Agencies focus on saving winter-run salmon
Members of the Winnemem Wintu tribe believe their lives are intertwined with the salmon — particularly the winter-run chinook salmon.
The Winnemem culture is based around the McCloud River and the salmon. Caleen Sisk, the tribe's chief and spiritual leader, pointed out that the tribe, like the salmon, no longer have access to the river.
"We believe that whatever happens to the fish, happens to us," Sisk said. "It's a cultural and traditional life thread that we really try to hang on to."
The winter-run once spawned by the thousands in the rivers and streams upstream of Lake Shasta, including the McCloud River. But the construction of Shasta and Keswick dams blocked the salmon's access to those streams.
The salmon's hold on its last remnant of habitat — the Sacramento River in Redding — has grown more tenuous during the past four years of drought.
Fish die-offs in the Sacramento River over the past two years have many people worried about the winter-run going extinct.
Trent Orr, a staff attorney for Earthjustice, said salmon have a three-year life cycle. They are born, swim out to the ocean, where they live for three years and then return to where they were born to spawn and die.
But more than 95 percent of the past two generations of the salmon have died in the river before ever reaching the ocean.
"We've now lost … two years of salmon runs. If we lose three years, that species may well be gone,"said Orr, who represents the Winnemem in a winter-run chinook related lawsuit against the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
Hatchery tries to keep species alive
While winter-run still spawn in the Sacramento River in the Redding area, most of them are born and raised at the Livingston Stone Fish Hatchery near Shasta Dam. Some time within the next few weeks, officials with the hatchery will release about 400,000 young salmon into the Sacramento River.
The fish are typically released in late January or early February, but the release has been delayed this year. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which operates the hatchery, has been waiting to release the fish during a rain storm.
When it rains, the river gets muddy, providing cover for the juvenile fish (about 3 inches long) from other fish that prey on them, said John Reuth assistant hatchery manager.
So far, though, February has been dry, delaying the release.
If it doesn't rain by the end of February, the little fish will be too big to keep any longer, and the hatchery will be forced to release them regardless of rain, Reuth said.
Typically, the hatchery releases 175,000 to 200,000 fish a year, but Fish and Wildlife has increased the number of fish it releases to compensate for the higher die-off rate the past couple years. Last year, the agency released about 600,000 fish into the river.
Unlike Coleman National Fish Hatchery in Anderson, Livingston Stone's mission is to help boost the number of winter-run to the point they are no longer endangered and the fish won't need to be raised in captivity, Reuth said.
Coleman raises fall-run and late-fall-run salmon for commercial and recreation fishing, as well as natural production. But Livingston Stone was opened in 1998 to exclusively raise winter-run and help the species recover from the brink of extinction.
"It's a conservation and supplement program. We just want to help jump start the numbers so they can recover a little faster than they would on their own," Reuth said.
The hatchery was originally designed to be a temporary measure that close after the fish recovered to the point where there were enough fish spawning and surviving in the river that the hatchery is no longer needed.
"We're trying to bolster the population. The population is endangered. Back in the 1980s and '90s, the number of adult winter-run were down to less than 200 fish," Reuth said.
"We just want to help jump start the numbers so they can recover a little faster than they would on their own," he said.
Fish numbers decline
Rather than thrive, though, the condition of the winter-run has continued to worsen.
Over the past couple of years, recently hatched winter-run salmon have been nearly wiped out before they can get as far south as Red Bluff on their way to the ocean.
The salmon need cool water — 56 degrees or colder — from Lake Shasta, via Keswick Reservoir, for the young fish and eggs to survive in the river during the summer and fall when the fish are migrating out to the ocean.
But the young fish head out to the ocean when the weather and the water are warmest, so bureau officials try to ship colder water down the river. A temperature curtain on the lake side of Shasta Dam allows the bureau to get colder water from deeper in the lake.
But over the past several years the drought has left Lake Shasta at near–record low levels in the summer and fall.
In 2014 the cold water pool in the lake was depleted, leaving thousands of eggs and young fish to die in the river before they could swim south. Fisheries officials estimated only about 5 percent of the young fish survived to Red Bluff, where they are counted in fish traps near the former diversion dam.
In 2015, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which operates the dam, cut back the amount of water coming out of the dam in the early summer in an attempt to preserve cold water and stretch the supply out further into the fall. The plan didn't work, though, and most of the fish were killed by high water temperatures.
Only 3 percent to 4 percent of the eggs and young fish survived to Red Bluff last year.
Closing the river
Federal and state fisheries officials are so concerned with the die off that for the past two years they have taken the unprecedented step of closing the Sacramento River in Redding to fishing from April to August when the salmon are spawning.
State Department of Fish and Wildlife officials said they are worried about trout anglers accidentally hooking a spawning salmon.
National Marine Fisheries Service officials have also added the winter-run to a list of endangered species that are "the most at-risk of extinction." The agency has also laid out a five-year plan to "turn the trend around for this species from a declining trajectory to a trajectory toward recovery."
The plan includes five steps to improve the winter salmon runs.
-- Improve the way the bureau keeps track of the temperature in Lake Shasta and how the agency manages water coming out of Shasta and Keswick dams.
-- Restore fish access to Battle Creek by removing barriers and installing fish ladders around dams and other obstacles in the creek. Pacific Gas & Electric Co. operates numerous hydroelectric facilities on the creek that have blocked salmon and steelhead from reaching spawning habitat.
The bureau has spent about $121 million on restoring the stream and plans to spend an additional $18 million.
-- Improve habitat in the Yolo Bypass near Sacramento for young fish and improve access for the salmon to and from the area to the Sacramento River.
-- Install measures in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta that prevent young fish from getting drawn into the interior of the Delta, where they are more likely to die and be prevented from reaching the ocean.
-- Reintroducing winter-run chinook to their McCloud and Sacramento rivers upstream of Lake Shasta. Bureau officials expect to begin a pilot program of releasing the salmon into the two rivers in the summer of 2017.
Fisheries officials said water in the two rivers is colder and more suitable for the salmon. The rivers are also less susceptible to drought because they are also spring-fed mountain streams.
Taking fish for a drive
The McCloud and Sacramento plan would involve plucking salmon out of the river at Keswick Dam and hauling them by truck past the dams so they can spawn in the streams. After the young fish hatch, they would be trapped before they reach Lake Shasta and again hauled by truck to the Sacramento River below Keswick Dam, where they could be released into the Sacramento River.
Sisk said the Winnemem have submitted an alternate plan to the bureau that proposes the salmon swim up Sacramento River tributaries such as the West Fork of Stillwater Creek, Churn Creek and Cow, Little Cow and Dry creeks to a point less than a mile from Lake Shasta.
The salmon would then swim through large pipes to the lake and on to the McCloud and Sacramento rivers. After the young fish hatch, they would return to the lake, swim back through the pipes, into the creeks and back to the Sacramento River, according to the plan.
While the Winnemem plan is not included in the federal five-year recovery plan, Jonathan Ambrose, a biologist with the fisheries service, said his agency and the bureau are willing to consider whether the tribe's proposal is feasible.
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