Last week, I had the opportunity to go on an interpretive walk offered by the Bainbridge Island Land Trust (highly recommend! Check out future opportunities for interpretive walks on their website!) at the Cougar Creek Preserve, which sits in the upper Cougar Creek watershed, which is where our picture takes us this month. Cougar Creek is a small stream whose headwaters originate in wetlands behind Blakely elementary school, then eventually coalesce into a seasonal channel before finding its way into the pond that is pictured here at the east end of the preserve near Old Mill Road.
If you look carefully at the back of this picture, you’ll see an earthern berm, which hints at the origins of this pond as a livestock watering feature for the farm historically present on this site. Today, the pond is home to diving ducks, like the bobbing bufflehead we saw on our visit, and lots of amphibians- Megan Rohrssen, the Land Trust’s community education coordinator, showed us some egg masses attached to the leaf litter at the edge of this pond that were hanging out, waiting for warmer temperatures when tiny tadpoles would emerge.
Cougar creek seeps through the earthen berm and then heads under Old Mill Road, down into what Wild Fish Conservancy (WFC) describes as a “forested ravine” before it eventually finds its way under Eagle Harbor Drive and outlets into South Eagle Harbor. Historically, Cougar Creek likely hosted salmon species, particularly cutthroat trout who would have been able to move in and out of its channel as it swelled in the winter and narrowed over the dry season. Unfortunately, the culvert under Eagle Harbor Drive is undersized and in poor shape, and likely does not allow fish to move into this system. No fish were found when WFC surveyed in this channel about 10 years ago. This is another good example of what we might call “disconnected habitat”, that would gladly be recolonized by fish if they had access to the stream. However, this forested ravine and wetland complex still provides beautiful habitat for a wide variety of species- perhaps even the occasional visit from its namesake, the cougar.