[Water_news] 1. DWR'S CALIFORNIA WATER NEWS - Top Item for 11/3/08

Department of Water Resources

California Water News

A daily compilation for DWR personnel of significant news articles and comment

 

November 3, 2008

 

1.  Top Items -

 

Coho salmon fry discovered up a remote creek

San Francisco chronicle – 11/1/08

By Peter Fimrite, staff writer

 

(10-31) 17:58 PDT MENDOCINO COUNTY --

Jennifer Carah is a scientist who doesn't normally squeal, especially not when she is under water, but a recent snorkeling expedition in an obscure creek on the North Coast caused her to abandon all scholarly protocol.

 

"Yeeeee heeeeee," she shrieked through her snorkel upon spotting a mass of little fish behind a rock in Pardaloe Creek, a remote tributary of the Garcia River, in the heavily logged forests of Mendocino County.

 

The critters that elicited the squeal were endangered coho salmon. In fact, juvenile coho were found in 10 places where they had not been seen in years in the 72,000 acre Garcia River watershed.

 

"I was pretty excited to find them there," said Carah, a field scientist for the Nature Conservancy. "We've checked the data of other agencies and haven't heard accounts of coho being up there before. These sightings have generated a whole lot of enthusiasm, especially given the fact that coho are pretty much on the brink of extinction."

 

The discovery of coho in the headwaters of the Garcia River is especially eye-opening because the watershed once was destroyed by logging. Now it is part of a unique experiment that involves what conservationists call sustainable forestry, or selective logging.

 

"As we all know, parks are struggling to manage the lands they already own, and local governments, particularly in rural counties, don't like to see big swaths of private land put into parks because it takes it off the tax roles and takes the land out of public use," said Chris Kelly, the California program director for the Virginia-based Conservation Fund, which paid the timber company Coastal Forestlands $18 million in 2004 for the 23,780-acre Garcia River Forest. "Why not own it and manage it as a productive forest and use the timber to pay for the restoration and management of the property?"

 

The Nature Conservancy paid $3.5 million for a conservation easement on the property that allows them to conduct studies and monitor fish and wildlife populations in the watershed. The Conservation Fund is in charge of managing the forest by repairing roads, fixing erosion and hiring loggers to selectively thin out stands and remove sick trees.

 

In exchange, the land is protected forever from residential and vineyard development.

The forests of Mendocino County are a crucial testing ground for this type of strategy because it is in this region that coho salmon once were extremely abundant.

 

Decline of the coho

A large American Indian fishing village once was located on the Garcia River, but when white men arrived in the 1850s and 1860s, the native Bokeya, or Central Pomo Indians, were moved out, land was cleared, and lumber production began. By the late 1870s, more than a dozen mills were operating in the watershed.

 

Meanwhile, salmon from the Garcia River were netted by the thousands, smoked and shipped to San Francisco. The Nature Conservancy's Carah estimates that as many as 500,000 coho once squirmed and wriggled their way up California streams every year as late as the 1940s.

 

Old-timers living in Mendocino County remember spearing coho in the Garcia. After the first rains, dozens of young coho could be seen in every pool and eddy. They were so abundant that people simply ignored the 25-fish limit, sometimes just scooping the fish out of the water.

 

The fish began to disappear when the widespread clear-cutting of forests began after World War II. The rampant building of logging roads in the watershed, the removal of riparian vegetation and huge amounts of silt running off into the creeks ruined their habitat.

 

The Garcia River Forest has been clear-cut twice, the last time in the 1940s, according to Kelly.

 

Coho now make up about 1 percent of their historic population on the North Coast. The construction of dams, pollution and the emergence of global warming appears to be making things even worse. So few spawning chinook salmon returned to the Sacramento River and its tributaries this year that ocean fishing for salmon was banned in California and Oregon.

 

Coho, which are more sensitive to water temperature and quality than other salmonid species, are in worse shape than chinook. The species was listed as endangered in 2005 under the Endangered Species Act. On top of that, fisheries analysts report a 73 percent decline in the already dismal number of coho returning to the creeks and tributaries along the coast of California during the 2007-08 spawning season. Coho in Oregon showed a 70 percent decline.

 

'Encouraging sign'

Pardaloe Creek, which at 2,470 feet is the highest point of the Garcia watershed, had been surveyed six times between 1975 and 1999 by the state Department of Fish and Game and the Mendocino County Resource Conservation District. Not a single coho was spotted in any of the surveys. In fact, the farthest up coho were found was in Inman Creek in 1997, 11 miles downstream from Pardaloe Creek.

 

The Nature Conservancy and the Watershed Fund have been working together to build wood structures in the streams to create pools for fish, upgrading logging roads to reduce sediment and choosing only non-thriving trees to harvest.

 

The coho were discovered during the first survey of the upper reaches of the watershed since the restoration work began. Success is hard to measure, Carah said, and one field survey is hardly definitive evidence of a recovery, but she thinks the little fish she saw in the creek are a message that better times could be ahead.

 

"Because coho are so sensitive, they really serve as kind of a canary in the coal mine for Northern California coastal rivers and streams," Carah said. "It is a really encouraging sign to find them in 10 places and especially way up in the headwaters given the status of coho in the state. I think it does indicate that we are having some success."

 

Kelly said the kind of forest management being practiced in the Garcia watershed might be the best way left to preserve woodland ecosystems, watersheds and fish.

"A forester would look at this land and say it doesn't meet my 8 or 10 percent return on investment, but we don't have a rate of return expectation. All we need to do is pay the bills," Kelly said. "I look at it as an intervention. We are preserving the viability of the forest and watershed in a feasible way that over the next 10 or 15 years could restore the productivity and volume of timber and again make the timber industry meaningful."#

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/01/MN5613NOAH.DTL

 

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