Chinook salmon getting a lift upriver.
What do you do when your state is in a
historic drought, with no end in sight and no way for salmon to swim up those dry riverbeds? You
roll out the largest fish-lift in history:
For the first time, all five big government hatcheries in California’s Central Valley for fall-run Chinook California salmon — a species of concern under the federal Endangered Species Act — are going to truck their young, release-ready salmon down to the Bay, rather than release them into rivers to make the trip themselves.
Some 30 million young salmon need a lift to survive.
“It’s huge. This is a massive effort statewide on multiple systems,” said Stafford Lehr, chief of fisheries for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, which since February has been rolling out four to eight 35,000-gallon tanker trucks filled with baby salmon on their freeway-drive to freedom.
Scientists and conservationists are doing all they can to preserve the Chinook salmon population. For the Coho salmon, it may be
too late:
No salmon eggs were spotted in the shade of the world-famous redwood grove this past winter, and not a single baby coho could be found in the summer. The situation was so bad in August that 105 juvenile salmon had to be removed from the creek and brought to a hatchery.
“It’s a crisis in terms of this kind of intervention has never happened before” in Redwood Creek, said Laura Chariton, the director of the Watershed Alliance of Marin. “Historically these fish evolved in this watershed, so it could be the beginning of local extinction or extirpation.”