35 Years Later, Volunteers are Dedicated to the Same Goal: Restoring Habitat for Salmon

By Sarah Brown, Stewardship Program Manager

NSEA’s community work parties, events where volunteers gather to work together and support salmon habitat restoration projects, began in the early 1990s due to the passion and determination of NSEA’s founding board members. What started as a dozen friends bringing their own shovels from home has grown into thousands of community members working on lands and waters throughout Whatcom County to make a difference for salmon.

Earth Day Work Party, 1991

Bringing together the power of people is how we celebrate holidays centered around service each year, especially Earth Day. Earth Day began April 22, 1970, and has since transformed from a few dedicated public servants into a worldwide annual movement engaging a billion people in sustaining and protecting our planet. In 2026, NSEA had the opportunity to host not just one but three events over Earth Week to celebrate this environmental movement.

Volunteers remove invasive plants along Kenney Creek

Community partners celebrate Earth Day together

For the first event, 65 volunteers joined NSEA, the Whatcom Land Trust (WLT), and the Whatcom Conservation District (WCD) in furthering the restoration efforts of Lower Kenney Creek, a North Fork Nooksack River tributary that provides habitat for Chinook, pink, coho, and chum salmon, steelhead, plus eagles and other wildlife. This day of removing invasive vegetation builds on over a year of collaborative work between WLT, WCD, Whatcom County, and NSEA, including two acres of native tree plantings, two removed fish passage barriers, and large woody debris added along the creek.

A volunteer frees a tree from a cage it has outgrown

On Earth Day, four volunteers joined NSEA’s Stream Team to return to a restoration site along Kendall Creek that was planted in 2002. They walked over an acre of the site to remove cages from 60 native trees that were outgrowing them. This puts the trees at risk of being girdled and damaged by the caging originally installed to protect them from deer and beavers. This maintenance ensures that the time, resources, and effort put into restoring this section of creek over two decades ago will continue to benefit Kendall Creek. These trees are now free to continue growing to provide shade and improve water quality for salmon.

Volunteers happily work together to improve habitat along Squalicum Creek

Finally, on the last Saturday of Earth Week, 181 volunteers removed over a dozen different types of invasive weeds from the City of Bellingham’s Squalicum Creek Re-route Project site. This project, fully completed in 2021, rerouted Squalicum Creek around Sunset Pond and transformed Bug Lake into a forested wetland, while redirecting the creek through a historic channel on the south side of this new wetland. Continued support in maintaining this site guarantees the long-term success of improving water quality and habitat for coho, pink, chum, and Chinook salmon, and steelhead in Squalicum Creek.

Each of these events were centered around Earth Day and followed a similar theme of connecting past action to current and future progress, building upon years and years of work with the power of a dedicated community and collaborative partners. NSEA work parties continue to operate with that original intention created 35 years ago: bringing people together to act for salmon.

Volunteers working towards the same goal at an Earth Day work party
35 years ago: Restoring habitat for salmon

Bellingham Community Raises Baby Salmon for Third Year

By Grace Maxa, Education Coordinator

Throughout Whatcom County this spring, thousands of students and community members observed salmon growing up from eggs to fry. For the third year, NSEA also collaborated with the Bellingham Public Library to bring a salmon tank to downtown Bellingham. This partnership is an extension of NSEA’s Salmon in Schools program, which provided Whatcom County schools and the Bellingham Library with fully functioning aquarium tanks and salmon eggs in January.

We kicked off the three-month program with the delivery of 250 chum salmon eggs, which brought a lot of excitement and wonder to the children’s section in the downtown Bellingham location. With eyes wide, community members watched as the bright orange eggs were lowered into the tank. Children’s hands shot up as questions bubbled out like waterfalls: “How many are there?”, “Why are they so small?”, “How big are they going to get?”, “I like eating salmon!” Many of these kids and their families continued to stop by the salmon tank week after week to check on their new friends and observe their growth.

NSEA’s education team also joined the library staff for storytimes for preschool and elementary-aged youth. Families participated in activities including testing the water quality to make sure the salmon were healthy, singing songs, reading a picture book from the salmon’s perspective, and crafting their own fish aquarium. These moments of connection with children and their families invited more curiosity about the natural world around us.

Our exciting new event for the year included a collaboration with Friends of the San Juans (“Friends”) and the City of Bellingham. Friends is a local organization whose mission is to bring people and nature together to protect the San Juan Islands and the Salish Sea through education, science, policy, and law. Their education team has begun bringing an immersive underwater experience to elementary students. Their large dome creates a planetarium-like encounter to watch salmon large and up close, as they swim from the Salish Sea to their home streams.

Friends brought this dome to the library, where over 170 community members joined us to explore the salmon-filled world around them. Thanks to the City of Bellingham for joining us to share where salmon can be found in local streams, and a tremendous thank you to Friends of the San Juans for bringing their wonderful experience to our community. 

These events throughout the spring all built up to the big day: releasing the salmon fry into Whatcom Creek! In March, we gathered with over 400 salmon stewards to celebrate the journey of the chum salmon in their next stage of life. The sun shone brightly after a week of rain as many excited families and groups sent their fry down the salmon slide into the stream. The salmon’s journey will continue as they make their way through Bellingham Bay, out towards the Salish Sea, and eventually the greater Pacific Ocean.

We are immensely grateful to our partners at the Bellingham Library who make this partnership possible. Thank you to the many individuals, groups, and families who joined us throughout the spring season. These small moments might only be a fraction of a day, but the impacts of experiencing salmon up close can transform the future for how we all steward our natural resources.