Smuggler’s Slough

Location:  Lummi Flats

109 acres, brackish slough/salt marsh/salmon rearing habitat

The Smuggler’s Slough project consists of six conservation easements protecting 109 acres along Smuggler’s Slough in the Lummi and Nooksack River deltas. Before a number of human activities (logging and leveling of the land, clearing log jams from the rivers and installing an extensive dike system) the Nooksack and Lummi River delta region not only looked radically different (the Nooksack emptied into Lummi Bay, not Bellingham Bay) but functioned differently, too.

Now federally designated as “threatened”, Chinook salmon smolts relied on the brackish estuaries for their critical developmental transition from fresh to salt water. Lummi Natural Resources Department and Whatcom Land Trust are working together to re-create those lost estuary habitats. WLT holds conservation easements on currently vacant lands to preserve them from development or industrial use, forever. Lummi Natural Resources, funded by grants and federal programs focused on shore land environmental restoration, is working to recreate the salt marshes, brackish sloughs, and sheltered streams that are vital to Chinook survival.

Here, excavators have begun to recreate sinuous channels, shaded by vertical banks on one side, but graded on the other to allow seasonal and tidal high water levels to inundate adjacent fields. Plantings in those areas will discourage the invasive reed canary grass, provide habitat and food for native birds and animals, and hold the soil during floods.