New channel for McIlvaine Run takes advantage of natural stream design techniques. Download the special photo feature attached to this webpage.

By Shelby E. Chunko, Project Manager, LandStudies, Inc.

High hopes and low-tech tools were plentiful at recently restored McIlvaine Run in Chester County, when a dozen people came together on December 16 for the final phase of the Growing Greener-funded project – planting brown trout eggs.

Representatives from West Whiteland Township in Chester County, Valley Forge Trout Unlimited, and LandStudies, Inc. gathered streamside with shovels, sieves, buckets, a funnel, and a length of rubber hose to plant at least 1,000 eyed brown trout eggs, supplied by the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission, in five separate riffles along the relocated and restored lower section of McIlvaine Run.

With shovels and sieves, workers scooped out, cleaned, and sorted gravel, replacing all but the silt and sand back into the man-made nests. Female trout achieve the same results by using their bodies to move gravel and dislodge the finer materials from the egg-laying site. The largest material was laid back into the excavated depression first and one end of a rubber hose was placed in the redd (nest) through which the eggs are flushed into the gravel.

The activity capped more than four years of planning, designing, and construction of the new channel and floodplain.

McIlvaine Run, spring fed and wholly contained on private property, is a tributary to West Valley Creek, a known brown trout stream. The lower 900-foot portion of the channel, which now meanders through a newly reforested meadow, had been channelized decades ago and, in recent years, had become little more than a polluted ditch running immediately adjacent to a heavily traveled highway near Exton.

Valley Forge Trout Unlimited and officials at West Whiteland Township applied for and received a $182,558 Growing Greener Grant to relocate the lower portion of McIlvaine Run, restore the floodplain, install native plantings along the riparian corridor, and plant brown trout eggs in the new channel.

LandStudies, Inc., an environmental restoration and land-planning firm based in Lititz, Pa., in nearby Lancaster County, provided the design and construction management for the project. Another Lititz company, Ecological Construction (717-625-2696), which specializes in environmentally sensitive excavation, provided the actual channel and floodplain construction services.

LandStudies also brought to the project the expertise of highly respected wild brown trout ecologist Dr. Robert A. Bachman of Lancaster County, who is responsible for the increase and restoration of numerous wild brown trout populations in the waterways of the Mid-Atlantic region.

Joseph Roscioli, West Whiteland Township director of public works, credits many people for the success of the project, including Trout Unlimited, property owner Louise McIlvaine, and the state and federal regulatory agencies that provided guidance through the entirety of the project. “These folks made it happen,” said Roscioli.

Already observers have seen small fry swimming in the restored section of McIlvaine Run, when no fish of any kind were scene there before. And gravel bottoms have developed in the reach above the stored section, indicating a healthier stream is becoming a reality there too.

The eggs were scheduled to hatch on Christmas Eve, but the fingerlings won’t emerge from the protection of their gravel nests until sometime in the first quarter of 2005. The final goal of the project is to see wild brown trout returning, typically in three years, to their hatching site in McIlvaine Run to create nests and lay eggs on their own.

“That,” exclaims Bob Bachman, “will really mean we did it!”

(This article first appeared in the Spring 2005 PA Trout publication and those portions are reprinted with permission.)

3/11/2005