30,000 coho salmon return to California’s Mendocino coast in record recovery
A record 30,000 coho salmon returned to central California rivers last season — up 10 times from an average of 3,000 over the last decade and double the total of last season.
Running up the rivers which empty into the Mendocino coast, the proliferation is something scientists studying the animals thought they’d never see in their careers.
In a March release, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said it took the numbers as a sign that targeted restoration efforts on private land can help move the needle for a species that was not long ago considered near the brink.
“I am overjoyed — everybody’s just ecstatic about how many coho there are,” said NOAA Marine Habitat Resource Specialist Joe Pecharich, who has been supporting restoration projects in the region for 20 years. “We have conducted intensive sampling since 2009 in these watersheds and many of us never thought we’d see something like this in our lifetime.”Life is precarious for the central California coast coho salmon, the most endangered subset of the coho species. In many waterways, their existence had become a mere memory.
Stretching back before the new millennium, NOAA gathered a wide-ranging coalition of local stakeholders, including timber companies, tribes, NGOs, California Department of Fish and Wildlife and nonprofit Trout Unlimited, to work on over 100 small improvement projects to give the coho the best chance of reclaiming its former territory.
These included removing or altering fish-unfriendly modifications like widening undersized road culverts, removing barriers like log jams, and returning previously-straightened waterways to their natural, meandering state in the North Fork Navarro, Noyo, Garcia and Big river watersheds. Last summer, NOAA and The Nature Conservancy constructed the largest-ever habitat restoration project in the Ten Mile watershed.
“It’s been amazing to see how quickly coho will occupy new habitat. Just days after the excavators roll out, the fish will start to swim in,” said Peter van de Burgt, The Nature Conservancy’s North Coast Restoration project manager.
The breadth of the return is as striking as the numbers. Usal Creek hadn’t seen a live coho in 10 years; the Gualala River watershed hadn’t recorded any in 2 decades. Both are now witnessing adults migrate upstream and juveniles downstream.
Early indications from the spring count suggest similarly robust numbers this year, with a reported 400 coho on the North Fork Navarro River so far — far beyond normal estimates.
