Hanging out, as I do, with people who make their living reading the land, I often find myself wishing I could get inside their heads. What does he see when he plucks an ear of corn and picks at a kernel? What does she see when she stands in a forest, paint gun in hand, preparing to mark trees for harvest? Turn over a rock in a stream and one sees what? Put a flower under the hand lens and it communicates to whom?
Recently, it was Scott Wixsom's head I wanted to get inside of. Scott, who works for the Green Mountain National Forest, was in charge of designing our team's current habitat restoration project on the Batten Kill, and is on the river now supervising the installation of cover and shelter structures. Scott is a reader of rivers. The objects he's having placed in the Kill, and where, help me understand a little bit better what he sees and what this famous river of ours really wants to be.
Valley bottom rivers like the main stem Batten Kill are naturally meandering things. Wild valley bottom rivers meander wildly, accessing as much of the floodplain as they have water for. But even in the Batten Kill, where the stream channel has been lowered by people activities, there's a meandering quality to the water itself.
Think of it as a line stretching from the top of a watershed to the bottom, delineating the deepest part of a channel. This line or "thalweg", German for "valley way," bounces from side to side between the banks, dropping sediments on the inside curve where the water is slower, and scouring out sediments and creating pools on the outside, where the current whizzes.
Pools are good for trout Ñ their waters are colder, their depths provide cover, so Scott likes pools. His restoration design promotes them, by enhancing the bouncing back and forth of the thalweg from one side of the river to the other.
On my visit, I saw bar builders Ñ a series of boulders and root wad structures cabled into the bank Ñ designed to slow water and increase deposition. They'll narrow the channel and deepen the thalweg, creating a varied cross section where before the Kill was uniformly wide and shallow and trout-less.
All pools have a pour point, a riffle, and this too is an important habitat feature. It's where water picks up oxygen.
It might be a good trout spawning location, because water velocities there are fast enough to keep the cobble substrate free of the silts and clays that reduce spawning success.
Where the river allows it, Scott will try to create pool-riffle sequences frequently, at a spacing shown to be the most stable in rivers like the Kill.
Then there's the fine tuning of the design. Scott and his National Forest colleagues Chris Alexopoulis, Justin Myer, and Keith Sargent protect the banks from too much thalweg by installing root wad structures and tying in whole trees along the edges.
The tangle of wood will not only protect the banks, it will also provide cover and shelter for fish. And in the pools themselves, the crew is placing huge pieces of rock stacked in staggered fashion.
The resulting interstices are good hiding places for trout needing a rest, or waiting for a meal to come downstream.
Whole trees and huge boulders require heavy equipment and able operators and ours are out there.
Moses Sheldon, who works for logger Bruce Waite, runs the skidder. Moe delivers materials to Dean Catellier, from Noel Dydo Inc., who operates the excavator with a thumb, very carefully. The team has worked together before, and it shows.
They hope to restore cover and shelter to a half-mile of Batten Kill in the next several days, and it appears now they'll do it swimmingly.
The project is sponsored by the Batten Kill Watershed Alliance. In addition to the GMNF, other participants this year include Southwestern Vermont Trout Unlimited, Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, and the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation.
Thanks to the Lesko, Stuart, Murray, Wyman, Pelham, Weber, Giglio, Sullivan, and Peters families for permitting work on their properties.
Shelly Stiles is the district manager of the Bennington County Conservation District, whose mission is promoting rural livelihoods and protecting natural resources in southwestern Vermont. See their Web site at www.bccdvt.org
This column appeared in the Bennington Banner in September 2008, as one of the BCCD's Conservation Currents pieces, a bi-weekly feature written by BCCD board and staff members since August 2006.