In winter, storms race across the North Pacific Ocean and slam into Oregon’s coastal mountains. As torrents of rain fall, normally placid streams rise. Endangered wild coho salmon return from the ocean, to save people.
The fish have no intent to save people, and little awareness that people exist, except possibly as another predator. These wild coho return at this bleakest time of year and muscle their way upstream to spawn. They lay down their eggs and milt in gravel “nests” in cold, rough mountain streams in the Pacific Northwest coast ranges. It seems the worst possible time of year to start new life, but the coho have evolved to fit this season.
My son-in-law Brian Franklin, a fish biologist, arrived at our recent family dinner after a day surveying the spawning coho in the Umpqua River Basin. Wild coho are listed as a threatened species in Oregon, and the 111-mile-long Umpqua River in southern Oregon, with its tributaries, is key habitat for the species.
Over roast beef and mushroom gravy, Brian described the spawning coho he had seen that day. Bright silver in the ocean, the coho’s skin changed to spawning colors when they returned to freshwater. The males were crimson, the color of Christmas ribbon, and the females were a shining green with slashes of crimson. “Christmas colors,” he commented, “you could call them the co-ho-ho salmon.”
The data that Brian and others were collecting on coho returns would be used eventually in the Oregon Coast Coho Conservation Plan Annual Report Card, put out by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. It’s difficult to tell if you’re actually saving salmon, as the Endangered Species Act commands. All the right restoration work is being done: stream banks stabilized with treeplanting, livestock fenced out so they don’t trample streams, culverts impassable to salmon replaced. Wild coho are returning to streams where they haven’t been seen in years, and coho numbers are up in stream reaches where habitat has been improved.
All of the improved habitat and greater numbers of coho, however, are merely loose change in a bucket, compared to the total stream miles in the Umpqua River Basin (the river plus hundreds of miles of stream) and the total coho population. Normal fluctuations in wild salmon populations complicate the report card; poor ocean conditions, which cause more fish to die in the oceangoing part of their life cycle, may be masking any upticks in salmon numbers from the restoration work. Because of the improved coho returns in the restored reaches, fish biologists have a gut feeling -- which they talk about among family and friends but can’t report -- that when ocean conditions cycle back to good, the wild coho numbers will surge.
Actually seeing the fish return has a powerful effect on people that data can’t measure and report cards can’t document. Stanley Petrowski, a landowner in the Umpqua River Basin and a board member of the watershed council, has told me what got him involved in saving salmon. A self-described “radically independent individualist,” Stanley and his wife raise angora goats on a small ranch. In the winter of 2004-05, he spotted one coho salmon in Joe Hall Creek, which runs through his ranch. He watched that one fish resting in a pool, after surviving a rigorous life in the Pacific Ocean and a bruising, exhausting struggle upstream, with no mate.
If that fish could make that effort, Stanley told me, he felt he owed it to the fish to make an effort for the stream, for more fish to return to Joe Hall Creek. When he first got involved in restoration work, he feared the “enviro police” would shut down his angora goat ranching to protect the stream. That didn’t happen, and he went on to become a board member on the Partnership for the Umpqua Rivers Watershed Council.
On his web page for Singing Falls Ranch, Stanley wrote that “many miles of the county’s waterways are once again opened up as healthy spawning grounds for salmon, steelhead and cutthroat trout. … From personal experience I can tell you it is a thrill.”
In Joe Hall Creek, the stream in his backyard, Stanley wrote that the stream “is sporting many cavorting spawning salmon. The thrill of seeing these returnees to Singing Falls is hard to describe. There is a surge of hope that wells up within my heart when I witness this noble effort on the part of this keystone species to return to the ancient spawning grounds of its ancestors.”
It’s a one-in-ten-thousand, maybe even one-in-one-hundred-thousand chance, for any one fertilized coho egg in Joe Hall Creek to survive its early life in the stream, its downstream migration to the ocean, its adventurous life in the open ocean, and its return migration upstream to spawn.
Even at these long odds, it is an indisputable fact that coho salmon survive, and people are restored.
Wild coho salmon fights its way upstream to spawn in an Umpqua River tributary. Because of restoration work, the coho are returning to streams where they haven’t been seen for decades.
Photo credit: Brian Franklin.
