The coho run in Lagunitas Creek has crashed. From the San Francisco Chronicle:
The lack of rain this winter has contributed to what fisheries biologists say is, so far, the worst return of coho salmon in the recorded history of Marin County’s Lagunitas Creek watershed, one of California’s most critical ecosystems for the endangered fish.
The Lagunitas coho run is the heart of the ecosystem on Mount Tamalpais, the Bay Area’s emblemic peak. It was surprisingly healthy for a run so close to a major urban area. The coho were beautiful and strong.
I have sat here for some time tonight trying to find words in me to describe how I’m feeling at reading this news. No luck. The best I can do is reprint some words I wrote 12 years ago. They’re below the fold.
Coho Come Home
(first printed in Terrain, February 1997)
Swirls of steam rise off the creek. I rub my hands. There’s a thin layer of frost still on the grass in the San Geronimo Valley this early December morning. The basalt outcrop on which I sit, high in the Lagunitas Creek drainage, rose out of the ocean floor to be squeegeed onto the Marin Hills by sliding crustal plates. Today, it holds the benthic chill of those deep waters. Cold flows right through the thin khaki of my trousers, through the skin, into my leg bones. I feel alert. This chill makes my hairs stand on end.
There should be salmon here.
I sit, increasingly cold. Western sword ferns grow halfway up the redwood tree boles, huckleberries drip cold dew onto the mosses. A large eddy swirls around an inviting gravel bed. The water is green with runoff. The cold has lowered the creek’s voice an octave or so; it gurgles deep sentiments of madrone leaves, cherty soil and redwoods. I stay for half an hour more, trying to find fish shapes in swirling water and tannin foam.
A State Park ranger collars me; I’ve forgotten to write my truck’s license number on the day-use fee envelope. Feeling vaguely foolish, I ask him if the coho are running. A grin spreads sideways across his face; he beckons, and I follow him a few short muddy steps to another rill. “There’s one, no, two. Three. And two more there.” I see nothing but alder leaves and dappled reflections of white December sky. “Look for the tails,” says ranger Woody, “white triangles with the broad end downstream.” I peer into the deep pools. Soon, I find a likely-looking flash, partially obscured by the shining surface, the dappled gravel. I stare for a minute.
There’s a perceptual shift that happens when your search pattern suddenly clicks. What was random information, stray flickers of light and submerged color, is now meaningful. What was incidental play of leaf and sun on water is now a dark, determined form struggling to stay in place against the current. What was a dirty wedge of reflected fog is now the tail of a two-foot female coho salmon.
A step back, and I see the four other fish Woody had pointed out. And several more. They’re big. Really big.
About six feet from where I stand, a male and female hold together on a redd – a shallow depression in a gravel bed the female has dug to lay her eggs in. They dodge in the current, drifting back and forth over a patch maybe a foot wide, no longer than the length of the male, at least two feet long, who’s releasing milt – fish sperm – into the redd. They nuzzle one another, playing the currents, leapfrogging sideways over one another, slipping and sliding. I know better, but I let myself think they’re being affectionate. Big red male slides over staid female, thrashing exuberantly.
The female, if she isn’t interrupted, eaten, or swept away, will bury the fertilized eggs with the same tail-thrashing that dug the redd. The eggs will hatch out alevin, the salmon’s answer to tadpoles, larval fish with attached yolk sacs who live under the gravel for a few weeks. When they deplete their yolks, alevin emerge from the streambed as fry, and flit about in the pools for about a year, eating bugs and crawdads and tadpoles and smaller fish. If they survive a year of hungry scrutiny by Mount Tamalpais’ herons and osprey and raccoons, the young fish (now called smolts) one day stop fighting the current, drift downstream past the second-growth redwoods, past the tires and soccer balls and styrofoam cups, past the slumping, over-grazed hillsides of Olema, into the brackish waters of the creek’s estuary at the south end of Tomales Bay. Once they’ve adjusted to the saltier water, they head across this submerged arm of the San Andreas Fault into the open ocean, the fattened, battle-scarred survivors returning to Lagunitas Creek three years from this hopeful day of spawning.
Coho are relatively abundant here in Lagunitas Creek – also called Papermill Creek – largely due to neighbors’ activism in restoring spawning habitat and battling the Marin Municipal Water District for sufficient instream flows. But Lagunitas Creek notwithstanding, salmon are all but gone from California. Of 6000 historic miles of salmon spawning habitat in the Sacramento-San Joaquin drainage system, only 300 remained in 1993. Fewer than a tenth the historic number of fall-run chinook salmon – cousins to the coho – now struggle upstream in the San Joaquin River and its tributaries. Runs into many of the smaller Sierra drainages, the Clavey and the Rubicon and the upper Mokelumne, are extinct. Anglers on the Sacramento River near Corning still watch chinook flash past them, but now it’s reason for them to yelp and point. It used to be the way things were.
Coho and chinook in coastal streams don’t fare much better. Coho in the Gualala and Garcia rivers are nearly extinct, according to fisheries biologists. So are coho in the Scott, Mad, and Mattole. So are spring chinook in the Smith, Salmon, and Trinity. So are fall chinook in the small streams that flow from Headwaters Forest into the Eel River and Humboldt Bay.
Agriculture bears part of the blame for Pacific salmon’s plight. Despite fish screens, a third of each year’s crop of Sacramento River salmon smolts gets turned into salmon smolt paté by the Central Valley Project’s pumps, which send water to the cotton fields (and lawns) of the south. Smolts heading out to sea often get hopelessly lost in mazes of irrigation ditches. Coho in the Gualala and Garcia Rivers drift toward extinction due to water diversions for boutique Sonoma vineyards. One could be excused for hoping the wines go with the fish. Agricultural runoff interferes with salmon reproduction, due to pesticides washed off fields that mimic estrogens, changes in stream ecology caused by nitrate fertilizer, and increased turbidity and water temperature from silt rolling off over-grazed hillsides. Cows and sheep damage streamside vegetation, cutting off the base of the freshwater food chain.
The timber industry has had a huge impact on the salmon. Logging sends hillsides of silt into the rivers, either all at once in landslides or a bucket at a time due to erosion. Silt covers gravel vital to spawning, cutting off oxygen to eggs and alevin. That’s if a flash flood off a denuded hillside doesn’t wash the gravel beds away altogether. When cut and pulped and turned into cereal boxes, trees no longer shade creeks and regulate water temperatures. Salmon like temperatures in the low fifties or below. If the water gets warmer than that, they suffer.
Forest defenders have latched onto the coho as an emblematic species in the campaign to protect old growth, and rightly so. The fish depend on ancient trees as much as they depend on squid. They’re as likely to suffer from logging as are spotted owls and marbled murrelets. And they make a better emblem than the spotted owl, as they’re immune from Wise-Use jokes about barbecues: many of us want to save the coho so we can eat them.
Our desire for their flesh has done some damage too. Bans on driftnetting have helped, catch limits have helped somewhat more. The Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations is calling for new restrictions on the harvest of squid, an important source of food for salmon in the ocean. A couple of really good seasons for the trawlers, of squid or of salmon, could mean the end of an industry. A modern factory ship could “process” the entire salmonid population of Lagunitas Creek in about the time it took me to look up “salmonid” in the dictionary.
Supplementing wild populations with hatchery stock is part of the problem, not of the solution. Planting of hatchery stock in wild drainages dilutes native genepools, lowering resistance to disease and aiding in disease transmission besides. Hatchery programs are the primary vector for the spread of Bacterial Kidney Disease (BKD), which if it doesn’t kill a salmon outright, makes the transition from fresh to salt water (and the consequent strain on the fishes’ kidneys) much harder: BKD-impaired salmon don’t gain as much weight in the ocean and therefore don’t spawn as successfully.
Even if a planted fish makes it out of a hatchery healthy, it acts differently from a wild fish. Trout lovers know this to be true of their own favorite fish. A wild trout must be snuck up on, alder leaves in your hat, angle of the sun just right and the wind at your face, expertly-tied dry fly simulating to a micron the local dominant insect hatch of the afternoon, and the proper thoughts in your mind, none of which involve catching a fish or killing a fish or, Walton forbid, eating a fish. If you’re fishing a lake where the Department of Fish and Game has just planted hatchery trout, you can catch them with green Play-Doh and grilled cheese sandwiches while line-dancing four feet out from the bank.
Hatchery salmon are much the same. They are less wary. They tend toward pack behavior. They beg peanut butter and jelly sandwiches from picnickers. They have trouble telling the difference between food and not-food. A study published in Norway mentions wood and rocks found in the stomachs of hatchery-raised Atlantic salmon. The study didn’t mention what was found in the fishes’ heads. If planted smolt make it out to sea a few months after they hatch, they’re generally easy prey for the first shark that offers them a ride to the Farallones. In the meantime, they’ve competed with native salmon for food and habitat. A growing number of fish people have repudiated hatcheries except as small-scale, last-gasp attempts to maintain the numbers in a specific strain.
Dams are to spawning salmon what Texas highways are to armadilloes. At many dams, the Grand Coulee on the Columbia being the biggest example, no provisions have been made for migrating fish. Salmon spawn downstream or not at all. Many of them choose “not at all,” hurling themselves quixotically at dam aprons and up spillways.
All of the major dams in the Sierra Nevada are in this category. A map of current and former spawning habitat in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Basin looks distressingly like a diagram for espaliering a three-year-old fruit tree; most of the branches are cut off nearly to the trunk. The hydrological engineers have decided the Cosumnes is the only large branch that will bear fruit; the chinook had better choose their homelands wisely.
Even those dams with accommodations – fish ladders, salmonid commuter shuttles set up by the state, or whatever – can pose a fatal barrier on the return trip. Water cascading over a dam spillway becomes highly ærated. Lots of atmosphere dissolves in it. Most of the atmosphere consists of nitrogen. When smolts tumble over the spillway into the maytag at the bottom, they’re charged with a huge amount of dissolved nitrogen. When they swim out of the tumult, the nitrogen comes out of solution in the fatty tissue into the bloodstream causing gas bubble disease, the salmonid version of the bends. As much as ninety percent of smolts going over a large dam will die of gas bubble disease after going over the spillway.
Threats to salmon vary from species to species; logging hurts the coho in Central California more than any other cause. But all of these evils take their toll. And all of them show up, at least symbolically, here in the Lagunitas Creek drainage.
The Peters Dam probably isn’t tall enough to cause gas bubble disease, but it’s done its share of damage to Lagunitas coho. Built by the Marin Municipal Water District in 1954, its reservoir – Kent Lake – flooded half the length of Big Carson Creek and much of what remained of free-flowing Lagunitas Creek, below Alpine, Bon Tempe and Lagunitas Reservoirs. During the mid-century influx of commuters and attendant housing construction, more and more of the creek’s water was sent over the ridge to Mill Valley and San Rafael. During the drought of 1976–77, there were times when no water at all flowed past Peters Dam. The Marin Municipal Water District ensured a water supply of an acre-foot every eight and a half hours to the lawn sprinklers of East Marin; the coho got nothing. Any coho hovering at the creek’s outflow on Tomales Bay, waiting to head upstream past Point Reyes Station and along the east base of Bolinas Ridge to their ancestral redds, would have had to hitch a ride on the Sir Francis Drake. None did.
Two decades later, the fish have at least enough instream flow to spawn at the foot of the dam. I’ve wandered upstream from the State Park, armed with my new search pattern, and it hasn’t failed me. A dozen strapping males vie for consortium with a pair of good-looking females, stationed at either end of the pool. From my vantage point on the muddy fire-road forty feet or so above the surface of the creek, just past the “Restricted Area: No Entry” sign, I can look nearly directly down at them. It’s like looking into an aquarium.
Pointed upstream, the males jockey for position, playing the current the way an angler would play them. They give the stream some slack, let the stream play them out, then stop. Every so often, a salmon will appear to lose to the current, looking like it’s being swept downstream, vent over teakettle, flailing and splashing as it tumbles. But the salmon is in control, always in control. When its flailing brings it to the spot it apparently meant to get to all along, the salmon points its nose upstream and is instantly motionless, as if anchored to the streambed.
Darting into the crowd of males around the southernmost female is a four-pound steelhead, a rainbow trout that went downsteam and made good. It’s about a foot long, a good ten inches shorter than the smallest of the coho here. It’s after salmon roe: it dives through the knot of male coho at the redd. The boys chase and snap, but it returns as soon as they turn their tails and head back to spawn. The steelhead is at a bit of an advantage. While the coho will die by the end of the week, the steelhead might survive to spawn six or seven times. Though steelhead are just as threatened, just as awe-inspiring, and just as illegal to catch in this part of the creek, I find myself rooting for the coho. Oh, for a bamboo wand, a bit of four pound green monofil, and a triple hook dressed in salmon eggs. I feel I could pull this unwary steelhead right out of the creek. (A foolish conceit. Steelhead, even roe-crazed steelhead attending a salmon redd, are notoriously hard to hook.)
As of January 1 1997 the coho in Lagunitas Creek – and throughout California from Fort Bragg to Santa Cruz – are a federally-protected Threatened species. This classification has been something of a topic of controversy. California governor Pete Wilson attempted to kill listing of the coho in a bow to timber and other powerful industrial interests. Douglas Wheeler, head of the state’s Resources Agency, sent a letter to the feds asking for a delay in listing of the coho due to economic considerations: namely the effect on logging, agriculture, and urban development. A species listed as Threatened is protected from any harm, or “taking.” “Taking” can be interpreted quite loosely. Petting a spawning coho could be considered a taking. So could building a reservoir. Or not. It depends on the judgment of the bureaucrat making the decision, the political connections of the person doing the taking.
When the taking is most of a century old and no one knows who did it, it’s hard to figure out where to serve the summons.
Two weeks after I watched the steelhead beleaguering the redds at Peters Dam, a wave of winter storms has hit the California Coast. They’re the kind of storms that make the first few minutes of the news; they’ll make hundreds of thousands homeless in the next couple of weeks. Tornadoes touch down near Point Reyes; the local paper’s subhead reads “Rancher Lucky to Be Alive.” California gulls hang grimly in place four feet off each lamppost on the Richmond Bridge, fighting the wind. I stand at Roy’s Dam in San Geronimo, at the west end of the San Geronimo Golf Club. The dam, an old one lately fallen into disrepair, is on San Geronimo Creek, a tributary of Lagunitas that joins that watercourse a mile below Peters Dam. Four days ago Roy’s Dam was mostly dry, the fish ladder on the dam’s north margin carrying the creek’s whole flow. Today, the watershed is swollen with runoff. A considerable volume of muddy water cascades over the broken apron.
Todd Steiner, Director of the Earth Island Institute’s Sea Turtle Restoration Project, leans on a bridge abutment and scans the torrent. I talk to Bill Cox, a biologist with the California Department of Fish and Game, about the heavy flows and the broken dam. The dam is a hot topic in the county. During heavy flows, coho avoid the fish ladder, heading instead for the heavier flows over the broken apron. They leap, land on the apron, and are stranded. Many of them are swept back down to another chance at the ladder. Some of them, exhausted and battered, don’t make it. Steiner watches as a couple of ten-pounders leap up and are swept back.
“The problem is,” Cox is saying, “people get so concerned about the individual coho, that they forget about the good of the species. Sure, high flows like this can sweep away some of the eggs that have already been deposited in the redds, and that hurts those individual fish. But the flows also sweep away the silt, and that helps the species as a whole. Next year’s run will have better spawning grounds.”
“What happens,” I ask Cox, “if the species gets down to just a few individuals?”
Cox ponders a moment. “That is a problem, isn’t it.”
A changing crowd of locals drifts past the bridge. Lately, this dam and its broken apron have been regular players in the local papers. People keep an anxious eye on the coho’s progress over the ladder. Neighbors have spent time netting stranded salmon and tossing them into the pools upstream. Some locals, Steiner included, advocate a drift fence across the base of the dam, to shunt salmon into the ladder, and debris the other way.
“It wouldn’t work.” Cox smiles benevolently. “I’ve put installations into lots of creeks. The only thing that’d stand up to a flow like this is cabled rock. You put a fence in the stream down there, the first flow like this will knock it out. And flows like this are when you’d need the fence to be there most, cause that’s when the fish want to go up onto the apron. During low flows, they all use the ladder anyway.”
Steiner isn’t convinced, saying that even putting in an ineffective fence would be better for the coho than no action at all. Earlier, he had told me that the National Marine Fisheries Service, which took control of management of the coho run January 1, had promised to send people out to the dam to net stranded salmon and help them over. “We had them out here for a couple days last week, but not Saturday or Sunday. Of course, they’re government employees, so they’re entitled to their weekends off.” Today’s Monday, but NMFS (pronounced “nymphs”) is nowhere in evidence.
According to Steiner, if it were up to Fish and Game, nothing would be done about Roy’s Dam at all. He says that DF&G sent a “cop-type” to talk to the NMFS workers, telling them they were “harassing” the fish and therefore violating the Endangered Species Act. Steiner says Fish and Game’s take on the issue is that nature should be allowed to run its course. “Yeah, we’d like nature to run its course too, but there’s a dam in the way.”
Steiner and Cox have argued publicly in print about the dam for some weeks, but they haven’t met in the flesh until now. “I should introduce myself,” says Steiner, turning his cap around to show the Earth Island logo on the front. Cox is cordial but uncomfortable.
The larger battle over California coho is writ small here in the San Geronimo Valley. Turf wars between the state and the feds are likely to determine the fate of the fish. The argument may come in part from honest differences in interpretation of coho data, but politics is at the core of the dispute. When the central California coho was listed by the feds as a Threatened species, the National Marine Fisheries Service gained jurisdiction over any project that may affect coho populations. State and local agencies should, theoretically, follow NMFS’s lead. But according to Zeke Grader of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, California governor Pete Wilson has ordered state agencies not to comply with any NMFSmanagement directives. “What they want to do is to create a train wreck,” says Grader. “When the coho is in even deeper trouble than it is now, they can turn to the feds and say ‘see, the Endangered Species Act isn’t working.’”
This order takes place in the context of business’ increasing determination to do away with restrictions, be they environmental, labor-protection or anti-trust. A cynical observer might guess that Wilson, once considered almost a liberal on some issues, is positioning himself for maximum corporate support for a future presidential race. Such a guess would be consistent with Wilson’s demonization, during his campaign for the 1996 Presidential election, of the Santa Cruz long-toed salamander. In a highly-publicized press conference in 1995, he blamed protection of the amphibian for flooding in the Pajaro River, saying that the Army Corps of Engineers couldn’t clear the river channel due to laws protecting salamander habitat. Agribusiness interests rallied around the claim, despite the utter lack of data indicating that there were ever long-toed salamanders in the river, that the Corps had delayed clearing of the river, or that clearing would have lessened the severity of the flooding, which caused corporate strawberry growers minor and insured damages. Given Wilson’s opposition to listing the coho, it isn’t hard to believe Grader’s accusation. What’s hard to believe is that state employees like Douglas Wheeler, who did a stint in the upper echelons of the Sierra Club, would go along with the plan. “It’s disgusting,” Grader told me. “These guys should be lined up and shot. And that is absolutely on the record.”
The feds aren’t blameless, to be sure. Allegations flew before the election in 1996 that Vice President Al Gore pressed for delay in listing so as not to threaten his friend Michela Alioto’s campaign for the North Coast Congressional district seat. The delay was granted, and coho north of Fort Bragg still aren’t listed, but Alioto lost anyway to incumbent Frank Riggs, a friend to the timber industry who once suggested a major factor in declining coho numbers was fisheries workers who couldn’t count accurately. Given that NMFS is controlled by an president who has repeatedly compromised on environmental protection, federal listing is no quick fix.
Todd Steiner has been fighting NMFS for years. After years of wearing his Earth Island Institute hat trying to get commercial shrimpers to ensure sea turtles don’t get tangled in their nets, his experience with the agency is that they knuckle under to the trawlers faster than you can say “Kemp’s ridley.” It may be that with pressure to save the coho coming from the fishing industry, NMFS will fold in the right direction this time. Still, Steiner is skeptical. “They promised they’d have people out there netting on the apron. You don’t see any here today, do you? And even the two days they were here, it didn’t look like the guys knew what they were doing. We had a volunteer out here netting fish a few days earlier, and she watched the NMFS guys. She said that if you put the net in front of the coho, it’ll swim right into it. The NMFS guys were chasing around with the nets behind the fish, losing about a third of them. It was pretty pathetic.”
Rain pelts the windshield of Willis Evans’ truck, but like many coast residents, he hits the wipers only intermittently, usually while slowing to point out the site of some historic slide, or mill, or a good place to see coho if the water weren’t so high. Evans – a fisheries biologist with half a century of experience working with DF&G, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and other agencies, and a resident of San Geronimo Valley – is giving Steiner and me a quick tour of the watershed.
Evans is more optimistic than Steiner about the National Marine Fisheries Service’s potential role in protecting Lagunitas Creek coho. But he’s still skeptical enough about the feds, reciting a litany of forty years of damage various agencies have done to the Lagunitas coho run. His ire seems neatly divided between upstream and down, the Marin Municipal Water District’s in-flow regime at the head and what he sees as National Park Service acquiescence to ranchers at the estuary.
Overgrazing in the watershed’s lower reaches has helped silt up coho habitat. The hills are bright green with new winter growth, but the telltale signs of erosion are there anyway. Hooves have worn closely-spaced parallel contour paths on every slope. Bedrock and bare soil poke through the green mantle at a distressing number of places. One piece of property, at a junction where the creek makes a right turn and forsakes Sir Francis Drake for Platform Bridge road, seems in particularly bad shape. Whole hillsides slump toward the creekbed. The creek flattens out, running in a broad, braided channel through willows and brambles: ideal coho spawning habitat if it weren’t for the failing, silt-disgorging hills above. Evans points upslope. “The guy that owned this ranch,” he deadpans, “used to head up the Soil Conservation Service district.” Evans points out that dairy farming takes a special toll on these hillsides. “The cows have to go from the field to the barn twice a day for milking. If the ranchers were to switch to beef cattle, the erosion might be less of a problem.”
Getting West Marin ranchers to switch from dairy to beef production would be about as easy as persuading Napa growers to tear out their Zinfandel in favor of red winter wheat. The region is built on a foundation of milk. A narrow-gauge train once pulled milk, butter and cheese along Lagunitas Creek to East Marin, from where they were shipped to the Bay Area’s growing cities. Nowhere is this dairy dominance more plain than in Point Reyes Station, a small village on Lagunitas Creek near its estuary on Tomales Bay. The town’s main tourist stop, Toby’s Feed Barn, has an iconic Holstein on its souvenir t-shirt. Across Highway One from Toby’s is the Bovine Bakery, with Holstein spots on its floor tile. Every day at noon and six pm, an ear-splitting moo – recorded by the technicians at nearby Skywalker Ranch – issues from a loudspeaker in town in lieu of a fire whistle, its dulcet tones audible all the way up the Bay to Marshall.
Ranching doesn’t just affect the coho through grazing. Each summer since anyone can remember, the Giacominis, owners of a large local ranch, have bulldozed an earthen dam across the creek at Point Reyes Station. The dam backs up a large freshwater pool until the high rains come to flush the dam back out to sea. A fish ladder was installed across the dam’s north end, intended to help drifting smolts get out to the Bay.
The Giacomini family, despite the comforting stereotype urbanites may have of ranchers, isn’t exactly a raging band of anti-environmentalists. They run what’s been called a model ranch. (As you read this, the National Park Service may have entered a six million dollar bid to acquire the ranch to add to Point Reyes National Seashore.) They’ve fought suburban sprawl in West Marin. Gary Giacomini, as a California Coastal Commissioner renowned for his pugnacity, helped kill plans to drill for oil off the Northern California Coast. The family is valued in the West Marin community. Locals have used the dam’s seasonal reservoir as a town park and swimming hole for a long time. Kids who learned to swim there have taught their kids, and their kids’ kids, to swim there. It’s a town tradition. Still, Giacomini Dam will become a thing of the past after the summer of 1997. The National Park Service, after consultation with locals and various state and federal agencies, has issued a cease and desist order to the Giacomini family, effective in June, which will prevent the dam from being built.
It was a difficult decision. Water wells in the area have depleted groundwater to the point where without the dam, brackish water will percolate into the soil and the wells, forcing the North Marin Water District (as distinct from the Marin, or MMWD) to scramble for a new source of drinking water for 1800 homes.
But damage to coho habitat caused by the dam outweighed the inconvenience to NMWD customers of removing it. Smolts don’t swim toward the ocean when they’re ready to become ocean fish, they just stop fighting the current, and drift downstream. When they reach slack water, they stop. Fish ladder or no, the Giacomini Dam reservoir blocked smolt migration.
Perhaps more important, though, was the change in the estuary’s salinity, and the effects that change had on aquatic life. During their stay in the Tomales Bay estuary, Lagunitas Creek coho mainly eat possum shrimp, so-called for their habit of keeping their eggs in a thoracic pouch. Possum shrimp can tolerate only a limited range of salinity. They can’t live in fresh water or in seawater, and are thus restricted to the lens of brackish water where creek mixes with bay. This lens shifts upstream and down with tides, creek volume and season. Giacomini Dam blocked the flow of freshwater into the estuary, making downstream water more saline and endangering the survival of the possum shrimp. With coho newly protected by federal law, the dam had to go.
John Grissim, who heads the local grassroots Environmental Action Committee, made the difficult decision to publicly oppose his friends the Giacominis and call for removal of the dam. “My family benefits from the dam. Our house is right on the creek, we have a wonderful dock that sticks out into the swimming hole the dam makes every year, and here I decide I have to go to Sacramento on behalf of the EAC and testify to get them to tear the dam down, and have my property values go down. I could have recused myself, because I’m taking a financial hit with this decision, and my family’s quality of life will suffer. But on the whole, my wife and I decided we had to bite the bullet on this, and go with saving the fish. We can always move. The fish can’t.”
Walking a cow-trampled path to the mouth of the Lagunitas Creek estuary, I find a stripped corpse of a gull in the mud. A few feet ahead, there’s another. Something – a peregrine falcon? – cleaned these gulls methodically, eating head and entrails and feet, leaving outspread, feathered wings still attached to the breastbones. Farther along, a pair of muledeer splash across salty Stocker Creek to the base of the bluffs on the estuary’s east side. The air is dank and full of methane. A great egret, absorbed in hunting stranded three-spined sticklebacks, lets me walk right up behind it. The hill is shot through with small crevices where wet soil has succumbed to gravity and hooves. This is the bottom of the Lagunitas Creek watershed, the coho’s gate to the open ocean. Dark forms swirl fishily in the main channel a hundred yards from the promontory on which I stand. They could be coho. There should be salmon here. There probably are.
It’s a daunting prospect the coho face. Even in this valley, where they do better than anywhere else in central California, the fish contend with dams and drained motor oil, predation and pesticides.
Houses go up along the ridges, sending silt down to smother redds. Tributaries are culverted. Agencies battle over whether state or federal inertia will govern the fate of the fish. Lagunitas Creek coho may prevail, but they face an uphill battle first.
Uphill battles, of course, being what the coho do best.
Written in 1996/7. Clinton years. Yes, I recall those halcyon days.
And this right on the heels of the chinook collapse…in addition to the catastrophic losses seen in various species around the globe (e.g. Atlantic bluefin tuna are nearing extinction). Collectively as a race, we have no sense of restraint, conservation or responsibility.
Sometimes I just have to think that life will go on in some form or other in the long run, not necessarily human, not necessarily the life that we know, but life.
You’re right, there are no words, except maybe ones I don’t want to type here. Just deep sadness, simply put.
And pondering this weird weather pattern where San Diego has double its normal rainfall and Northern California is behind. Seems I remember that happening before. (We’re supposed to get drought for the rest of the year, though.)