Paul Thompson and Dan Donovan used to fell timber and work in area mills.

But during a balmy Tuesday afternoon on Johnson Creek, the pair, dressed in hard hats and construction orange, were putting their skills to a very different use.

Using an excavator, the duo piled logs and whole trees — complete with roots — on top of a bar of boulders they’d placed in the middle of the creek.

On Tuesday, it looked like a mess. But come winter and high water, the creek will sort itself out; the logs and rocks will settle, pools will form downriver from the debris and gravel and sand will build up behind the obstacle.

Presto, fish habitat.

“It’s funny. We used to take a lot of logs and wood out of the creeks,” said Donovan, speaking of his time in the logging business. “Now we’re putting it back in, for the fish.”

Thompson and Donovan’s Tuesday afternoon project is just part of a larger effort to restore fish spawning habitat on Johnson Creek, Rock Creek and the upper South Fork of the Coquille River near Powers. Decades of land management practices — logging, road building, mining — have left the water bodies barren of pools and gravel beds needed for coho and Chinook salmon, steelhead and Pacific lamprey.  

“We’re doing this work in areas that have been altered from historic conditions,” said project manager and Forest Service fish biologist Steve Namitz. “We’re trying to put this watershed on a trajectory to recovery.”

The restoration work has, at various points, had many partners: The Forest Service, the Coquille Watershed Association (Thompson and Donovan are employees of the Association), even Powers High School. Meanwhile the Coquille River Salmon and Trout Enhancement Program is working downriver to jump-start fish populations.

Namitz estimates his organization will spend $3.7 million over the course of 5-7 years on the three streams.

The process is complicated by the fact that much of the areas deemed worthy of restoration are along property owned by miners. The stretch of Johnson Creek where Donovan and Thompson were working is an ancestral mining claim dating back to 1928 where Ray Looney still dredges for gold in a state of semi-retirement until he turns part of the claim over to his son.

“I was a little skeptical in the beginning,” said Looney of when Namitz first approached him about the restoration work. “The Forest Service and miners don’t always get along.”

But standing in his camp along Johnson Creek, 20 yards from where the restoration work was taking place, Looney said he didn’t mind the work being done. He’d sat down with Namitz and they’d sorted out how best to get the job done without disrupting his mining operation.

“I applaud them for trying to enhance the stream and the fish here,” said Looney. “I don’t mind it a bit. I’m retired, so I can sit here and watch these guys work all day long.”

There are a lot of ways to build fish habitat. Many of them involve the same kinds of tools and methods used in timber harvest and road building — trees are felled or ripped from the ground whole — and dragged into the creek beds. Dirt and rocks are moved using heavy equipment.

The whole point is to add what Namitz calls “complexity” to the river system, a fancy word for the piles of wood and stone vital to fish habitat.

Before and after examples are striking. Much of Johnson Creek, for example, looked like chaotic boulder fields with water dribbling through them. After the work is done, boulder-and-log structures trap pools of water, lowering its velocity and allowing sand and gravel to drop to the bottom. In short, it looks something like a natural creek.

Up until the 1970s, said Namitz, people were being paid to take wood out of area rivers and streams in the belief that the absence of such stuff actually made water cleaner.

“As it turns out, the opposite of that is actually true,” said Namitz.

So now they’re putting wood back in the water, which is the short-term part of the project.

“We’re providing a natural Band-Aid so things can function while we implement a long-term solution,” said Namitz.

The long-term answer involves thinning stands to natural levels — some range from 250-1,000 trees per acre, whereas in undisturbed areas it would be 20-60 much larger trees — and planting trees for shade.

The work in the streams may have an immediate effect on fish populations. The thinning and planting is on a much longer-term scale.

“I’ll probably never see the fruits of my labor,” said Namitz. “But our kids will.”