Salmon Tales: Cedar River Salmon Journey: 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