"Abundance"

Finding a Definition for Wild Salmon Recovery

by Bill McMillan

What is the goal of wild salmon recovery? Is it the concept of some mathematically computed spawning escapement goal, designed to assure an economy built on human consumption of salmon, rationalized as a benefit to spawning and juvenile rearing efficiency in a way that nature’s order of events somehow forgot to provide?

That is the way salmon have been, and still are, managed. The management model has been called Maximum Sustained Yield (MSY). Tribal, federal, and state managing agencies have managed, and largely still manage salmon with a predetermined goal of consumptive usage first.

The belief is that having taken five oranges from a basket held high above their heads, five oranges will remain for seeding future orange groves.Five oranges are first selected from the unseen contents of the basket to eat, because the data chosen for a mathematical model says the basketcontains ten oranges. The problem is the basket has most often contained only six to eight oranges, and sometimes only five, rather than theexpected ten.

Either the mathematical model is wrong, or the chosen data is wrong, and salmon are expected to survive the error in our mathematics until we get it right.

But there is another way to manage fish, or oranges. You don’t take any oranges for consumption until you put the basket on the ground and take a look at it. You take only as many as will leave sufficient visible oranges to seed the orchard. Applied to salmon, this means you first let escapement necessities occur, and only then do you harvest.

Tribal, federal, and state managing agencies have most often managed for depletion and extinction rather than for the seemingly obscure numbers needed for long-term salmon perpetuation. Even at its very best, management has determined to limit its understanding to economics, mathematics and science rather than vaguer but truer concepts of a larger and less measurable vision. As an example, how well does science deal with concepts such as zero (nothingness), or infinity? Similar concepts are at the root of the dilemma that will determine the success or failure of managing for salmon recovery.

"the one word that has been applied to healthy Pacific salmon populations is abundance"

What is the one word that has been applied to healthy Pacific salmon populations ever since European explorers and colonizers first encountered them? Abundance. There is something about the term that sums up Pacific salmon. With it they exist. Without it they do not, no matter what the models say.

How do you mathematically define abundance? You can’t, at least not initially. It’s a term of relativity. But abundance is prerequisite to Pacific salmon and their ability to perpetuate themselves.

Sensing Abundance

In September of 1963, my father, a high school chum and I took a motor canoe 65 miles down Lake Babine in northern British Columbia to the fish-counting weir on the Babine River a few miles below the final lake outlet. It was a high school graduation gift from my father. Looking back, I see it was a rite to manhood, about as good as could be devised by my father’s imagination, considering the era.

But I was not alone; I did not fast; I had no vision; I had no dream from which an adult name emerged beyond that given at my birth. But something occurred in the deepest auditory and olfactory areas of my brain, something heard and smelled, upon which the remaining experiences of my adult life have been layered since those few days on the Babine 36 years ago. It provided a benchmark from which I would unconsciously measure other rivers and fish populations.

For a half mile below the Babine fish-counting weir, humpbacked salmon flopped, splashed and thrashed, never a moment without the sound of their ceaseless spawning activity, night and day, until that ceaseless sound, in fact, became part of the wilderness silence - the background music from which the silence came. And the smell. It hit me like some great ocean wave that just kept coming, ever-building and ceaseless, until finally, at the end of the second or third day, I woke up and realized I no longer fought the smell; that I had become part of it, and it a part of me. Sound and smell had transported me to a different sensory level. I found myself in a new and, yet, very old universe - a universe of abundance and some sort of unknowable balance that created it. I was lifted into an Eden where Genesis failed to take me. Sound and smell took me to a place which twelve years of education had hidden me from. It was the one lesson a father with an 8th grade education hoped to impart to his son - a reality based on the freedom to experience rather than on the confinement of young human lives. On the Babine I experienced the reality of what salmon spawning escapement should be based on - not on numbers, but on something sensed visually, audibly and olfactorily.

Rediscovering Eden on Index Creek

Then came two days in early December of 1998 on a very small tributary of the Snoqualmie River. Thirty-five years of distance from the Babine River gradually ground me down to a melancholy acceptance that abundance, once lost, cannot be recreated, that my life would forever be limited to a few distant travels of rare experience from which to try and rediscover some sort of sensory transport to the “Eden” of natural abundance again.

But December 1998 proved me wrong. Just 30 miles as the crow flies from the Seattle skyline, and just ten miles from the nasty blight of Duvall’s upscale subdivisions, I found myself once again on the Babine River in 1963, transported by the sound and smell of abundance.

The Snoqualmie River system has remained among the few bright spots for wild coho salmon in the Northwest through the 1980s and 1990s. However, it is an anomaly rather than the norm. The 1994 SASSI (Stock Assessment and Salmon and Steelhead Inventory) report lists its production type as Wild and its stock status as Healthy. What’s more, the stock assessment data quality is considered very good dating back to 1977. From 1977-1992, wild coho escapement has ranged from a low of 10,183 in 1981 to a high of 56,920 in 1983.

" Griffin Creek is the superstar of the entire Snohomish River watershed"

Griffin Creek is the superstar of the entire Snohomish River watershed (including the Skykomish and Snoqualmie Rivers). Draining through a series of wetlands and beaver ponds, Griffin Creek enters the Snoqualmie a few miles south of Carnation. Largely due to the productive rearing qualities of the wetlands and ponds it drains through, Griffin Creek from 1984-1993 has had an annual average escapement of over 16,000 wild coho! Just over 20% of the entire Snohomish system’s estimated annual escapement of 81,436 coho during that same ten year span has returned to Griffin Creek to spawn. Creeks can be remarkably productive.

However, despite the fact that the Snoqualmie River has been given a healthy stock status for coho based on spawning surveys at 14 index sites in the watershed, it does not mean that each tributary has received adequate spawning escapement to fill every available niche. Nor does it mean that the spawning goal figures chosen by managers reflect the actual biological capacity or needs of the watershed. Stossel Creek, tributary to the Tolt River, is just one example of a stream that has a significant wetland/pond complex that provides a quality of juvenile coho-rearing habitat very similar to Griffin Creek, but whose recent history has included a number of impediments to fish passage (most often culverts) which limited or denied access of coho to and/or from those prime spawning and rearing areas. Whereas annual wild coho escapement to Griffin Creek from 1984-1993 was over 16,000 fish and 20% of all Snohomish coho escapement, for the same period, the Tolt River’s annual coho escapement (Stossel Creek the primary index area) was just under 1,200 fish and only 1% of all Snohomish coho escapement.

However, between 1994-1996, eight projects designed to improve fish passage into Stossel Creek were completed, opening up 10.3 miles of habitat. Each of these problem sites was initially identified and restoration nursed to completion through corrective projects by Washington Trout with the monetary and technical support of the varied members of the Tolt Fish Habitat Restoration Group.

In the aftermath of these projects, WT has made annual spawning counts as a means to monitor the success of these projects, although securing funding for monitoring has been less effective than securing the initial project funding. Therefore these counts are sometimes of a voluntary nature, and less frequent than desired. Nevertheless, in the three-year span of spawning surveys I participated in with WT field crews, it was evident that coho numbers made no astonishing leap on Stossel Creek where culvert projects had been completed, until the late fall of 1998.

Wild salmon appear to recolonize very slowly unless there is sufficient escapement to encourage them to find more spawning space. The necessary spur to expand into reopened habitat seems to be a high level of competition in previous spawning space limitations. Lower levels of what are considered acceptable spawning escapement in 1995, 1996 and 1997 on the Snohomish/Snoqualmie/Skykomish system were not providing the necessary stimulus for recolonization of newly opened Stossel Creek habitat.

The 1994 SASSI report indicates through tag recovery data of coho salmon destined for the Skykomish River above Sunset Falls, that 40%-70% of the total harvest of this stock is by Canadian fisheries - the largest catch by the varied user groups on this stock of coho. The SASSI report assumes that the Sunset Falls harvest data holds true for the entire Snohomish system (including the Snoqualmie and Stossel Creek). In 1998, Canada virtually curtailed both commercial and sport harvest of coho off the British Columbia Coast.

S-4 is the designation for a WT culvert project on a Stossel Creek tributary called Index Creek, due to its long history as a coho spawning survey site by state salmon managers. Coho escapement into Index Creek above S-4 culvert had been virtually nonexistent in 1987, 1988, 1990, 1991, 1992 and 1993. But even in the best of years between 1984 and 1995, escapement upstream of S-4 was no more than one-third of the numbers of coho returning below S-4. This was in spite of over 2,000 feet of available habitat upstream of S-4, and only 275 feet of available habitat below. S-4 was a project designed to solve a juvenile coho outmigration problem due to a flow that went underground from late spring and on into the fall just above the culvert. Juvenile coho were denied the critically needed opportunity to migrate between upper Index Creek and the extensive wetlands and ponds of Stossel Creek. The fix included placement of several log dams downstream of the culvert. This created several pools that raised the streambed through the culvert. This ensures that the culvert maintains a flow through the spring and summer for juvenile coho migration.

After the fix of S-4 in 1995, coho began again to spawn in Index Creek upstream of the culvert, but the proportion spawning upstream of the culvert in 1995 remained only about one-third the numbers spawning below the culvert. WT surveys in December of 1996 found only 12 coho and seven coho redds upstream of S-4. From early November, 1997, to mid-January, 1998, WT surveys on other areas of Stossel Creek found more coho in 1997 and early 1998 than in the previous spawning season, but no evidence of real abundance.

Then came December 3rd and 4th of 1998. It took two days to count all the coho, carcasses and spawning redds on Index Creek. Both days were wet and dark - typical December weather. The droop of riparian trees and bushes closed in to create a tunnel through which the creek tumbled. The only sound was the continuous flopping, splashing and thrashing of spawning coho over the burble of the creek. And then it hit me: the smell of carcasses, the wet, heavy air holding it there, inescapable, pungent as ammonia-based smelling salts on an unconscious mind. Something stirred and found a distant place inside me, a memory of abundance. For two days my deceased father was with me counting coho, redds and carcasses with the sound and smell of the Babine River emanating from this small creek, just eight feet in width.

Altogether, 86 coho redds and 314 coho were counted in the 2,000 feet of Index Creek above S-4, to a ten foot high waterfall barrier. This compared to 22 redds and 61 coho in the 275 feet below the culvert. Animals had dragged Coho carcasses as far as 200 feet from the streambank. Coho body parts and bones were in unexpected places well beyond the immediate riparian corridor. There on upper Index Creek, utterly unexpected, I re-experienced an abundance forgotten for 35 years - something that no numbers on a computer screen or a sheet of paper could describe.

"excess is important to the overall fertility of streams and surrounding vegetation"

The Purpose of Abundance

At some points in the creek there were “logjams” of up to a half dozen coho carcasses. For the first time, I saw a creek bottom virtually flowing with salmon eggs that had escaped from redds, or which had been dug up by putting one redd on top of another. In the past this has been considered “waste” by fish managers, until more recent understandings have determined how important such excess is to the overall fertility of streams and even to the vegetation and growth of trees throughout the riparian corridor. It’s all easier to understand once abundance is actually seen.

I turned around at the waterfall and walked back downstream toward the awaiting truck with light rapidly fading at the end of the second day. Where the creek gradient flattened about 150 yards below the waterfall, I took a final look at two scarlet humped-backed male coho of about twelve pounds each. They were such clean and perfect fish, not a mark on them, as they continuously jostled back and forth with each other, shoving and lashing, and occasionally one grabbing the other in the distorted curve of its jaws.

These were the two males that had penetrated the farthest upstream. I had found two females waiting 50 feet and 100 feet upstream. They were the two females that had gone furthest upstream; but these two males would never mate with them. I watched these fish, backs fully exposed in a flat spot in the little creek where the rush of whitewater came off the steeper gradient of the slope from the waterfall. I watched for 10 minutes, mesmerized by their relentlessness. And finally, I waded into the rush of current beside them where they continued to jostle against one another and my very legs, oblivious to everything that existed beyond some blind determination they had long lost the ability to control.

I watched the eyes of each fish. They never left the stare of the other’s eyes. Their entire being was locked into the unyielding pivot of their eyes, each on the other. I reached down into the cold water, grasped the tail of one, and lifted him straight up out of the water. He never moved. His body did not writhe. As his head dangled down his eyes were still locked on the eyes of his twin, and the twin held against my leg with his eyes still locked on the other suspended above. Both males were utterly exhausted. They could not move. Their bodies were already dead. And yet, as I slipped the suspended male back into the water beside his twin, some force beyond any human understanding controlled their bodies again as their eyes remained locked and their bodies flailed against one another.

It was my strangest experience in 20 years of spawning surveys. These prime and perfect fish, perhaps the two most perfect coho in Index Creek, would not live to procreate. Sometime during the following day, both would be carcasses along the creek. Like great stags with locked antlers, they would continue to struggle for dominance when there was no dominance to be had. They were twins, absolute equals, absorbed in a dilemma that only death could solve.

It would be in death, rather than procreation, that these two males would serve their purpose in the return of abundance to upper Index Creek. Their carcasses would remain as shreds of bones, scales, skin and flesh through the winter and into the spring, providing a source of nutrients for emerging fry that this little creek built of rainwater would otherwise not have had - life built on the plenty of death.

Learning to See, and Smell

I don’t know for sure what provided abundance on Index Creek in December of 1998. It was but the first of what undoubtedly were several similar waves of spawning coho into the creek. They spawn until well into January. WT crews documented a similar expansion of spawning abundance on another tributary of Stossel Creek in December of 1998, but it was not found on two other recently reopened tributaries of the Tolt River just a few miles upstream from Stossel Creek. Perhaps there is not yet enough excess escapement in the Snoqualmie system to push them there.

As good as the Snoqualmie system looks for wild coho in the numerical records of State fish managers, there remain significant historic coho habitat reaches that have not achieved anything like the abundance necessary to wild salmon restoration. In part, that is because of reliance on models and mathematics rather than on the experience of the senses regarding what abundance means and in recognizing the necessity of abundance for effective salmon restoration. As an old friend told me regarding logging practices, “If it doesn’t look right, it probably isn’t right, no matter what the words and numbers say.” We’ve got to learn to see rather than merely measure, was his message.

In the case of Index Creek, for a brief moment in December of 1998, Humpty Dumpty was put back together again. Some of the key pieces included the provision for access into former habitat; that reasonably good habitat remained to be colonized once reopened; that an increase in escapement to Stossel Creek helped to push coho into that reopened habitat; and perhaps early indications of an ocean environment that is returning to cyclic cooling.

The future will tell if Index Creek abundance is sustained, and whether state, county, tribal, federal, and international fish, land, and water managers act with an integrity of decision to implement what mechanisms are in the range of each government’s jurisdiction for the spread of seeable, hearable, smellable abundance, rather than modeled depletion.

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