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