts in so much effort to better the environment to improve native salmon habitat and the riparian ecosystems involved, as well as educating the public on these topics. I even got to spend a day with the children participating in the first ever daycare/ salmon focused education program based on NSEA’s campus, where they were taught important values related to caring for the land and salmon, highlighting the importance of educating youth on environmental topics.
Overall, working with NSEA and seeing on a daily basis the effort everyone there puts in to improve riparian habitats for salmon was really inspiring to me, and is motivation to continue my future education and career in the environmental field!
30 for Thirty #19