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.

Every year, millions of fish make a strange and harrowing detour through the Skinner Fish Facility, part of the State Water Project's facilities in the Delta.

In my last post, I wrote about my visit to the Banks Pumping Plant, whose giant pumps slurp water from the Delta to help quench California's thirst. As the volumes of water are sucked up, both resident and migrating fish come along for the ride. The Skinner Facility, in operation since 1968, was built to protect fish from being killed at the pumps–an effort that sadly is not as successful as one would hope (more on that below).

I was amazed to learn there is a whole art and science to fish screens, which range from physical barriers–called positive barriers–like perforated plates or wire mesh, to behavioral barriers like sound, light, or other stimuli aimed at keeping fish away. Well-designed screens minimize both entrainment (fish being pulled into the pump or diversion) and impingement (fish being trapped or injured against the screen itself due to water velocity).

Both physical and behavioral barriers are used at the Skinner Facility. Fish being pulled toward the pumps first encounter a trash rack that diverts many bigger fish, along with floating debris. Next, fish encounter a large, v-shaped array of metal louvers. The louvers create turbulence that functions as a behavioral signal, encouraging the fish to swim away into bypass pipes that function, as our tour guide put it, like "a big vacuum system."

From the bypass pipes fish travel to another set of louvers and pipes, concentrating them into a smaller volume of water, and then into holding tanks in a nearby warehouse. Giant, suspended cone-shaped buckets are used to periodically sample the fish, which are identified, counted, and measured. Some 90 species turn up in the facility, including Chinook salmon, steelhead, white sturgeon, and delta smelt. (I asked our guide if delta smelt really do smell like cucumbers. He confirmed it. In fact, when a school of smelt comes through–an event that has become rare–the warehouse smells "like a salad.") When enough fish have been collected, they are loaded into trucks and driven back to the Delta.

Here's the rub. Many fish caught in the pull of the pumps are lost to predation before even reaching the screening facility. Then, the facility does not effectively screen fish smaller than about 1.5 inches, meaning that littler, less powerful species and juveniles are still vulnerable to the pumps. For the fish that make it to the holding tanks, the process is such a trauma–with big and little fish squashed together in the tanks, buckets, and trucks–it's no surprise there are casualties; in fact, the delicate delta smelt often do not survive. And even for fish that make it through the entire process and out the other end, there's a final, fatal hurdle: the trunks routinely dump salvaged fish at the same locations, where more predators have learned to cluster for a free lunch.

Scientists agree that the loss of fish at the huge state pumps–and other pumps and intake pipes throughout the Delta–is a major contributor to plummeting populations. How much water we use makes a difference: The higher the export rates, the more fish are entrained. There also is broad consensus that more state-of-the-art fish screening facilities are needed. That could come with a hefty price tag. But with our fish disappearing, can we afford not to invest in their survival?

Recent news headlines have been full of Chinook salmon, but sadly the same cannot be said of Central Valley waterways. This fall, only about 90,000 Central Valley Chinook salmon returned to their home rivers and streams to spawn, down from more than 800,000 just a few years ago.

Like most salmon, Central Valley Chinook are anadromous, spending the bulk of their lives in the ocean but hatching and returning to reproduce in freshwater. The journey from the Valley through the Delta and San Francisco Bay to the Pacific, and back again, has always been a long and arduous one. In the past half century it has become even more difficult as the fish have increasingly faced an obstacle course of dams, pumps, and dewatered rivers and creekbeds.

Central Valley Chinook salmon populations include four runs-winter, spring, fall, and late fall-with each spawning not only at different times of the year but in different parts of the watershed. The dawning of the age of dams hit the winter and spring runs the hardest, cutting the fish off from their historic spawning grounds in the upper reaches of the watershed. Both runs are now listed under federal and state Endangered Species Acts.

The fall run, which spawns lower in the watershed, was less impacted by dam construction. In recent decades it has numbered more than 10x all the other runs combined and has been the mainstay of the California coastal salmon fishery. Now, even it appears to be in serious trouble: The count of 90,000 salmon this year was the second lowest on record and well below the minimum conservation target of 122,000 set by the Pacific Fishery Management Council. Also alarming is that the number of 2-year-old "jacks" returning was just 2,000, down from a typical count of 40,000. Since most spawners are 3-year-olds, these early returners are considered a good predictor of the size of next year's run.

Ocean conditions are one factor in the salmon decline, with rising water temperatures and more unpredictable upwellings-possibly resulting from global warming. But scientists are also pointing to overexploitation of our rivers and Delta-the "highway" for migrating salmon. The abrupt decline in the salmon population comes concurrently with the collapse of other fish species dependent on the Delta ecosystem, including delta smelt and longfin smelt. The salmon returning to spawn this year would have been juveniles headed to the ocean in 2005, the year Delta water exports hit a record high.

Between unfriendly ocean conditions and the degraded condition of the watershed, the salmon are facing a double whammy. But, as Bay Institute Senior Scientist Tina Swanson points out, "Apart from rolling back global warming, we can't really control ocean conditions. What we can do is drastically improve conditions within the watershed so that more adults can spawn successfully and more juveniles survive the journey to the ocean."

Ann Dickinson is Communications Manager for The Bay Institute (www.bay.org), a nonprofit research, education, and advocacy organization dedicated to protecting and restoring San Francisco Bay and its watershed, "from the Sierra to the sea."