Egg Planting Completes McIlvaine Run Restoration

High hopes and low-tech tools were plentiful at recently restored McIlvaine Run in Chester County, when a dozen people came together on December 16th for the final phase of the Growing Greener-funded project - planting 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, to hold one end of the rubber hosing 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.

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.

 

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