A deer mouse made it difficult for Garrett Sitting Dog to read the numbers on a hanging scale as the small mammal wriggled and crawled up the scale.

“This one is crazy strong,” said Sitting Dog, a wildlife specialist for the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe.

After the mouse calmed for a second to get a reading, Sitting Dog tucked the mouse between his fingers to lay a ruler on its underside to get the length and check for the sex.

The deer mouse was one of several sampled this fall for the tribe’s new small mammal data collection, part of a larger effort to get an idea of what critters are on tribal properties, Sitting Dog said.

The tribe also conducted a bird survey over the summer and will survey amphibians next spring.

The surveys are taking place at 10 locations throughout the Port Gamble S’Klallam Reservation, plus two newly purchased properties—the Hansville Block (an 873-acre timber property, north of the reservation) and Miller Lake (a 265-acre property, south of the reservation). The study sites cover a variety of ecosystems, including clearcuts, old growth, second growth, beaver ponds and riparian areas.

Small mammal trappings happen in the fall because the young have moved on from their parents, and there are no pregnant females or babies to trap, said Dylan Bergman, the wildlife biologist for the Point No Point Treaty Council who helped design the study. The tribe also received training and borrowed traps from the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, which ran a similar wildlife study in the Elwha watershed.

Bird surveys occur in the summer to ensure they are documenting species that typically breed and nest in North America during the spring and summer but migrate south for the winter, in addition to the year-round residents.  Birds are much more vocal during the breeding season, making them easier to identify. Amphibians will be surveyed in the spring in riparian areas, when there are typically egg masses.

With the tribe’s newly purchased properties, the tribe wants to learn about what animals are living there, which could help with planning for habitat use.

“We also want to start thinking about what habitats are most in need of conservation,” Bergman said. “If there’s going to be new housing or other developments, we have the baseline data that can potentially help with that decision-making process.”

Simultaneously, the tribe’s habitat department is focusing on connectivity by mapping wetlands and other critical habitat.

“Ideally, combining the data of the small mammal collection with the habitat planning will start creating a picture of the natural resources on the reservation and other tribal-owned properties,” Bergman said.

A deer mouse about to be released after tribal scientists collect data on it. Story and photos: Tiffany Royal

The post Small critters important to habitat, tribal lands management appeared first on Northwest Treaty Tribes.

These are a few signs of summer giving way to fall that Tulalip high school students learned to notice in an alpine meadow at Stevens Pass in September. The Heritage High School students were immersed in a scavenger hunt for plant types in the meadow in preparation for restoration work at a nearby, berry-rich landscape co-managed by the Tulalip Tribes and the U.S. Forest Service. 

Beneath mountain goat artwork made by her brother and placards describing some of the Coast Salish history of the Cascade Range, Melissa Gobin, environmental and education outreach coordinator for the Tulalip natural resources department, described some of the cultural resources traditionally found in the alpine region, and threats now faced by the effects of climate change. 

“Our natural resources are dwindling away,” she said. 

A loss of seasonal snowpack is contributing to the changes. This year, a snowpack drought contributed to poor berry development, leaving the fruit shriveled and tough, Gobin said. 

Lindsey Crofoot, an Interior Salish and Alaska Native descendant who teaches native environmental science and food sovereignty at Northwest Indian College, said the Lushootseed name for this particular mountain valley means guardian spirit of snow, and healthy snowpack historically fed a lush community of plants. 

“The berries up here were endless,” she said. 

As the environment changes, practicing and passing down traditional land stewardship skills is essential. 

“These mountain meadows are becoming more and more and more endangered because of climate change,” Crofoot said. “These plants are in a very precarious place right now. It’s our job to protect them.” 

Accompanied by cultural experts and chaperones, students ventured up into the Stevens Pass ski area, taking a ski lift above the trees to a meadow awash in the greens, yellows, oranges and reds of the season, and surrounded by rocky peaks. 

There was a time when many tribal communities would meet in mountain meadows like this one, tending the land and trading resources, Crofoot said. Before the Tulalip reservation was established along the marine shoreline, tribal members followed salmon up the rivers and creeks into this landscape.  

“We were put in the Puget Sound, but we weren’t only from the Puget Sound,” Gobin said. “This is also where we gathered, where we would gather wool from the goats for weaving and cedar and berries. We want to make sure we gather in these areas still and practice our traditions.”  

The students, many in the alpine environment for the first time, looked for specific plants by color, leaf shape and other clues. While they searched, Crofoot offered lessons about some of the plant species. 

Fireweed, for example, is a flowering plant with a stalk that can be eaten in a manner similar to asparagus and is good for calming an upset stomach. As the plant develops from purple flower cones to seed, it produces a cotton-like material that can supplement sources of wool in the weaving process. 

“This plant, at every stage of its life from sprouting to sending out its fluffy seeds in the wind, was a part of Coast Salish culture,” Crofoot said. 

The following week, the students helped Tulalip natural resources with restoration work at swədaʔx̌ali, a meadow the tribe co-manages for huckleberry harvest. 

At swədaʔx̌ali, meaning place of the mountain huckleberry, Tulalip has worked across several years to restore healthy conditions for the berry-producing plants, repairing soil damage from recreational vehicles, removing conifers that shade the berries out and reintroducing controlled fire to the landscape. Including youth in the process has been essential. 

“We need our youth to steward these resources into the future so we don’t lose them,” Gobin said. 

The alpine meadow experience is one of several themed, multi-day field trips organized by Tulalip natural resources to support cultural education for tribal youth. Other experiences have focused on salmon, camas meadows, the snow cycle and youth-elder knowledge sharing. 

Above: A group of Tulalip youth gathers around in an alpine meadow, working together to identify plant types as part of a scavenger hunt organized as a cultural activity by the tribe’s natural resources department. Photos and story by Kimberly Cauvel

The post Future stewards explore mountain meadows appeared first on Northwest Treaty Tribes.

The project is part of the Listen Up Collaborative, a partnership among the Point No Point Treaty Council, Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe and others.

The goal is to improve habitat for birds through restoration, acoustic monitoring and data sharing.

Bird populations globally are declining precipitously, said Dylan Bergman, wildlife biologist for the Point No Point Treaty Council, a natural resources consortium that supports the Jamestown and Port Gamble S’Klallam tribes.

“Birds are struggling,” he said. “Birds also are a pretty good indicator of overall ecosystem health.”

With climate change and potential changes to forestry management, including timber harvest and public recreation in the forest, there are impacts to bird habitat, Bergman said.

“If a certain species was around in a certain area for a really long time, and then they’re suddenly gone, then that’s an indicator—what’s happened?” Bergman said.

With funding from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the group purchased AudioMoth recorders to place in western Washington forests. For the next few years, Bergman will set up recorders at 12 locations within the Dungeness, Quilcene and Hamma Hamma river valleys to get a sampling across different timber environments, management areas and elevations, plus forests and ecosystems, that birds prefer.

The devices are set to capture audio recordings in the early morning, mid-morning and evening after sunset, all times when birds are most active.

“I am curious about species diversity within these different ecosystems, and I want to have a baseline data set for how that changes over time,” he said.

The data may help prioritize habitat types, especially if there are certain plants or wetland areas that offer something unique, he said. It also provides a baseline for comparison as the landscape changes.

“We should be nervous about changes in bird behavior and populations,” he said. “When we’re seeing those declines happen globally across thousands of species, this means we are fundamentally doing something very wrong, and we want to support ecosystems that are still sustaining large and diverse bird populations.”

Concern about the decline of birds across North America is shared by Adrian Wolf, Great Peninsula Conservancy stewardship director and founder of the Listen Up Collaborative. 

“There are 1 billion fewer western forest birds than there were 50 years ago, and this warning should be treated like the canary no longer singing in the coalmine,” Wolf said. “Many of our forestlands are unhealthy for birds, and if so, they are likely unhealthy for humans.” 

Other partners in the project include the Jefferson Land Trust, Bainbridge Island Land Trust, Northwest Natural Resource Group and Kitsap County Parks.

“The collaborative highlights the ‘power of numbers’ concept,” Wolf said. “Things can get better if you join forces and work together for the common good.”

Dylan Bergman, PNPTC wildlife biologist, removes an audio recorder that collected bird calls for several months in the spring. Story and photos: Tiffany Royal

The post Audio project assesses bird use across habitats appeared first on Northwest Treaty Tribes.

The Lummi Nation was honored in July with the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s PISCES award for performance and innovation at its Gooseberry Point Wastewater Treatment Plant.

For treaty tribes, clean water is essential to protecting treaty resources such as salmon, crab and clams, as well as southern resident orcas and other fish and wildlife in Puget Sound.

“We’re still looking for better ways to save water,” said Vendean (Jim) Washington, member of the Lummi Indian Business Council, when accepting the award. “We’re still looking to that future and how we do this. We’re thinking in a big way from the Fraser River all the way out to the southern Puget Sound … It’s ours to protect.”

Wastewater from toilets and drains contains nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus that in large amounts are harmful to sea life. Excess nutrient pollution can deplete dissolved oxygen and lead to harmful algal blooms that sicken and kill fish and other marine mammals.

As the human population continues to expand in western Washington, treating municipal and industrial wastewater becomes even more of a challenge Utilities tasked with cleaning up wastewater find themselves in need of expensive upgrades to handle massive amounts of sewage.

The Washington state Department of Ecology nominated Lummi for the award as an example of how small communities including tribes can achieve large-scale infrastructure improvements

The Lummi Tribal Sewer and Water District used about $15 million from the Clean Water State Revolving Fund to upgrade its tribe’s Gooseberry Point Wastewater Treatment Plant in 2025 with climate-resilient engineering to endure sea level rise, high tides and extreme weather.

Nutrient Management Exchange

Other estuaries across the country have navigated wastewater management challenges similar to what Puget Sound is experiencing.

To learn from one another, NWIFC and the Puget Sound Partnership invited representatives from Chesapeake Bay, Long Island Sound and San Francisco Bay to join Puget Sound treatment plant operators, utility managers, technical experts and regulators for a Nutrient Management Exchange this fall.

The two-day event at the Suquamish Clearwater Casino Resort focused on practical solutions to wastewater treatment upgrades, permitting approaches, funding strategies and other nutrient-reduction efforts.

Chesapeake Bay, Long Island Sound and San Francisco Bay are using Clean Water Act authority to reduce nutrients, increase dissolved oxygen and improve water quality. In Virginia, for example, state law requires wastewater treatment plants to meet new equipment treatment thresholds by 2030 via new technology. If a plant uses a state grant to install equipment prior to 2030, it must meet the new threshold before the deadline.

Regulatory requirements and technological advancements have led East Coast wastewater treatment plants to make upgrades that boost their ability to remove nutrients before treated water is flushed into the estuaries.

The information exchange explored ways these and other funding, regulatory and technical solutions could be implemented in Washington state to strengthen collaboration among tribes, utilities, regulators and scientists to reduce nutrient pollution in Puget Sound.

Above: The Lummi Nation’s Gooseberry Point Wastewater Treatment Plant removes harmful nutrients from wastewater before is it released into Bellingham Bay. Recent upgrades earned the plant a PISCES award from the state Department of Ecology for advancing the protection of  water quality, tribal resources and habitat essential to species like salmon, orcas, marbled murrelets, and rockfish. Photo: Lummi Nation. Story: Kari Neumeyer.

The post Nutrient Exchange connects wastewater experts to help keep estuaries clean appeared first on Northwest Treaty Tribes.

Dungeness crab science in Puget Sound tends to focus on larval and adult stages, and not as much on the juvenile stage.

That’s how Point No Point Treaty Council (PNPTC) staff found themselves shoveling and sorting through samples of mud, sand, sediment and algae on a hot summer morning looking for crab the size of a pinky fingernail.

By counting and measuring juvenile crab, shellfish managers can use the data to improve population size assessments and better understand crab growth in Puget Sound, said Austin Paul, PNPTC shellfish manager. PNPTC is a natural resources consortium that supports the Jamestown S’Klallam and Port Gamble S’Klallam tribes. 

Dungeness crab is important culturally and economically, especially with declines of finfish populations. Collectively, tribes in western Washington harvest more than 5 million pounds of Dungeness crab a year.

Samples for the study are being pulled from two sites: by Shine Tidelands, just north of the Hood Canal Bridge, and at Old Fort Townsend. These sites were used when a similar study was conducted in the 1980s, so there is historical data for comparison, Paul said.

The latest study is piggybacking on the efforts of the Pacific Northwest Crab Research Group, a partnership of tribes, universities, and local and federal agencies studying crab in the region.

Population assessment is one of the group’s main goals, with efforts focused on studying larvae using light traps, and looking at migration patterns of adult crab.

“Now we’re just trying to fill knowledge gaps with the juvenile work,” Paul said. “By collectively looking at the larval and juvenile stages, our hope is that we can feed that information into a more complex model, like a stock assessment, where we can learn about the health of the population, in addition to how many adults we think there are available to harvest.”

Dungeness crab have a complex life history with three distinct phases. The crab start in the larval stage, when the eggs are first fertilized and float around in the water before eventually swimming on their own, a process that takes up to six months.

They then transition into the juvenile stage, which is distinct because of their size and where they live. The crab in this stage move closer to the beach, living and growing in the intertidal zone, before heading to the subtidal zone as adults.

“A lot of these crab populations are kind of cyclical,” Paul said. “Every 10 years or so, there will be a high and a low, but it seems like there are some areas that are just on the decline. I think the more information we can get about the larval stage and the juvenile stage, the better understanding we’ll have about the health of the population.” 

Point No Point Treaty Council shellfish manager Austin Paul, left, sorts through seaweed to search through for juvenile Dungeness crab while project biologist Tori Cantelow records data. Story and photos: Tiffany Royal

The post The forgotten stage: Juvenile Dungeness crab appeared first on Northwest Treaty Tribes.

“It’s an area Port Gamble S’Klallam has put a lot of resources into,” said Hans Daubenberger, the tribe’s senior research scientist. “We’ve sampled two of the stations in Hood Canal and Admiralty Inlet for a decade and were heavily involved with the development of the program.”

There are two major problems with the loss of the funding for the regional Salish Sea Marine Survival Project, Daubenberger said. The first is losing the ability to consistently gather data.

“The value in having the long-term data set is so we can watch trends,” he said. “If there are gaps, it’s hard to determine what happened if a change occurred.”

The program was initially formed to look at why there has been poor salmon survival in the Salish Sea from both a top down (marine mammal predation) and bottom up (food availability) perspective.

The downside of using a data set as a predictor of animal behavior is the need to gather it over a long period of time. The irony of the funding loss is that the tribe was just getting to the point where the database was becoming valuable as a salmon management tool, he said.

“For a chinook salmon, which has a life span of up to 5 years, teasing out the relationship between fish abundance and food availability (zooplankton) needs a really long data set and we were just starting to get to that point,” Daubenberger said.

The other significant impact is possibly losing support for the zooplankton analysis, which is done by the University of Washington.

“It’s very difficult to train new people if you don’t have the expertise in place to train them,” Daubenberger said. “It takes a long time to become proficient at identifying zooplankton, especially down to the species level.”

While funding was cut in June, the tribe sampled through the summer at both stations but will start limiting data collection to just the Admiralty Inlet station this fall and continue gathering data as they can. 

“We are working with our project partners on how to identify project funding sources to fill the gap that’s been left,” Daubenberger said. “We hope that the program gets reestablished under another mechanism because it’s an important data set that can’t be replaced.” 

A chinook salmon is tagged near the Hood Canal Bridge so scientists can track its migration patterns. Story and photos: Tiffany Royal

The post Tribe feeling impact of marine survival project funding cuts appeared first on Northwest Treaty Tribes.

With low water levels becoming more common in the Dungeness River, the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe has been monitoring flow conditions to support adult chinook upstream migration. 

In the last few seasons, the tribe and Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife have worked together to help chinook salmon by modifying potential barrier riffles.

After identifying choke points where fish appear to be impeded as flows decrease in mid-to-late summer, the tribe and a Washington Conservation Corps crew used river rocks and aqua dams (small yellow rubber booms) to create channels for chinook to swim through in the first few miles of the river.

For the past four years, it’s been necessary to create these riffles from August through October, said Hilton Turnbull, the tribe’s habitat biologist.

“The gravel bars and the riffles tend to get steeper for fish when there isn’t enough water in the river,” he said. “By temporarily manipulating the habitat, we’re hoping to build some hydraulic lift by creating a little deeper water channel for them to navigate.

“And we know it works. There can be hundreds of fish in a pool downstream of where we’re working, and as soon as we build these structures, we’ve observed fish moving upstream.”

If fish can successfully make it through the river’s lower 3 miles, they’re usually able to make it to the upper watershed because of the tribe’s other habitat restoration work, including installing logjams and fixing floodplain connectivity the past few decades, Turnbull said. But the water levels and habitat issues need to be addressed long term.

Much of the lower river’s habitat degradation is due to manmade changes to the watershed, including removal of large woody debris, and dike and levee construction that has constricted water flow.

In addition, the melting Olympic Mountain snowpack and glaciers have contributed to the problem.

One solution has been working with Sequim farmers to adjust irrigation schedules, which includes an agreement to reduce irrigation withdrawals starting at 120 cubic feet per second (cfs) and to halt diversion completely when the river hits 62.5 cfs. 

Additionally, irrigators have voluntarily joined a dry-year leasing program through Washington Water Trust, reducing diversion demand by as much as 8 cfs as well as a system-wide reduction for several 24-hour events, reducing diversion for as much as 25 cfs. 

These system-wide reductions are “pulse-flow” events and provide an improved flow for a certain period of time that allows fish to move upstream. In the dry-year leasing and pulse-flow events, Washington Water Trust pays the irrigators to support the water flow. The payments are intended to replace the cost of the crop that was not grown because of keeping water in the river.

Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe staff and Washington Conservation Corps crew members walk past yellow booms in the Dungeness River, which are temporary tools to improve riffle areas for salmon as they swim upriver to spawn. Story and photos: Tiffany Royal

The post Salmon in Dungeness River get help swimming upstream appeared first on Northwest Treaty Tribes.

The tribe has partnered with Washington Sea Grant to see whether the growing numbers of the voracious green crab are affecting native Dungeness crab.

After setting out several types of traps overnight, tribal staffers pulled the traps the next morning and recorded their elevation and data about the crab they caught: species, sex, size and whether they carried eggs.

With the same data recorded over time, the tribe and partners will learn more about the ratio of green crab to Dungeness, and which direction that trend is headed in.

“This is getting baseline data,” said Scott Mazzone, the tribe’s shellfish and marine fish biologist.

“We want to find out what’s normal. If we keep trapping every year, we might see an increase in green and decrease in Dungeness or vice versa.”

Invasive European green crab can destroy critical eelgrass, estuary and marsh habitats and prey on other shellfish. Their impacts on Dungeness crab need to be studied, given the importance of the native crab in Washington state and to tribal treaty rights and commerce, Mazzone said.

Many years of data will need to be gathered and analyzed to establish a correlation between the populations, and determine whether one has a direct effect on the other.

If green crab harmed the Dungeness crab fishery, Mazzone said, “it would mean heartache for communities up and down the West Coast.”

A staffer with the Quinault Indian Nation hands over a European green crab to be bagged as part of a study. Photo: Trevor Pyle

The post Quinault trapping invasive crab data appeared first on Northwest Treaty Tribes.

“We like to call them naive, and they’re learning the harsh realities of life,” said Ryan Crim, conservation hatchery manager for the Puget Sound Restoration Fund (PSRF) who oversaw the growth operation at its Manchester facility.

But the cockle seeds weren’t completely left to Mother Nature’s trials and tribulations. The seeds were tucked into geoduck tubes on a beach near Suquamish, the latest effort by the tribe to develop a cockle subsistence program for tribal members.

The traditional food has been hard to find on local beaches the past few decades, according to the elders who used to harvest them regularly.

But cockles have been showing up on their own in geoduck tubes on shellfish farms throughout Puget Sound, said Elizabeth Unsell, a Suquamish Tribe shellfish biologist. The tribe wanted to see if using geoduck tubes could help develop out-planting techniques.

Starting with broodstock from a wild population in Sequim Bay, the cockles were spawned at PSRF’s conservation hatchery in April.

“We know they do really well in Sequim Bay, and they’re the same genetic stock as the cockles in Suquamish, so there’s no issue with moving the individuals around,” Crim said. 

The tribe set out 150 geoduck tubes (some PVC, some mesh) on the beach in May. In June, they filled each tube with either 30 or 60 cockles, either all small or all large in size, and topped with a mesh net cap or left open. A group of control tubes were set up that didn’t have cockles but had mesh caps or no mesh caps.

The first monitoring in July showed visible growth and strong survival among some plot types, Unsell said. 

“It makes sense because there was lots of food in the water, so it was a pretty happy time for them to be planted,” Unsell said. “The algae and other plankton were like soup out there.”

The tribe also is learning how to outplant cockles to maximize the genetic diversity.

When spawning at the hatchery and after seed was produced, PSRF took samples to compare the genetic diversity of the offspring of different family sizes, and to compare them to wild populations found in the Salish Sea.

“We’re really hoping with this data we’ll be able to develop a hatchery protocol that produces genetically diverse seed that could be used to enhance wild populations without conferring any genetic risks,” Crim said. 

A cockle seed is measured for growth during the geoduck tube outplanting project. Story and photos: Tiffany Royal

The post Partnership experiments with cockle outplanting in geoduck tubes appeared first on Northwest Treaty Tribes.

For the past six summers, Tulalip tribal staff have participated in the ongoing study of juvenile salmon’s marine health—an indicator of the salmon’s chances of surviving years in the ocean and returning home to spawn. 

“This is a tape measure to see how much the fish grew before they go to deeper water,” said Mike Crewson, fisheries enhancement biologist for the Tulalip Tribes. “It’s been shown in past studies to be highly predictive of marine survival.”

The Bureau of Indian Affairs provided funding for the initial five years of this program but discontinued their funding in early 2025. The Tulalip Tribes and its partner Long Live the Kings managed to secure funding from the Salmon Recovering Funding Board to continue surveys for this year and 2027 but future funding is uncertain.

If the research doesn’t secure ongoing funding, valuable long-term data needed to understand salmon survival under a changing climate will be at risk. 

Researchers in this annual offshore monitoring program collect juvenile salmon using a purse seine, sampling their diet, length and weight. They also collect scales to analyze growth rates and DNA from wild fish and coded wire tags from hatchery fish to see what stocks they originated from. In addition, zooplankton samples are collected at each site along with recording other environmental conditions that could also help or hinder their growth and survival.

Samples from the fish collected throughout the sound are also available to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW), to help determine areas where fish may be exposed to high concentrations of toxic contaminants.

As in previous years, this year’s foray sampled the marine waters extending from Bellingham Bay to the San Juan Islands and throughout Puget Sound including the northern end of Hood Canal.

The study also surveys the abundance of forage fish such as herring, which serve as a key food source for salmon. 

“We view this as an annual diagnostic—a fish checkup,” said Elisabeth Duffy, associate director of science with Long Live the Kings. The Offshore Marine Juvenile Salmon and Herring Project, and its companion Puget Sound Zooplankton Monitoring Program, were determined as top priority annual monitoring projects under the Salish Sea Marine Survival Project both projects were recommended to continue as the consensus of more than 200 scientists from 60 partner organizations that participated in the Project from the U.S. and Canada.  

“This is one of the tools we need to plan for the future. It’s critical,” Crewson said. 

The ongoing study has given the tribes and partners crucial data, especially as climate change’s foothold grows.

“It’s an essential tool not just to forecast abundance but to identify the main limiting factors affecting salmon survival,” Crewson said. “It’s a responsibility we all have to our constituents.” 

The Tulalip Tribes, together with other tribes and partner organizations, are committed to keeping the program alive, and this year’s sampling effort was no exception. With less than two months warning before the start date, the boat had to be replaced and a new boat acquired and fully equipped.

That was accomplished thanks to the extraordinary efforts of the Canadian captain and veteran crew of four, who collectively have more than 250 years of experience. A delay at the onset of the project required the entire crew of eight to reschedule the entire cruise and add an additional week.  Despite all of these obstacles, a record 21 sites were sampled this year including two new sites.

“We’re going to persevere and make it through these obstacles,” Crewson said. “Losing our salmon is bad enough, but not even being able to explain how or why is incomprehensible to us, so we remain optimistic that the agencies will come together to maintain these vital programs,” Crewson said.

A juvenile salmon is lavaged so scientists can study its diet. Photos: Trevor Pyle

The post Funding in peril for marine survival research appeared first on Northwest Treaty Tribes.