Milt McMachen holds a grate designed to prevent beavers from building dams within a culvert, but with bars set apart widely enough to allow pike to traverse the culvert and reach spawning grounds in the marsh on the other side.
 

Published in The Gananoque Reporter

by Cameron Smith

Milt McMachen is a practical man. He has to be. He’s a beef farmer and also is road supervisor for the Township of Leeds and the Thousand Islands. There’s little leeway there for running after rainbows.

So it’s with great practicality that Milt talks about the pike in Killenbeck Lake. In the spring, when the ice is leaving the shoreline but remains on the lake, and water levels are high, pike leave the lake to spawn in neighbouring wetlands.

This occurs in the latter part of March and the beginning of April. Then, as soon as the ice leaves the lake, the pike head back to lake waters.

There’s a problem, however, along the north side of Killenbeck. Router Road separates the wetland from the lake, and the only way pike can get to the wetland is through two small culverts side by side near the end of the road. Because beavers dam the culverts, the township had installed steel grates to stop the beavers from extending their dams into the culverts, making removal of dams easier. The bars in the grates, however, were too narrowly spaced for the pike to get through.

Not any more. Last year, at the request of the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Milt changed the grates. The bars are now  about four-and-a-half inches apart — lots of room for a pike to pass by.

During spawning “We come down early in the morning to get the dams out so there’s a good flow through the culverts all day,” says Milt. He has taken out one of the grates so I can see it better, and I ask why he insists that crews come early every single morning during spawning to clear dams?

“Well,” he says, “anything we can do to help save wildlife is a good thing. They’re here for a reason, and we need to help them out as much as possible.” And then he adds a sentence that couldn’t be simpler, and yet is as profound as any treatise on environmentalism: “Everything has to work together to survive, you know.”

It’s an observation that applies to issues as large as climate change and global politics, to issues as minute as pike in a small lake in Eastern Ontario, and to everything in between. It means recognizing and respecting connections at all levels of life. It’s called sustainability, which to Milt is just another word for common sense.