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Construction debris gives a helping hand to Arkansas trout |
 LITTLE
ROCK - Major construction projects, including highway building, often
results in huge discarded boulders and tree root wads. They are a
disposal problem.One solution just found in Arkansas is to use the material for fish habitat. And trout are already benefiting. Tim Burnley is assistant aquatic habitat coordinator for the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, and his synopsis of a project on the Little Red River downstream from Heber Springs described the good use of unwanted material. Burnley said the bank stabilization and habitat work was in the Winkley Shoals area of the Little Red, not far from the spot where Howard "Rip" Collins caught the world record brown trout in 1992. "We did the majority of the work on one weekend, Nov. 6-7," Burnley said. "We had a lot of volunteers helping, and we could not have done it without these volunteers. Game and Fish has a dump truck big enough to haul the really big boulders, and with a front-end loader in the stream bed, we were able to get those boulders in the places we needed them." A trout steam needs obstructions. These create better conditions for fish, for the production of food for fish and for tumbling water that picks up vital oxygen. Burnley said, "At Winkley Shoals, we put in about 500 tons of rocks and boulders. We built rock vanes that were tied to the banks and were angled upstream. We also built lunker bunkers, which are low fish shelters. These are two big rocks with a large slab of rock across the top." Another habitat project is underway on the White River, and it will also use construction debris, Burnley said. "We're getting material from Marion County's road department, from a new Wal-Mart SuperCenter at Flippin and from a new road project in Baxter County. We'll have trees and root wads held in place by boulders.  "It's
hard to place a monetary value on this material, but it's good for the
fish, and it gets rid of some waste material."Burnley explained that over time, rocky trout streams lose some of their effectiveness as fish habitat because of flooding and siltation, which disturbs rocks and other features. It's no easy task to move a boulder weighing a ton or more into place in a river, but it's being done in Arkansas. A few years ago, volunteers including Navy Seabees helped AGFC restore trout habitat in a flood-ravaged stretch of the upper White River just downstream from Beaver Dam in northwest Arkansas. |
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