Community groups planted riparian vegetation along the Blackbird Island Channel on Blackbird Island near Leavenworth, Washington. This was a multi-year joint effort between WDFW and the Icicle Valley Chapter of Trout Unlimited to help recover endangered chinook salmon and steelhead trout. The site was planted with cuttings of black cottonwood, red osier dogwood, scours, coyote and pacific willow, water birch, woods and nootka rose, and snowberry. Last fall this site was hydro-seeded with native sedges, rushes, and wetland grasses. This week 's plantings put the final touch on the projects.

Blackbird Island Channel is a habitat channel creation project. Salmon and steelhead habitat has been artificially created by digging a half-mile groundwater-fed, fish-rearing channel and several rearing ponds adjacent and draining to the Wenatchee River. About $265,000 in SRFB grants have been used to create the habitat, including an extensive spring high flow and flood refuge area and new aquatic food production and shade zones.

Trout Unlimited local members were on hand, as well as volunteers from the Cascadia Conservation District, Department of Transportation, Bureau of Land Management, Natural Resource Conservation Service, and the Yakama Nation.