In college, I wrote a thesis on restoring steel head in Southern Southern California.
And some professors I had encouraged me to turn that into a grant proposal.
I submitted that proposal and went off and was a fly fishing guide in Alaska in Mongolia for a couple years.
And when I got back, it was funded.
A steel head is a rainbow trout that goes out to the ocean and comes back to fresh water to spawn.
And why they're so important and why it's so critical to restore and protect them is they're what we call an umbrella species.
An umbrella species is a highly migratory species that covers a wide range of habitats from the upper headwaters of a stream in the mountains,
all the way down the watershed out to the ocean and far away at sea.
So they have this life history where they use the whole watershed and historically some of the runs we had of thousands of fish would swim tens of thousands of pounds of ocean nutrients back into our mountains that other species could take advantage of.
Historically in Southern California it's estimated that at least 50,000 adult steelhead annually came in with the winter rains and migrated upstream to spawn.
Currently it's estimated there's about 500 adult steelhead in all of Southern California that return.
And what's happened is on larger rivers we've built these massive dams that fish can't get past.
A lot of the migration barriers that are blocking the fish passage are old dams that aren't serving any function anymore that should be removed providing access between the ocean and the mountains.
The migration route for them to get from the ocean back upstream to the habitat they need to spawn in rear has been blocked.
And on smaller streams barriers like road crossings have also done the same thing.
So this creek in Santa Barbara County ranks as one of the highest restoration potentials for steelhead.
And what was here before this bridge was a road crossing like this where people would drive in and cross the creek on this concrete pad with a culvert underneath it and fish were having a hard time jumping up and getting past it.
So we got grants and worked with the landowners here and removed that crossing and put in this free span bridge now fish can migrate upstream without any obstruction.
So the top priority for steelhead right now is to get rid of these migration barriers.
And so I've really been focused on identifying where the migration barriers are in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties prioritizing which ones are causing the most harm and which ones if modified or removed would provide the most benefit to steelhead recovery.
So one of the first things the most important things to do is to survey the watershed and look at habitat conditions and figure out where the fish populations are and prioritize the best habitat.
And then once you have that information you can prioritize what barriers downstream and what other issues you need to focus on for the restoration.
It's a really fun exercise to go out and figure out what's going on in that particular watershed and figure out what the limiting factors are and then actually work towards solving the problem.
Well I'm a firm believer that if you know a problem you should work to try to fix it.
And so one of the most rewarding things of my job is to take out these migration barriers and allow fish to get back upstream.
And probably the funnest example of that so far has been to blow up Horace Creek Dam back on the Sisquok River to identify a problem then get funding, get the different stakeholders involved.
And just to do a project that took about five years of effort to get to the point where we took it out and then just in a split second see it go up.
Oh!
Well unlike other projects when you blow up a dam it's instant. It's there one second and it's not the next.
And after the next rains come through and start flushing it out the river starts restoring itself by the way and the fish can come back almost instantly.
There was a dam just removed a couple years ago up in Washington and they blew up the dam, took it down.
The sediments flushed within almost a 24 hour period and three days later salmon were migrating past the dam site and heading miles up river to spawn so it's instantaneous in terms of benefit.
I'll definitely be working towards restoring free flowing rivers and restoring habitat that we've degraded for the rest of my life. So yeah, I'll be out of forever.
My name is Matt Stacker, I'm 34 years old. I'm a conservation biologist working on restoring southern steelhead and I love what I do because I get to work on restoring and protecting places like this right here.
I'm a conservation biologist working on restoring and protecting places like this right here.
Thank you.
