Heritage Lakes residents dug in last weekend to bring a local creek back to life.
About 15 Heritage Lakes residents grabbed their shovels Saturday to clean weeds and dirt from the creek that runs behind Huntington Crescent. The cleanup was done as part of St. Albert’s partners in parks program.
The creek, originally a cobble-lined stormwater channel, was very beautiful when it was first built several decades ago, says Marie Lehman, one of the participants in the cleanup, but has become so clogged with dirt and weeds that it looks more like a lawn with a groove in it. “You could barely see any rocks.”
Lehman says she and her husband, Ron, decided five years ago to clean up their part of the creek. They dug down to the stones, power-washed them, and added more rock to the shores. Their neighbour did the same soon after.
Neighbour Mike Kinsella organized a bigger cleanup on Sept. 25. Locals moved about two truckloads of dirt from about 50 metres of creek, most of which was still piled on its shores Monday. (The creek was dry, as it only runs during the summer.) “This was filled in with grass and about this wide,” he says, his hands about a foot apart. Now, the creek is about a metre wide, with some of its original stones exposed.
The neighbours hope to dig out the rest of the block-and-a-half creek by next spring, Lehman says. “This back [ravine] is just phenomenal,” she says, and is a popular spot for wedding photos in the summer. “If we’re going to do our yards, we may as well do the ravine part too.”
It was amazing to see so many people joining together on a project, Kinsella says. “We don’t have community like that anymore.”
For more on partners in parks, call Erin Gluck at 780-418-6005.
Riel Pond is fine, folks, says St. Albert’s environmental manager — it’s actually working properly for the first time in history.
The city’s environmental advisory committee got an update about the stickleback problem at Riel Pond on Sept. 24.
According to biologists, the threespine stickleback is a mottled-brown minnow with three big spikes on its back considered invasive to the Sturgeon River. First spotted in Riel Pond in 1996, the federal government ordered the city to put fine screens on the pond’s outfalls in 2003 to keep them out of the Sturgeon. City staff spent the next seven years scrubbing them because they clogged so frequently.
The city applied the pesticide rotenone to the pond last April 30 to kill all the fish in the pond, stickleback included, says Jackson. After electro-fishing surveys found no sign of the stickleback, the federal government gave the city permission to remove the screens on June 25.
Jackson says she’s since received many calls from people worried that the pond’s water level was too low. “It doesn’t look very nice right now. It looks very low.”
The pond is actually at its normal level now, Jackson says — a first since its construction. The shore looks bare since most of its vegetation drowned due to past high water levels. That vegetation shore should grow back in a few years, she says.
The stickleback saga isn’t quite over yet — the city still has to unclog the outfall leading to the John E. Poole interpretive wetland, Jackson notes, and is waiting for the province to decide if it wants the city to restock the pond with native fish. “Theoretically, it’s not supposed to have fish at all,” since it’s for stormwater, she says, but the city is willing to restock if asked.
