Terminal Creek

Where does Terminal Creek’s Water Come From?

The Terminal Creek watershed is Bowen’s largest, draining much of the island’s interior. Like all Bowen Island’s fresh water, Terminal Creek’s water falls from the sky. Rain, falling on the slopes of Mount Gardner, gathers in streams that flow downstream to fill pools in wetlands, then fills Killarney and Grafton Lakes before heading to sea in Terminal Creek. The Terminal Creek watershed is all the green-shaded area on the map.

The watershed’s forests capture low cloud and act as a natural water filter by slowing rain as it falls to the earth and helping it soak into the soil.

Forest soils have rich layers of decomposing plant and animal material and many animals smaller than an earthworm. Deep and extensive root systems soak up heavy rains.

Swamps, marshes, bogs, and fens are sponges for Terminal Creek watershed.

These wetlands recharge during rains, then slowly release water into streams and creeks through periods of drought. Insects, bacteria, and fungi that thrive in damp soils deliver a soup of organic matter and dissolved nutrients to feed creek life such as freshwater mussels, crayfish, and juvenile salmon.

Crippen Park’s beaver families are the watershed’s ecosystem engineers—creating and managing habitat by damming streams to expand their pond in the Meadows. By raising the water level, the beavers drown the existing forest while creating new wetlands—a neighbourhood for hooded mergansers, buffleheads, great blue herons, and American dippers.

Along the creek’s edge, forest cover offers shade and cools the water—conditions favoured by many creek residents during summer heat. Where water flow is greatest, turbulence draws oxygen into the water. Fish and other creatures need dissolved oxygen to breathe. In stretches where forest trees fall into the creek water backs up and slows down, causing organic debris to settle out. Many forms of life gather for the rich pickings found in these calm pools.

On its journey from the peak of Mount Gardner, Terminal Creek’s water is filtered clean; bathed in rich organics; and tumbled full of life-giving oxygen. This nutritious water supports countless creatures large and small, including humans, on its way to the ocean. The Cove Bay Water System supplies 700 users with fresh water. This steady supply of fresh, clear water is called an ecosystem service—something our environment provides that people need, but don’t have to pay for.

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Terminal Creek

Signal Crayfish

(Pacifastacuc leniuscuslus)

by Bob Turner

Until I stuck my facemask into Terminal Creek, I had no idea we had crayfish on Bowen Island.

But there it was, a reddish brown fresh-water cousin of the lobster, crawling out from under a rock, claws held high. Signal crayfish are BC’s only native crayfish. They range from southern BC to northern California and east to the Rockies.

Crayfish are fascinating crustaceans, cousins of shrimp, prawns and crabs. They live inside hard exoskeletons that they shed and rebuild (molt) as they grow, leaving them vulnerable during the molting process. They are omnivores, eating a variety of foods such as decaying roots, leaves, stream bottom insects, smaller crayfish, and fish.

Signal crayfish are solitary animals, living alone in crevices or in burrows under rocks. They breathe through feather-like gills, have compound eyes on the ends of long stalks, feel their way along with antennae, walk on their many feet, but can dart quickly if alarmed, with a flick of their tail.

Adult crayfish are on the lookout for predatory mink and otter, while juvenile crayfish can be prey to larger crayfish, merganser ducks, and larger trout. The presence of crayfish in Terminal Creek is a sign that the water quality is good, as crayfish are very sensitive to pollution.

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Terminal Creek

Terminal Creek Fish Hatchery

Tucked away in the forests of Crippen Regional Park, about a 15-minute walk from the Causeway towards Killarney Lake, is the salmon hatchery run by the Bowen Island Fish and Wildlife Club.

In partnership with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), club members raise juvenile salmon from eggs and release them in creeks on Bowen, including Terminal Creek and the Lagoon. Volunteers also monitor the health of Bowen’s salmon-bearing creeks and riparian areas.

Each fall, DFO provides the hatchery with eggs taken from spawning adult salmon caught on the tributaries of the nearby Squamish River at the northern end of Atl’7katsem/Howe Sound. The type and number of eggs received each year can vary, but typically they include chum, coho, and sometimes pink salmon eggs.

The eggs arrive at the hatchery during the salmon spawning season and are incubated in dark, cool, slowly flowing oxygenated water within trays that mimic the conditions of wild eggs laid by salmon in stream gravels. When the eggs hatch, young salmon with an attached egg sac wriggle out. These juveniles, called alevin or sac fry, feed on the nourishment contained in the egg sac until it is used up. At that point, the young salmon are called fry and are moved to large tanks of water where volunteers feed them until release time.

Chum salmon fry are ready for release in April. They are let go into the Lagoon, where they have only a short swim to the ocean. This matches the experience of wild chum fry as upon hatching they quickly swim downstream to the estuary and sea. Wild coho salmon fry, on the other hand, spend a year in their stream after rising out of the gravel. During this period, coho are preparing for life in saltwater. Hatchery volunteers release their coho fry into various creeks on Bowen well upstream from the ocean.

This release is in May (coho spawn later in the winter and so eggs mature later in the spring) and the Club invites the public to participate in the release during the Coho Bon Voyage celebration.

Earth Day Chum Release

On Earth Day 2021, Terminal Creek Hatchery volunteers escorted Bowen’s graduating class of young chum salmon from the hatchery where they were born down to the Lagoon to prepare for life at sea.

The team netted the young salmon from the hatchery’s giant tanks. At the shore, they tipped their pails to release approximately 70,000 fish into the shaded, shallow, and cool water of the Lagoon.

A further 30,000 were released into Davies Creek in Snug Cove. Each fish weighed roughly two-thirds of a gram (the weight of three toothpicks) and was about the length of your baby finger. The fry spent from a few hours to a couple of days in the sheltered water of the Lagoon or Davies Creek. Then they ventured out to begin their life in the ocean.

Here, as young fry, they spend several weeks near shore, hunting for food in the eelgrass beds of Kwilákm, then further months in local waters before heading to the north Pacific. Chum salmon spend about four years fattening up at sea before returning to the stream where they were born to mate and die. Chum is the largest salmon species that spawns on Bowen Island. Individual fish typically from four to six kg as returning adults.

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Terminal Creek

Terminal Creek is the main source of fresh water flowing into Kwilákm. Its watershed drains approximately one-third of Bowen Island’s land mass.

The nearly intact forest lands that it drains act as a sponge, soaking up winter rainfall and snow melt, then releasing water into its many tributaries throughout the summer dry season.

Every winter, Grafton and Killarney Lakes, the island’s largest, fill to the brim.

The Killarney Creek beaver wetland stores thousands of litres of freshwater.

This system ensures a year-round flow of freshwater habitat for many stream creatures, which in turn provide food for baby salmon.

Terminal Creek also acts as a conveyor, moving nutrients and leafy debris from the inland forest into the lagoon and Kwilákm.

Many marine creatures and plants feast on this abundant food. In this way, the fresh waters of the creek increase the abundance and diversity of the bay’s marine ecosystem.

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