Defenders Magazine

Swimming Upstream

Without our help, salmon runs in the Northwest may be history.

by Paul Tolme

© Tom & Pat Leeson

We slog our way upstream along northern California's South Fork Elk River on a cloudy winter morning in search of wild salmon, wading through waist-deep pools, climbing over fallen trees and tip-toeing across floating logs and branches. My companions, a California Department of Fish and Game employee and an AmeriCorps watershed steward, are conducting a spawning survey, part of an effort to monitor the health of the river's annual salmon runs. The South Fork Elk is cloudy with sediment from recent rains, making it difficult to see into the water, and after an hour of bushwhacking we have yet to spot any fish.

Spawning salmon are an increasingly rare sight here and in much of the Northwest. Dams, agriculture, development, logging and other human activities have severed salmon from their spawning grounds and destroyed crucial habitat. The Columbia River basin, once home to the planet's largest salmon runs, contains less than 10 percent of its original populations. The situation is similar farther south on the Sacramento and Klamath rivers, the region's second- and third-largest salmon runs.

Last April, the Pacific Fishery Management Council canceled the commercial salmon fishing season for California and much of Oregon due to the crash of the Sacramento's spawning run. The council took the drastic step—a first in its 22-year history—because only 68,000 of the river's fabled Chinook, or king, salmon returned to spawn in the fall of 2007, down from more than 800,000 six years earlier. Closing the $150 million regional fishery prompted the governors of California, Oregon and Washington to ask for federal disaster relief. "It's easy to have a sense of doom and gloom," says Pat Ford, director of Save Our Wild Salmon, a conservation group based in Portland, Oregon. "We're seeing an extinction trend."

Now, salmon face another threat: climate change. Salmon need abundant supplies of clear, cold water to migrate and spawn. As global warming raises temperatures in the Northwest, some rivers and streams will become inhospitable. Lower water levels caused by declining mountain snowfall will interfere with migrations and cause sensitive salmon eggs to overheat. Rising sea levels could destroy estuaries, the nurseries where juvenile salmon acclimate to salt water.

In addition, changes in the ocean could diminish food sources for salmon, which must fatten up to survive their long inland spawning runs. Salmon depend on the upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich water from the deep ocean, which spurs the growth of creatures at the base of the food chain. "The upwelling is the pump. It's like fertilizing your lawn," says John Ferguson, director of fish ecology at the federal Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle. This upwelling has become erratic in recent years, contributing to the crash of the Sacramento River spawning run in 2007 and 2008. Says Ferguson: "Salmon are connected to the atmosphere in ways we are only beginning to understand."

Back on the South Fork Elk, the splash of a tail fin grabs my eye and we scramble down an embankment for a closer look. Three salmon—two males and a female—swim in the gentle current, surging forward and floating backward in a watery dance. Suddenly, the female begins agitating the river bottom with her tail, kicking up sand and gravel.

"She's digging a redd," says Tambra Fisher, a technical advisor for the state's fish and game department. A redd is a gravel nest where females lay their eggs. The two males jockey for position several feet downstream, awaiting the opportunity to fertilize, after which the female will use her tail to cover the eggs with gravel.

Fisher and her colleague scribble notes and hang a ribbon from a branch to mark the location, and we depart to avoid disturbing the fish. We discover more than a dozen redds in the waters upstream—evidence of salmon that have spawned in previous weeks. If all goes well, alevins will hatch in a month and feed off yolk sacs attached to their bellies. Then tiny salmon fry will emerge from the gravel several weeks later to feed on insects and begin their journey to the ocean.

There are five species of Pacific salmon—Chinook, coho, sockeye, chum and pink—and their range extends from the mid-coast of California to Alaska. Born in fresh water, they travel downstream with the current to coastal estuaries, where they fatten up and grow before heading to the ocean for two to seven years. Some travel south along the California coastline, others north to the waters off Alaska, feeding on krill, smelt, herring, squid and rockfish. Then, driven by little-understood evolutionary signals, they cross miles of ocean to the coast, where their keen sense of smell helps them sniff out their home river. After pausing to allow their bodies to adapt to fresh water, the salmon travel up the rivers of their birth to spawn and die. Each species has multiple runs, with some fish returning in spring and summer, others winter or fall.

The spawning runs of old were a wonder to behold. Lewis and Clark wrote of waterways "crouded with salmon." Settlers joked about crossing rivers on the backs of fish. An estimated 16 million salmon migrated annually up the Columbia River, sustaining Indian tribes for thousands of years and traveling as far inland as Idaho and Nevada.

Industrial canning operations in the late 1800s began the demise by setting off a harvest free-for-all using gill nets, weirs and giant Ferris-wheel-like scoops. Mining, agriculture and logging continued the decline. Dams (the Columbia River basin alone contains more than 200) cut off salmon from as much as two-thirds of their historic range. In the 1990s, federal officials began listing Pacific salmon under the Endangered Species Act. Today, 16 distinct populations from California to Washington are listed as threatened or endangered. More than 100 stocks are believed extinct, from the Snake River coho runs to Oregon's Wallowa River sockeye. Once lost, a wild run never returns.

In light of the new threat posed by climate change, conservationists are calling for a major restoration effort. "We know sea level will rise. There isn't much we can do about that. We are going to have more extreme droughts. There's not much we can do about that either," says Jack Williams, senior scientist with Trout Unlimited. "But there are things we can do to help our watersheds deal with those changes so that salmon have a greater capacity to absorb the impacts of climate change. We have to become more proactive."

Save Our Wild Salmon proposes several steps to help buffer salmon on the Columbia River and Snake River (a tributary of the Columbia) from climate change: Protect headwaters where salmon spawn and rear. Modify and remove dams and maximize water flows so adult fish can reach headwater habitats, juveniles can reach the ocean and fewer fish die along the way.

Dams are problematic because, aside from physically blocking adults and grinding up juveniles in their turbines, they create areas of slack, warm water that stall migrations. Wholesale dam removal is unlikely (hydropower supplies about 60 percent of the Northwest's electricity), but older, antiquated dams such as four on the lower Snake River must come down if salmon are to persist, say conservationists. The lower Snake dams are primarily used to help barges carry wheat to the coast. "It's federally subsidized barging at the expense of salmon," says attorney Todd True of Earthjustice, which is suing the government over its management of Columbia and Snake River salmon.

The lower Snake dams have contributed to the decline of the sockeye that once spawned in Idaho's Redfish Lake, traveling 900 miles inland and climbing nearly 7,000 feet. In 2007, four fish reached the lake; in 2006, three. "Removing the Snake River dams becomes even more important in an era of global warming," says Ford of Save Our Wild Salmon. "The habitat above those dams in Idaho and eastern Oregon is a Noah's Ark for salmon. It's the coldest, highest and healthiest habitat in the lower 48. The problem is salmon can't reach it."

Salmon advocates also hope to remove four dams on the Klamath. Federal officials have ordered the utility that owns the dams to modify them to allow salmon passage—work that could cost $300 million. Removing the dams would cost less, analysts say. While federal officials plan to remove two dams on Washington's Elwha River in future years, "the jury is still out" for the Klamath and Snake, True says. "The current administration hasn't even considered dam removal. It's a litmus-test political issue."

Where dams remain, more water must be released for salmon, conservationists say. In 2002, tens of thousands of salmon died in the Klamath due to low flows, which in addition to heating up the water cause infestations of deadly parasites. On the Sacramento, more than half of the river's water is pumped out some years. Too much water has been promised to too many people, and climate change will exacerbate the competition for this resource. "With water becoming increasingly scarce, the reaction may be: 'We need that water for humans and to heck with the fish,' says Bob Davison, a senior scientist for Defenders in Corvalis, Oregon. "We hope they see that what's good for fish is good for humans, but climate change will force the issue more than ever before."

Steam rises from mossy logs as morning sun warms northern California's coastal mountains while Bureau of Land Management (BLM) fisheries biologist David Fuller waxes poetic about salmon spawning. "It's dramatic, beautiful and sad," he says. "The fish are dying. Their tails are falling apart from digging in the gravel. They have stopped eating. They are giving their lives."

Fuller and I are visiting the Headwaters Forest Reserve, a 7,500-acre parcel of BLM land that contains the headwaters of the South Fork Elk and Salmon Creek. Hoping to improve spawning habitat here, the BLM is removing 50 miles of logging roads to reduce sediment runoff (which clogs redds, cutting off water flow and entombing eggs). Fuller shows me entire hillsides that have been reshaped and replanted as part of the project. "It's a huge experiment," Fuller says, noting that it will be years before the watershed heals.

Similar projects are underway up and down the coast. From 2000 to 2006, the federal Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery Fund spent $590 million on 6,300 restoration projects encompassing more than 532,000 acres of habitat and 11,000 stream miles, according to a 2007 report to Congress. But that amount is just a small portion of the estimated billions of dollars spent on salmon during the past two decades—$9 billion in the Columbia basin alone to rear and transport hatchery fish, manage water levels, retrofit dams, truck spawning adults upstream and undertake a host of other mitigation and research efforts.

"We've focused a lot of energy on restoring threatened and endangered populations," says Paula Burgess, director of the Wild Salmon Center's North American Stronghold Partnership. "That's certainly important, but we need a complimentary effort to protect strong stocks so they remain strong."

Burgess' group is identifying salmon strongholds so government officials can take action to protect them now. Strongholds include the Smith River in northern California, the Rogue and Illinois rivers in southern Oregon, much of Oregon's northern coast, the Hoh River basin on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, and Oregon's John Day River—the second longest un-dammed waterway in the West. The salmon from these strongholds may help to re-colonize areas where salmon have disappeared.

Salmon are vital to the economy of the Northwest, benefiting thousands of commercial fishermen as well as recreational anglers, charter boat captains, bait and tackle shops and Indian tribes. They are also vital to the ecology of the region, as many species feed on the fish—from tuna and orcas to seabirds, bears, birds of prey and insects—and plants benefit from a yearly jolt of fertilizer as salmon decay following their spawning runs. The decline of salmon not only harms the economy and ecology of the region, it also illustrates the woeful state of our rivers. Like humans, salmon desire clear, cold and unpolluted water. Restoring waterways for salmon improves that water not just for humans, but also species such as sturgeon, coastal cutthroat trout, endangered delta smelt of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and countless others.

"Salmon are amazingly resilient," says Williams of Trout Unlimited. "The question is whether climate change will stretch some populations beyond their ability to survive. Then you lose genetic diversity. We have to do whatever we can to protect that diversity. Those might be the genes that allow an entire species to persist."

Paul Tolme is a wildlife and science writer whose work can be seen at www.paultolme.com. To learn more about global warming's impact on salmon, please visit www.defenders.org/salmonreport.