On a dreary late January morning, I join a small group of guardedly optimistic souls to scan the creeks of West Marin’s San Geronimo Valley to glimpse one of the Bay Area’s rarest denizens, the critically endangered coho salmon. With luck, we’d see a few survivors of the batch born here three years ago, returning to their home stream to pass on their genes to the next generation and renew the salmonid cycle of life.

It’s a cycle that’s in imminent danger. We know the chances of witnessing a coho homecoming in Lagunitas Creek are slim, especially considering the provenance of this run. The fish, officially called the 2008-2009 cohort, emerged from a total of 26 redds (the spawning beds of salmonids). A shockingly low number. The lowest on record.

Coho lay between 1,400 and 3,000 eggs (depending on the female’s size), and it’s a good thing, because the salmon lifestyle is fraught with peril. Adults bury eggs in gravel under rocks, but silt from homes built too close to streams can choke the flow of oxygenated water and suffocate eggs. Surviving eggs yield tiny “alevins” that subsist on yolk sacs, hidden among rocks to avoid predatory insects, until they venture into the current as fry. If fry evade kingfishers, herons, and otters, they grow through summer, fall, and winter, barely the size of a ballpoint pen. Finally, as saltwater-ready smolts, they travel downstream to the Tomales Bay estuary, where bigger fish, birds, and hungry sea lions await, then head out to sea.

Coho can swim thousands of miles in the ocean, feeding on smaller fish or falling prey to sharks, sea lions, seals, orcas, and fishing boats. It’s a wonder any have come back at all.

But they have. And it’s what they come home to, what we do for them in their natal streams, that’s critical to the species’ survival, says our guide, Jonathan Appelbaum, conservation coordinator and restoration scientist with the Salmon Protection and Watershed Network (SPAWN). To illustrate his point, he takes us to the Leo Cronin Viewing Area, “where all the action is right now.”

The steely overcast sky adds a nip to the damp air but makes it easier to spot the battered bodies of the silvery fish, barely moving in the dark waters of the stream, about 30 feet below the trail. They take a beating as they move from salt- to freshwater and carom off rocks, logs, and sundry debris on their way home.

“They look like zombie fish,” says volunteer naturalist Shannon Savage. “Their bodies are just falling apart. They’ve stopped eating and are just here to breed.”

A male (left) and two female coho, easier to spot thanks to their denuded tailfins, return to their natal stream in Lagunitas Creek to spawn. (Photo: Liza Gross)

As we survey the creek, we spot ghoulish white streaks undulating near the creek bed, possibly fungus on a depleted fish, but more likely a female’s tailfin, or what’s left of it. Females gyrate with so much force to make redds that they shred scales, skin, and fins, Appelbaum says, “until they’re just stubs.”

Binoculars confirm the blurry white flecks as a female, fighting the current to guard her eggs from predators and other females. With 50% of spawning habitat cut off by dams to sate human water needs, competition for nesting sites is fierce. My excitement turns to sorrow as it hits me: her mission complete, she will soon die.

The smell of home

The fish don’t start their improbable journey upstream until the first winter storms send plumes of freshwater, replete with the chemistry and scent of home, into Tomales Bay. The freshwater pulse leads coho by the nose back to their birthplace. But the arid winter, one of the driest on record, cut spawning season short. The vast majority of fish didn’t return until the end of January. We’re seeing the stragglers.

A week earlier, Appelbaum braved a hailstorm to scout fish at Roy’s Pools, a few miles down the road. “Sure enough,” he says, “I looked over and saw a fish jump.” Fish can now pass what used to be Roy’s Dam thanks to a chance encounter with a few frustrated fish.

SPAWN Executive Director Todd Steiner recalls driving his daughter to preschool when he noticed giant two-foot fish swimming in two inches of water, stuck in gaps of a broken concrete structure in the dam one December morning in 1997. He watched the determined fish jump up, slam into the dam, fall back, and repeat their ordeal over and over.

Steiner called an editor at CNN who’d asked him for help on a story about endangered species, and alerted the local media. Soon, hundreds of people turned up at Roy’s Dam to watch the hapless fish.

The community spent three years working with a small army of engineers to make the dam coho-friendly. There was just one problem. Even with the best engineers and knowledge at the time, Steiner says, “we solved an upstream migration problem for adults but created a downstream migration problem for juveniles.”

Juvenile survival is the coho’s biggest problem, mostly, thanks to us. We dam their streams for our reservoirs and channel placid waters into raging, fry-shredding flows. We convert floodplain habitat into housing, farms, and ranches. And, worried about floods, we clear fallen trees that give fry refuge from predators.

Until the population crashed in 2008, Steiner led emergency rescues, going into small tributaries to scoop up fry stranded in fragmented, evaporating pools and moving them downstream. Since the late '90s, Steiner and his group have relocated 23,000 juveniles. But in the past few years, fewer and fewer fish have spawned in these tributaries.

Even so, coho advocates are buoyed by this year’s census: 130 redds and 340 live fish (though the live census likely includes double counts).

Sea-fed forests

Just 60 years ago, hundreds of thousands of coho delivered nutrients and energy to our coastal, stream, and ocean ecosystems. Historic salmon runs probably even shaped inland ecology. Peter Moyle, professor of fisheries biology at the University of California at Davis, traced the flow of marine nutrients from chinook runs in the Central Valley’s Mokelumne River to adjacent vineyards.

“You see the number of vultures increase as the salmon come in, bear and deer and other animals come down to the streamside to feed and then distribute the nutrients into the uplands,” Moyle says. “Trees grow bigger and faster, and when trees are bigger, you have more habitat for birds.”

When you lose the big salmon runs, he adds, “you’ll reduce the population of a lot of things that depend on them.”

Living at the southernmost distribution of the species, our coho may prove an invaluable genetic resource in the face of global warming. They’ve somehow learned to adapt to warmer water temperatures, Steiner explains, and may hold a genetic key to understanding how other populations will cope with a warming world.

Fish feed the forest: A salmon carcass on the banks of Lagunitas Creek sustains local animals, birds, and even trees. When salmon spawn in high densities, they deliver substantial quantities of marine-derived nutrients to the soil, plants, and trees along stream banks. Biologists are studying how the loss of these nutrients may affect riparian ecosystems.
(Photo: Liza Gross)

Nearly 90% of coho habitat is on private land. For Steiner, the key to coho survival rests in the hands of Marin County’s Board of Supervisors. We need regulations to move houses back from streams, he says, and keep trees standing so they can capture desperately needed moisture during dry spells.

But we all play a part, starting with water conservation. Every drop we waste could offer a lifeline to a species struggling to survive.

As I retrace my steps along Lagunitas Creek five days later, the warm sun casts a glare on the rippling water, now opaque. I search for signs of the sacrificial offerings of the week before. Finally, I notice a carcass on the creek’s edge, pulled up by a raccoon or maybe an osprey. I close my eyes and imagine the forest floor flush with salmon detritus, rowdy with feasting scavengers, as it surely was before dams disfigured the watershed. When I open them, I hear only the sound of rushing water.

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I’ll write about SPAWN’s habitat restoration efforts, and how you can help, in a future post.

Fisheries technician Wes Hartman (left) and lead biologist Ben White tag a female coho in preparation for spawning at the Warm Springs Hatchery. The tag will help match the female with males that have been selected as mates through genetic screening. Credit: Brandon Beach/U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

A short history of California salmon: Glorious past. Grim present. Dark future. Now, the story I just got done working on for QUEST Radio is about the crisis of coho salmon along our coast. But that short synopsis applies as well to coho in other parts of the state and to their larger and perhaps better-known cousins, the chinook. Wherever you look in California, salmon are in serious trouble if they have not already disappeared. It's evident that their biggest problem is having to live alongside us. Our needs and our ability to exert our will on the world around us–to dam rivers and streams, to clear forests, to replace entire ecosystems with new ones of our own making–has wrought havoc on many species.

The collapse of salmon populations is just one example. Some of the people working to preserve and restore coho along our coasts feel that history–both the natural history of the salmon and their role in human history–can be a powerful teacher and could help save the wild fish from extinction. An egg being squeezed from the vent of a female coho salmon at the Warm Springs Hatchery. Biologists at the facility examine the eggs as part of the process of determining when the females are ready to spawn. Credit: Brandon Beach/U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Biologist Rory Taylor checks on a tray of coho salmon recently hatched at the Warms Springs facility. The coho here are called "alevin"–the salmon's earliest life stage. They'll be reared in the hatchery, then planted in tributaries of the Russian River. Credit: Brandon Beach/U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

Charlotte Ambrose, the National Marine Fisheries Service biologist in charge of coordinating an upcoming recovery plan for coho along our coast, says she has this intertwined history uppermost in her mind. In fact, the draft of the 4-inch-thick recovery plan she's been working on starts with a chapter on the coho's history. Ambrose calls it "a renegade move" to open the document that way, but she says she feels it's crucial to understand the past vitality of coho on the California coast.

She's fond of quoting a 1930s account of a coho run on Northern California's Garcia River: "The water was like glass … the salmon were in rows … they lay there still … every now and then one would wiggle its tail to keep his place in line. They lay there by the thousands as far as my eye could see." That's the glorious past of the coho.

But Ambrose points out that even in that lost age, coho showed a remarkable ability to handle adversity. Drought, flood, or fire might devastate a watershed and wipe out a run. But far from being "hot-house flowers," in Ambrose's phrase, coho are survivors by nature. They're prolific breeders–a single female will lay 2,000 eggs or more in its streambed nest. If they find their natal streams unreachable, they'll wander to new spawning grounds.

Ambrose thinks an understanding of the coho's history–its ever-present drive to perpetuate itself, and its past abundance–are key elements to getting people to act to save the fish. And she says small steps to improve the odds of salmon survival can be as important as sweeping ones. "It’s like a small pebble in a pond. One small action can make a tremendous difference in increasing the probability of survival of the young, of the adults, of the eggs, of the out-migrating smolts." If we want to rewrite the next chapter of the coho's story, she suggests, get to know your watershed, and go out and volunteer to help repair it.

Listen to Saving Salmon radio report online.

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California Coho Salmon are listed as federally protected,
and are critically endangered. Image: Richard James

As we would with any loved one, we care about its health and well being. Over the years we have witnessed wanton pollution from purposeful and "accidental" sewage spills, there has been gravel mining, seemingly unchecked agri-business dumping pesticides and sucking wells dry, and more than anything, precious water has been continuously pumped out and diverted to quench the thirst of the ever-growing populations of Sonoma and Marin Counties. Each one of these factors has taken some of the life and wildness out of the Russian River. And there comes a point when the natural world and The River does not have anything left to give.

Still there is the hope that nature is resilient. One of the best indicators of environmental health on the Russian River would be the return of the native salmon. While producing our story on these magnificent fish we had the privilege to witness the incredibly dedicated conservation fishery biologists at the Don Clausen Fish Hatchery at Lake Sonoma. Seeing them work gave me a lot of hope. These men and women literally hold the future of the coho salmon in their hands. Each egg is tenderly cared for– each little growing fish is carefully identified, numbered and individually tagged before being gently released into the wild. It is an enormous, time-consuming and laborious task. But without them, the critically endangered coho salmon have little or no realistic chance of returning to the Russian River.

Sadly, it seems that much of their work may have gone for naught. In early April 2009, for just one night's frost protection, the wineries of the Russian River valley went against a request by the National Marine Fisheries Service and turned open their taps, taking so much water out of the Russian River watershed that the water-table dramatically dropped resulting in a massive coho salmon die-off. It's another heartbreaking blow to an already perilous situation. The wineries were told specifically about the consequences of their actions last year at a special meeting held by the State Water Resources Control Board. Yet to protect a small percentage of an already glutted crop, the wineries knowingly risked dooming an entire species to extinction.

For more information see:

Quick drop in water level kills coho | The Press Democrat | Santa Rosa, CA
04/04/09
Frost protection measures to save crops stranded fish in Russian River tributary

Coho killed after water diverted to protect crops | SF Chronicle
04/04/09
Endangered coho salmon killed after a sudden drop in the water level…

I have always advocated for The Russian River and its small communities and businesses. I recommend it as the perfect getaway for friends looking for a weekend exploration. Hiking, canoeing, wine-tasting or exploring–The River is the place. In turn I have also regularly recommended and sought out Russian River wines. But I doubt I'll be recommending anything from this year's vintage. I have a feeling the 2009 Russian River wines are going to leave a very bitter taste.

Watch the California's Lost Salmon television story online.

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