Over the course of a week, from October 6 - 10, students at Frank Ney Elementary worked with NALT school water stewards educators to plant native plants and create amphibian habitat in the riparian area where Walley Creek flows past the school.  This has the benefit of teaching children about native plants and ecosystem health, and hopefully building empathy for the plants so they don't get trampled during learning and play.

On November 10 a group of staff, students and families from the school finished planting the area where blackberry was removed in August along the paved path between Harry Wipper and the school. We're planting thimbleberry to replace the blackberry, and other native plants that will provide shade to the creek, habitat for animals, and food for people!

Doing this work over so many years has the encouraging effect of seeing positive change, however incremental.  When we started work in this area there were generations of Christmas trees and yard waste dumped over the bank, as well as a plastic swimming pool, fence posts with chunks of concrete footings attached, and tons of other litter that had washed downstream.

Since 2019 we've been installing benches (terraces) of wood, supported by long 1" x 1" stakes, and planted with ferns and other hardy species that will help prevent the bank from eroding.  There's one spot where the bank has calved, taking one of our log terraces with it, but this may eventually become a pool if flows continue to scour around it.  Like many other urban streams,  a huge amount of water enters the creek through storm drains during rain events, and what used to be dynamic flow has been restricted to a narrow area.

Today we replanted terraces where some plants haven't survived, and densely replanted an area that used to be a floodplain, where we did a huge debris cleanup in August 2023.

We also added new benches, with help from the terrace guru, Lindsay Haist, and Kirsten from Alder Environmental.  The new benches or terraces are just below the culvert at Shores Drive, an area that needs more stability.  

We're hoping these solutions will provide natural resilience in this vulnerable spot, and that the habitat will eventually be suitable for spawning Coho.

It was exciting to begin work at Frank Ney Elementary school this summer, near the headwaters of Wally Creek. Staff at the school will be working with the NALT school water stewards program to begin restoration of an area used as an outdoor classroom.  Access to the "gulley" is steep, and students love sliding down the muddy banks.  On rainy days they play like otters, climbing and sliding on the slope.  Unfortunately, this compacted the soil and prevented anything but Himalayan blackberry and Scotch broom from growing.  This area was identified as an ideal opportunity for restoration - as an educational value, and to improve biodiversity beside the creek.

Frank Ney school was built in 2000.  The area around Frank Ney and to the north used to be boggy wetland, and we believe the stream was dug out to drain water away from where the school was built.   When the school was expanded in 2018, engineers designed rammed earth pillars to support the addition that would withstand subsidence in the event of an earthquake. 

The outdoor classroom area, or "gully" has soft, silty soil that gets very wet in the winter months, and blooms with skunk cabbage in the spring.    Unfortunately, reed canary grass has also taken over in this soggy area.  We know reed canary grass seeds can survive for many years, and is very challenging to suppress.  In Burnaby, there is a test area where thick black plastic is being used to smother the reed canary grass before attempting to replant with native species.  We're going to use thick layers of cardboard around our native planting, covered with dense layers of wood chips, to suppress invasives.

We started with a late summer work party to involve students and families in removing invasives and getting to know the purpose of this work, and connecting with each other! Besides doing some important work to reverse the damage done by human activity, we want people to have fun and spend time together in nature.  It was a satisfying start to this part of our restoration efforts.

Himalayan blackberry can be a real problem along riparian watercourses.  In disturbed, sunny areas, it chokes out native plants and reduces biodiversity.  It doesn't provide real shade to creeks and streams, and prevents older successional species like Fir and Cedar from getting established. 
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Now Himalayan blackberry has a problem, and that's US!  We've been using a mattock to dig out blackberry roots, and this small tool makes easy work of digging out the root balls. It's SO satisfying to clear a small area in a short amount of time.  It's easier to carry out this work in the cooler months when we can wear long sleeves and pants to protect our skin from the thorns.  Wearing thin gardening gloves with a thicker leather pair of gloves on top helps protect hands, though some thorns still manage to get through!  We load the cut brambles on a tarp and haul loads away for disposal by the City.  Over several years, we've been able to suppress the Himalayan blackberry enough at the Morningside culvert that native Thimbleberry are thriving.  
Along the gravel path to the tennis courts in Morningside Park, the Oceanspray are finally getting a chance.  Persistence is paying off!

In 2022 we received support from the Pacific Salmon Foundation to hire an engineer to create a plan to deal with the fish barrier near the mouth of the creek.  The resulting plan was far too involved given the private property access, so the barrier is on the backburner again, for now.

PSF generously allowed us to use the remaining funds to dramatically improve the biodiversity in the riparian area in Morningside Park, and just upstream of Shores Drive.  That planting was carried out in November 2024 and March 2025.

Walley Creek is very different above and below Shores Drive.  Where the creek flows past the RDN GNPCC its course has been altered so that it's cut off from ground water infiltration by a clay liner.  To make stream flow even more challenging, the GNPCC removes ground water periodically to maintain the function of the settling tanks that treat the City's waste water.  Some ground water does make it into Walley Creek below the Shores Drive bridge, and we want to maintain these base flows for fish habitat.   

Our focus on the RDN property is to improve the riparian area by replacing invasive Himalayan blackberry with native plants, as we've done in Morningside Park.  Maintaining  shade and native plant composition gives the greatest chance of survival for fish and other animals that live in and around the creek. 

On March 1, a strong group of volunteers used loppers and mattocks to remove fresh growth in an area we cleared a year ago.  On March 3, a grade 7 class from École Hammond Bay moved soil and bark mulch into the polygons, and planted native ferns, salal,  Oregon grape, and Oceanspray.   It's exciting to continue working our way up the creek, involving great volunteers and students.

This fall we applied some of our PSF Community Salmon Program grant funds to an important planting effort in Morningside Park.   

We had a strong, vibrant crew of over 30 volunteers from VIU, NALT, and the Dover Bay eco-club.  

NALT is spearheading a cutthroat trout monitoring project with several local streamkeepers groups, including Walley Creek streamkeepers.  They've received permits from the Province and DFO, so we are ready to go ahead with selecting monitoring sites and becoming trained to do this work. 

We'll use an app called Survey 123 to record

• Date​
• Time
• Stream Name
• Watershed Name
• Current weather
• Site ID (automatic as you will select your site from a map)
• GPS Location
• Photo
• Surveyors first and last names
• Weather during sample period
• Time/ date when you set trap out
• Time/ date When trap retrieved
• Bait type
• Fish captured – Y/N
• species
  • CTT
  • Rainbow
  • Coho
  • Stickleback
  • Sculpin
  • Other
• # per species
• Fork length (mm) for all
• Photos of all salmonids (clear, in-focus, taken in the viewer)
• Notes/comments

The software will then map the data so that it can be compared between streams and over time. 

​The goal is to determine if there are cutthroat trout in Nanaimo streams, and if so, where are they?  We'll be strategic about sampling where there's an increased likelihood of finding cutthroat.   We plan to continue sampling for at least 2 years, and possibly for as long as 5 years.  We may need to move the traps up or downstream, depending on what we catch, and water levels.  Interestingly, Pete Law did some pit tagging of cutthroat on a small stream in BC, and of the 50 fish they followed, all but 2 stayed within a 10-20m area of the creek over the year of the study.

It's important to note that we're not estimating total population, but recording presence/absence and comparing our results over the years that data is collected.  

A local newspaper covered the story here: https://www.nanaimobulletin.com/local-news/coastal-cutthroat-trout-project-examining-nanaimos-trout-population-7564784

*We're sad to report that as of February 2025, none of the trout traps in Walley Creek have found any cutthroat, only sticklebacks.  It's likely that the loss of surface water in the creek above Shores Drive during the dry summers has had a catastrophic effect on their population.  The pool habitat has become too isolated and the loss of water is too sudden for the fish to find refuge.  
​See our earlier post "Are there any fish in Walley Creek?" (June 2020)

In August 2023 Walley Creek Streamkeepers joined other groups in a tire wear toxin monitoring program run by BCCF in collaboration with VIU.  You can read all about it here.  We sample before, during, and after rain events to look for presence of a short-lived compound found in road runoff that's lethal to Coho.

All results of this monitoring program can be found on the BCCF interactive database. 

In 2023 we sampled Walley Creek at two locations - Morningside Park and the RDN GNPCC. Both locations showed between 3 - 11 ng/L of 6-PPDQ.  and 6-PPDQ was found more often at the upper of the two sites, where Walley Creek flows past the GNPCC.
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In August 2024 we looked at the storm drain inputs for Walley and decided to add a site just downstream from where two storm drain outfalls enter Walley Creek, behind Pipers Pub.   We'll stop monitoring in Morningside Park, since there's no new storm water input below Shores Drive.  The upper site is near a large piece of property that will soon be developed into housing.  Monitoring behind Piper's Pub will allow us to see how the development impacts the creek.  

In 2019 we witnessed Walley Creek go dry (subsurface) at the Shores Drive bridge.  Losing water in a creek that supports so much life was heartbreaking, and we reached out to Provincial hydrologists for help understanding what was going on.  While we suspected that upgrades to the RDN GNPCC had something to do with it, the experience made us want to better understand the hydrology of Walley Creek. 

In August 2019 Provincial hydrologist Neil Goeller installed a flume near the mouth of the creek, with permission from the landowner. Another flume was installed where Walley Creek flows past the GNPCC.  At both sites level loggers (transducers) and trail cameras were also installed.  During low flow we collected water level data using a ruler, and in high flows a Flow Tracker was used to measure discharge.  Data from the level logger (transducer) and photos were downloaded regularly.   

The trail cameras recorded what we'd observed, that when it rains the stream channel can go from empty to full in less than an hour.  The photos above are from the lower flow monitoring station on September 12, 2019, between 1:45 - 2:00pm.

During rain storms the flumes were quickly overwhelmed, making them ineffective at flow monitoring.  The lower flume was removed, and the upper one left in place to measure flow in drier seasons. 

During the summer of 2021 Walley Creek was often subsurface, with only isolated pools, from the GNPCC all the way down to Hammond Bay.  But then, a number of times we noticed a lot of water suddenly flowing, even when there had not been any rainfall in previous days/ hours.  We tracked it back to a storm water outfall on the GNPCC property.  We were told that the new digesters have a perimeter drain – could these be affecting the creek's base flows during the summer?  Where does ground water from around the GNPCC go, if not into the creek?

​For complicated reasons, the data that has been collected since 2019 isn't useful in establishing a flow rating curve.   Neil explained in 2020 that the Flow Tracker measurements had a percent Q close to 10% in some panels, when it should ideally be <5%.  Also, there was a high standard of error for velocity, which can be a function of turbulence.  He suggested moving the monitoring station slightly upstream to a flatter location, and making sure the flow isn't impeded by our feet, or branches or debris, to get more accurate measurements. 

In August 2023, we were welcomed into the BCCF Flo Mo, or flow monitoring network. This summer (August 2024), BCCF and Provincial hydrologists supported us to install a new flow monitoring station slightly upstream of the old one.  The BCCF also offered to help apply for funding to purchase a Flow Tracker so that our group and others can take the required minimum 6 flow measurements a year.  Right now we're sharing a Flow Tracker on loan from the Province with several other groups.  We'll continue to download the transducer data and trail camera photos, as well as take flow measurements.  BCCF has created data sheets to formalize what happens at each site visit, and we'll get a Provincial hydrometric station number.​

We're hopeful going forward that this relationship with BCCF will bring our data up to Resources Information Standards Committee (RISC) grade "C" standards and allow us to have an accurate understanding of the flows on Walley Creek.  We want to understand what consistent flows look like, what the expected peak flows are, and in what conditions the creek ceases to flow continuously. 
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Walley Creek has been drained, moved, and channeled. It experiences illegal dumping, competition from invasive plants, and toxic road runoff, and it's still so beautiful and supports rich biodiversity.  Understanding high and low flows on this creek will be key to our efforts to mitigate anthropogenic effects and enhance the health of the watershed.