But outside the walls of Warm Springs, many things are out of the control of the recovery team. By nature, salmon transcend borders and boundaries, exposing them to a glove of threats. In rivers, fish face warmer waters, droughts, forest fires, landslides, predators, and pollution; at sea, more predators, fishing and competition for food. Amplifying these dangers, climate change is making fish and their caregivers more and more demanding. For the program to be successful, many things must work out.
“We’ve never had great years of yields, but we’ve never had everything lined up either, like the conditions of the ocean, the water, our production here,” White says. “It’s always something.”
Even before the in the summer of 2020, people working to recover coho from the russian river had experienced a lot of climate chaos. The series of major forest fires they have suffered in the last five years are being blurred in memory. Most Sea Grant personnel have been evacuated from the area at least once. Obedzinsky has had a fire burning 50 meters from his home and once wrote a report on the temporary accommodation project with the family. One night in 2019, as Kincade Fire approached the city of Windsor, where the Sea Grant program is based, Ruiz took an Uber to the office to back up crucial data in case the building burned down. Two years earlier, another member of the team lost the family home. From late June to November, everyone is ready.
In mid-August 2020, temperatures rose to 40 ° C. Almost 90 days had passed without heavy rain, and the Sea Grant office was receiving frequent warnings from the power company, warning of possible disruptions to prevent fires caused by wind damage to power lines. On August 17, dry lightning ignited the Walbridge Fire, which spread southeast to the Mill Creek Valley, northeast to Lake Sonoma and Warm Springs, and south to protected forests. . In two days, 10,000 people were ordered to evacuate. On the edge of the evacuation area, the nursery was moved to a skeleton crew, doing the essential work to keep the coho alive.
“It was a great revelation,” White says. The area was without power and the diesel tank was malfunctioning, so someone had to refuel one of the nursery’s backup generators every six to eight hours or the water pumps would stop. “We want these generators to be able to run for days at a time, so if someone can’t be here, we at least know the fish have water,” he says. By mid-September, the Walbridge fire had burned an area the size of Seattle and destroyed 293 structures, including homeowners’ homes that are helping to recover the coho.
The fire eventually subsided in early October, but the California drought continued. The salmon were still in danger. Earlier this year, the Sea Grant team had counted a record number of coho born in the watershed; that fall, they returned to the pools where they had stored fish to find some completely dry ones. The winter rains came late, and very few streams had enough water for the adults to spawn. In the spring of 2021, just as 30,000 six-month-olds were trying to swim to the Pacific, drought again prevented many tributaries from flowing. Working overtime, the Sea Grant team helped Fish and Wildlife staff rescue stranded fish.
