The team in the helicopter L–R: Claire, Kate, Sam, Parker. Photo: Parker Makkreel.
By Claire Allore
After more than a year, the Water and Fish team returned to the Willmore Wilderness Park and Kakwa Wildlands Provincial Park to retrieve 59 temperature loggers with great success. This work will help to fill one of the missing data pieces for a collaborative water temperature model of Alberta’s Eastern Slopes. The main goal for this work is to help identify where habitat still exists for Alberta’s cold-water Species-at-Risk (bull trout, Athabasca rainbow trout, and westslope cutthroat trout).
A glacier and lake feeding cold water into the headwaters of the Willmore. Photo: Kate Marouelli .
The Willmore and Kakwa parks provide clean and cold water that is regarded as the ideal habitat for many of our Species-at-Risk. Now with the data from our temperature loggers we will be able to identify just how cold these streams can get.
Pulling the loggers often required lots of brute strength. All team members took turns prying the loggers out of stream beds. One proved so difficult that Kate managed to bend a crow bar in her efforts (she still got the logger out though).
Top Left: Kate pulling a logger. Photo: Claire Allore. Top Middle: Sam carrying a logger attached to a cinderblock and cable. Photo: Claire Allore. Top Right: Sam, Parker, and Kate pulling a cinderblock and cable out of a river. Photo: Claire Allore. Bottom: The team walking back from a successful logger pull. Photo: Parker Makkreel.
Most sites we visited were at a confluence and usually had two loggers, one on the main stem and one on the adjacent tributary. This typically meant two teams of two would go out and pull loggers simultaneously. Some sites like in the above far right photo proved so difficult to remove that all four team members had to take turns digging it out. In this case, we had attached a temperature logger to a cinder block and then cabled it to shore. We returned this year to find the entire cable covered by boulders (don’t worry we still dug this logger out too).
Left: Looking for cool rocks while we wait for our pilot to re-fuel our helicopter. Photo: Kate Marouelli. Right: Sam and Kate preparing for the newly fuelled helicopter to land. Photo: Parker Makkreel.
Although our team’s focus is on Alberta’s fish Species-at-risk, we were still fortunate enough to see another Species-at-Risk from a distance: caribou! Photo: Parker Makkreel.
The intrepid Water and Fish Team L–R: Sam Chevallier, Claire Allore, Kate Marouelli, and Parker Makkreel. Photo: Adam the pilot.
