About Bowker Creek
The headwaters are located at the University of Victoria with a secondary tributary in Cedar Hill Park. Bowker Creek flows through the municipalities of Saanich, Victoria and Oak Bay to the Salish Sea.
More than half of Bowker Creek is in underground culverts. Open sections of Bowker Creek at the headwaters, along Browning Park, Lansdowne Middle School, Royal Jubilee Hospital and in Oak Bay allow a connection to natural areas, flowing water and biodiversity in a growing city.
Watershed Features
Bowker Creek in Victoria is an urbanized watershed that covers an area of 1,028 hectares, or 2,540 acres. About 60% of the watershed is covered with buildings and impermeable surfaces. Isolated rocky outcrops, including Mt. Tolmie and Cedar Hill present viewpoints over this gently sloping watershed valley. Remnant and rare stands of Garry Oak meadow may be found in isolated areas.
The creek is known in the SENĆOŦEN language as Thaywun (coho salmon stream). For millennia, the creek had coho salmon and cutthroat trout that were a food source for First Nations who lived and encamped near the creek. Newcomers farmed the rich valley soils in fields drained into ditches. Urbanization channelized and buried the creek where it used to meander slowly through wetlands. Rainwater runoff from buildings, roads, parking and impermeable surfaces washes pollution into the creek and erodes the creek channel during rain events.
The creek main channel is 9.4 km from the headwaters at the University of Victoria to the Salish Sea at the south end of Willows Beach in Oak Bay. The secondary channel flows 1.5 km from Cedar Hill Park to join the main channel near Doncaster and North Dairy Road.
Open reaches of the creek provide access points where we learn how to restore natural areas, improve water quality, see plants and animals and connect with nature in the city.
Popular access points to Bowker Creek are:
- University of Victoria
- Browning Park in Saanich
- Cedar Hill Park
- Lansdowne Middle School
- The North Jubilee Spirit Garden
- Kings Community Nature Greenspace
- Royal Jubilee Hospital
- Bowker Creek Park in Oak Bay
A creek's resurgence
An interactive online storymap was produced for the Friends of Bowker Creek by Engage with Nature-Based Solutions and the University of Victoria’s Geography Department & Community Mapping students Megan Handley, David Hardwick & Olivia Levert.
This StoryMap aims to bring the creek’s story to light and to offer concrete ways you can help the creek thrive.
A Brief History of Bowker Creek (Thaywun)
Born of an Ice Age
The last ice age ended around 13,000 years ago. As the glaciers melted and retreated, the land began to rise, and about 5,000 years ago, an approximately 8-kilometre-long creek was formed.
Since Time Immemorial
To the lək̓ʷəŋən peoples (known today as the Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations) the creek provided a source of fresh drinking water, a canoe route inland, and an abundant source of Coho salmon and Cutthroat trout, since time immemorial.
A shell midden (layers of shells, ashes and other camp debris) archaeological site adjacent to Bowker Creek is at least 2500 years old.
1840s-1860s
Following the establishment of Fort Victoria in 1843, European settlers arrived in the area. In 1855, the creek was labelled on a Hudson's Bay Company map as "Tods Stream," named after an early settler John Tod, whose original farmhouse still stands today near the creek. At this time the creek was also informally known among locals as the "Thames." In 1864, John Sylvester Bowker, a gold miner and friend of John Tod in Oak Bay married John Tod's daughter Mary. Their property near Willows Beach bordered the creek, which would later be named after him.
1900s
Chum salmon were plentiful in Bowker Creek until around 1914. Ainslie Helmcken remembered seeing them migrating upstream behind Jubilee Hospital. He played along the creek as a boy while his father, Dr. John Sebastian Helmcken, visited patients.
1934
After several decades of unofficial use, the name "Bowker Creek" is officially adopted and labelled on a Department of National Defense Map.
1950s
By the 1950s, a century of land modification (agricultural land use, residential development, and urbanization) resulted in the straightening and culverting of Bowker Creek. A 1958 Times Colonist article of the time describes:
“It must have been before the land was cleared; when salmon used to go up and thick vegetation grew along its banks, and youngsters swam in the pools of crystal water. Now the balance of nature has been lost. It takes a lot of poetry in a man’s heart today to hear it sing its way through the cement arches. It is a sad sack of a creek, shorn of its beauty, slipping back to a mere trickle of polluted and frustrated water.”
1960s
As urbanization continued to shape the rapidly-changing landscape, the Municipality of Saanich considered culverting the entire section of the creek within municipal boundaries, but this plan was deemed too costly to proceed with.
1970s
The District of Oak Bay's "Bowker Creek Beautification Program" resulted in the remaining open sections of the creek being walled in with rock and concrete infrastructure.
1980s
In January of 1982, heavy rains caused Bowker Creek to overflow in the Victoria and Saanich areas of the watershed, forcing evacuations of 35 households and damaging over 100 residences in total.
Over the following decade, regularly occuring seasonal floods and oil spills increasingly captured the public’s attention and concern.
1989
A significant furnace oil leak in early 1989 led to a number of nearby residents developing a rehabilitation proposal for the creek. In May of 1989, the newly-formed Friends of Bowker Creek announces their vision to restore the creek to fish-bearing habitat, with an initial goal of "maintaining the creek and keeping it free of unnecessary pollution."
2021
Did You Know?
- A First Nations shell midden (layers of shells, ashes and other camp debris) adjacent to Bowker Creek is at least 2500 years old.
- Bowker Creek was named for John Sylvester Bowker, an American who settled in the area during the 1860s.
- Prior to urbanization, Bowker Creek once supported populations of coho salmon and cutthroat trout.
- Before agricultural and urban development, the watershed supported extensive Garry Oak meadows and woodlands. This unique ecosystem is now one of the most endangered in Canada.
- At 117 meters, the peak of Mt. Tolmie is the highest point in the Bower Creek watershed.
- An estimated 45% of the Bowker Creek watershed is composed of impervious surfaces such as roads, parking areas and roofs.
- 66% of Bowker Creek has been enclosed in pipes.
- 69% of the Bowker Creek Watershed doesn’t have tree cover.