Moving Water Archives | JuneauNature

Habitat in and beside streams & rivers

Mostly because of the importance of salmon to human economies throughout the Pacific Northwest, the ecology of streams and rivers is probably better understood by science than any other Southeast habitat.

Confluence of Rio Beaver and Thorne River, central Tàan, sea lion (Prince of Wales Island)

Array of channel types at Kadashan River. Classification follows Paustian (ed) A channel-type user’s guide for the Tongass National Forest (2010) R10 Technical Paper 26.

In 1985, when I was a wet-behind-the ears hermit naturalist, more interested in hiding out in the woods than confronting questions of human impacts to ecological function, diversity, or resilience, I was taken under the wing of a master-hydrologist named Dan Bishop—proprietor of a consulting business named Environaid. This was a mutually amusing partnership, during a period when I was as likely to tear flagging down as put it up (Ed Abbey, after all, posited that a time comes when a man has to pull up stakes).

I was initially skeptical of Dan’s logo, executed by Juneau artist Laurie Craig, which showed a happy dipper on a stream just in front of a dam. Message being, I guess, that with appropriate coaching from experts in moving water, human manipulations could retain functional habitat. (Today I concede he was right, problem being that there aren’t many Dans around—and even fewer since he died in 1991.)

With prodding from Dan’s associate Leigh Smith, I designed an alternative logo. Leigh and I thought that Environaid should have uniforms, to look more legitimate, and that these of course would need shoulder patches. You can view our draft design for this shoulder patch in Media types>Journals.

Hydrologist Dan Bishop was my mentor in consulting and in streamwalking.

By 1996, I had enough remove from the shock of Dan’s passing to write a tribute in Discoveries, the newly-fledged newsletter of Discovery Southeast. Streamwalkers, in the fall issue, had this recollection:

“From Dan I learned to dig holes, sniff sulfur, slurp through horsetail marshes, take pictures hanging from tree limbs, turn over rocks, hack survey lines through willow thickets, roll mud in my fingers, and then write about it. What I teach kids today is the same mucky, enlivening natural history – the art of paying sensory attention and asking continual questions. A naturalist’s questions rescue us from rootlessness: Where are we?! How did this place get like this? What’s around the next bend?”

Although Dan was not a professional teacher, he embodied the highest goals of education: curiosity, fairness, civility, and great care—to take the time to get it right. In this sense, he was a founder of Discovery Southeast—the reason streamwalking remains our passion and quest, thirty years after dedication of the Dan Bishop Bay Creek Trail, where kids still listen to moving water that sings beside Auke Bay Elementary School.