What Kind of Return?

(October 4, 2009)

Two redds today, here at the Williams Street Bridge smack-dab in downtown Renton. The water is clear and the fish are easily visible, redd-building in earnest. But from where I stand, only two redds! Well, it’s early in the run; hopefully there will be much more to come.

There is a wide promenade along this stretch of the river, and it is heavily used by joggers, moms with strollers, dog-walkers (and just dogs), people taking a break from the nearby community garden, men in suits with cell phones - a very popular place. Last year there was an unusually large number of redds here during the salmon run (maybe because the WFWD fish weir was moved and changed the hydrology? Who knows?) and I had huge fun standing on the bridge, watching unsuspecting strollers startle at a sockeye leaping at their feet. One gentleman stopped in his tracks right above a redd nestled against the grasses at the river’s edge,and stood unmoving for a good fifteen minutes, transfixed. And there I was above him on the bridge, looking down at him, feeling as if the fish were mine to offer up like promising young children who were making me proud. Look! My fish! (Our fish.)

These fish today are beautiful, fluorescing red in the dappled water, the males trading places from redd to redd, each one trying to claim it all, while the females, ignoring the males, are consumed with sweeping the sediment and algae from the cobbles and gravel, and digging pockets for their eggs soon to come. The male are ferocious (I once saw one male grab an interloper by the base of the tail and shake him so hard he flung him out of the water), but so are the females; they’ve come so far and worked so hard to find the perfect spot and prepare it that they’re not about to give it up to another hopeful female without a fight.

Upriver, at the Cavanaugh Pond Natural Area, I don’t see any new redds down at the beach - still just the two. But upriver, closer to the beginning of the trail along the river, is a reach with at least 30-40 fish! (I count ten, and guess at the conglomerate.) I’m so happy to see them that I can hardly breathe. Maybe it's going to be all right. It’s hard to count the actual redds because the water is dappled here and the bright ovals seem to overlap.

The USFS hatchery fish trap used to be set up here at Cavanaugh before the newer-and-better permanent weir was built last year downriver. The USFW guy would walk out onto the rickety wooden dam and climb down into the cage that trapped the fish, and lift out the fish one by one into a big rubber “boot” filled with water. He’d hand the boot off to anotherperson standing on the weir, who would walk it down the weir and over to the transport truck waiting at the bank. He would pass the boot up to yet another person standing on a high platform that went around the truck, who would then ‘pour’ the fish into one of the twin tanks filled with water (one for males, one for females - no unsupervised hanky-panky in the trucks, thank you). And off the truck would go to the hatchery. One time, as one guy lifted up the boot to the guy on the truck, the fish inside leaped out and landed on the truck’s standing platform. Eggs exploded everywhere, onto the platform, over the worker’s boots, down the side of the truck and onto the straw-covered muddy beach. Volunteer naturalists and the people gathered around to watch the transfer leaped back, crying out in dismay - all those eggs, lost! And then the kids scrambled around to find the pink round jellies in the hay, like so many Easter eggs. (“Eat them, they’re good!” one teenager urged his little brother.)

“Ripe”, the Fish and Wildlife guys call it; “these fish are ripe.” Ripe they may be, but of the 3,000-4,000 eggs each female lays, only 2-4 single fish will come back to spawn in four years. And that’s if things go well.

I've also taken a drive up to Landsburg Park in Maple Valley, the end of the line for our Salmon Journey program. In 2007 and 2008 there were many, many spawning fish there in the shallows just above the little waterfall/rock climb that disguises the pipeline that transports Cedar River water to Lake Youngs for Seattle's faucets. In fact, that's where I've been able to take most of my best photographs of the fish! But today I see - nothing. Not one fish.

Our training for this year is finished; this morning we got our assignments. I will be at Cavanaugh on three days during this year's three-weekend program. But this season opens to mixed reviews. While the fish I saw at Cavanaugh are very encouraging, the small count at the downtown bridges near the mouth of the river are very worrisome. And what appears to be a complete absence of fish at Landsburg, at the other end of the salmon's available spawning ground, is even more concerning. What will the next weeks bring?

-- Lorraine

They're Back!

(September 26, 2009)

This afternoon I took the dogs down to Cavanaugh Pond and there they were: two redds with five fat, gleaming, first-of-the-run sockeye in them, right down at the end of the levee trail where the old weir used to be.

This will be my third year on the river as a volunteer naturalist for the Cedar River Salmon Journey. This program, run by the Friends of the Cedar River Watershed, is sponsored by the City of Seattle, King Conservation District, and many private sponsors*, has trained and posted volunteers along the Cedar River from Renton to Maple Valley, Washington, for more than 11 years now.

Training for this year has begun in earnest, gearing up for the salmon run this fall. This year, though, I am sensing an undercurrent of worry among the volunteers and organizers that is dampening the usual sense of celebration we always feel as we anticipate the arrival of these amazing animals. We’re all acting like kids on Christmas Eve, for sure; the giddy sense of expectation is almost palpable. But this is the third year of declining runs of sockeye on the Cedar – in fact, with only 21,000 fish counted coming through the Chittenden Locks into Lake Washington this summer, it’s the lowest count since counting began in this watershed back in 1972. And this horrible return was completely unexpected, because these fish are the returning survivors of the very large spawning population of 2005. There was even some hope of exceeding the 350,000 minimum count needed to open the lake for fishing for a day or two.

Only 21,000 fish – why? Myriad organizations write grants and conduct fundraisers, and government and utility workers and private consultants produce studies and conservation plans, and volunteers like me donate countless hours to restore habitat and to tell people all about these flashy little miracles and what we can do to help them – and people come down to the Cedar in crowds (6,857 visitors last year, and 41,471 since the Salmon Journey program began in 1998) and lose all sense of time as they watch these flashes of scarlet and olive green. All these people, all this effort, trying to bring back our runs. What else can we do?

Only 21,000 fish.

But look: because I love those tomato-and-olive fish so much, I forget to pay attention to what else is happening in the river. It’s true that the sockeye – not a native fish in this river – are struggling, but the Chinook are doing well, relatively speaking. From a low of 120 Chinook in the Cedar River in 2000, there were 31,000 passing through the Locks in 2007, 1730 of which were wild Chinook coming to spawn in the Cedar. This is a tremendous success story for a wild return: biologists feel that, for this river, 1,200 Chinook is a healthy run. This year, as of early September, just under 5,000 passed through the Locks and based on this, we are expecting a much lower return than in 2007 or 2008 – but still a significantly improved run from a decade ago. Not only are the Cedar Chinook are wild - they are ESA-listed. And I am grateful for this, because that brings regulation and restoration money to the Cedar.

And for some reason, pink salmon are so abundant on the White and the Snoqualmie Rivers this year that they can’t scoop them up to transport them over the dams fast enough; the fish are piling up. There are even reports of pinks straying into the Cedar!

The sky today is cloudy, and the water is grey-green, flat, hard to see into. But even so, these first salmon are here, no mistake, flashing broken peach, red and green in the moving water like a Monet painting. I can’t wait to see what the next few weeks bring.

--Lorraine

* We are all so grateful to our sponsors:

• Brown Bear Car Wash
• The City of Renton
• Forum for WRIA 8 (Lake Washaington/Cedar/Sammamish Watershed)
• Friends of the Cedar River Watershed
• King Conservation District
• The Seattle Aquarium
• Seattle Public Utilities
• US Army Corps of Engineers, Seattle District
• The Wal-Mart Foundation

Notes from the field coming soon - stay tuned!

Charlotte is thrilled to have the opportunity to hear first hand from Cedar River Salmon Journey naturalists about their experiences from the field. Thank you to everyone who will be contributing. I look forward to hearing your stories.

Stay tuned for new posts coming soon!

Cedar River Salmon Journey Coming Soon!

Learn about the epic journey that takes place every year as salmon swim from the ocean, through the Ballard Locks, into Lake Washington, and on up the river to spawn. The Cedar River hosts Chinook (currently listed as threatened), sockeye, and coho salmon among other fish species.

Program Details:

Naturalists will be stationed at five sites along the Cedar River from 11am - 4pm on weekend days of October 17, 18, 24, 25, 31 and November 1.

For more information and directions to each site, visit our salmon journey page or contact Charlotte Spang at naturalists@cedarriver.org.