Seems as I know that area intimately I better respond.
That is a beautiful and well produced NGO promotional video!
There is some not given and miss guided information on the video though.
Logging did not damage the productivity of the Kennedy flats streams like implied in the video. Any of the hundreds of anglers who has ever fish off the Kootowis creek bridge with a big bag of roe in mid Oct. would tell a tale of whammer-slammer days for cutthroat and coho!!! I fished the creeks of the Kennedy flats thirty years back starting in 1989. To catch and release 100 coho in a day in Kootowis was normal. One time late 1990's I remember we decided to count every fish we caught in one hour. Three of us released more than seventy cutthroat trout in one pool one hour. Oh, and one bloodthroat trout. It always blew me away just how good the fishing was in such a log f@#$ed stream!! Since then I have learned of the unique buffering abilities that those streams have to create such consistent productivity. The picture of Kootowis totally submerged in log jams brings back old memories. I lost a few steelhead under that pile of logs. Although in the video they passionately explain that the logging has ruined the streams by chocking them with large woody debris and such! Well in other restoration projects large woody debris is add for cover and stream bank stability. These people are promoting taking it out?? That place was logged flat in the 1960's-1970' and now they are logging the second growth. The fish productivity in those streams has stayed fairly consistent regardless of all the visually unappealing logging activity.
Another thing mentioned is the fact of stream gravel used for road mulch. There is only a couple road crossings and one strip of Grice Bay road where stream gravel was used for road base. Back in the 1960 they used whatever was the closest rock substance to build roads with. They did not drive up and down the streams to extract all the gravel. If they did there would still be machines lost and sunken into the underlying clay stream base. They used whatever was close to the assigned road path. I have driven those roads many many times and they are not all made of stream gravel but mostly blasted quarry rock. The rock quarries are still there. The section directly 1km east of Kootowis bridge was built just on the edge of the water table so in Novembers with consistent high waters fish will spawn on the road. In the case where dude mentions smelly salmon and eggs in the road gravel. Sometimes in folk lore stories get exaggerated into eventually a wolf and bear speak to each other and come up with a plan to teach the people how to be holistic!!! That one strip of road did not kill off the productivity in the rest of the stream but did provide a bad spot for fish to spawn in high water. Those streams always did have restrictive spawning gravel thru out the watersheds. More gravel in the less reached sections of those streams would definitely help because the combination of natural slope, chemistry, buffering ability and climate is magical!!
If anyone did research out a comparison of salmon productivity for log fu#$ed Kotowis creek in contrast to unlogged and pristine Megin rivers they would easily see that logging is not the major factor in the stream productivity. Kootowis and Staghorn creek are in comparison of magnitude far more productive than most other Clayquot sound streams regardless of how many times the trees have been harvested. Atleo river is the other one that would make the rating.
I did one time enter the West Coast Forest Society office which is 50 yards from where my boat is moored all summer. The office has been there for about the last 10 years. I try to talk to the same gal in the video about acid rain and invertebrates and long term natural environmental chemistry changes. She was going to have nothing to do with it. I instantly felt a negative polarity once I mentioned I was a fishing guide. There was a tree hugger vs logger ambiance to our discussion after that. My intentions were scientific and here were uncomfortably defensive. I just left. Looks like they are working to ride the native train in search of more funding with the video. Good luck to you at West Coast Forestry Society!! Fishing for us guides doesn't look so good:[
