Coho Salmon Near Extinction On The Scott and Shasta Rivers

For the last three years, endangered coho returns to two key Klamath tributaries – the Scott and Shasta rivers - have languished, and this winter returns were so low that there will not be enough smolts born to ensure that some survive to adulthood.

From the Shasta, it is likely that no smolts at all will swim out to sea next year.

The Shasta used to be the most productive salmon river in the state for its size, but only 31 coho returned there in the winter of 2009. This winter, only nine showed up, and they were all males. In the Scott, which is in a

Photo: Thomas Dunklin

slightly better situation, biologists found 88 coho in the winter of 2009. Sections of the river went totally dry last autumn, and only 31 coho returned to the Scott this past winter.

Smolts return to these rivers at the rate of about two to three percent, said Curtis Knight, the Shasta regional director of California Trout, Inc., a statewide advocacy organization. “Two to three percent of 50 fish is not going to cut it,” he said.

Young coho hatch in late winter, spend one year in the river where they were born, then one to two years at sea, and return the third year to spawn. Therefore, there are always three cohorts of coho from any one river. Two cohorts of Scott and Shasta coho are now dead. Even if the third cohort wasn’t poised for nonexistence, that would be a problem, because mating between cohorts is important to maintaining a diverse gene pool.

The state of California listed coho as endangered on the Scott and Shasta in 2005, activating a legal requirement that the Department of Fish and Game (CDFG) take action to mitigate habitat degradation in those watersheds.

License To Kill

But, after years of research, the agency took its first action in January, issuing blanket “incidental take permits” to the resource conservation districts (RCDs) on the two rivers. The holders of these permits are entitled to incidentally kill coho by diverting water. Farmers could then get individual permits from the RCDs.

In October, a bevy of environmental advocates, Native American tribes and fishermen’s groups, led by Klamath Riverkeeper, sued the agency over the program, which they say strips legal protections from the endangered coho.

“These permits provide legal coverage for the same harmful dewatering that caused Scott and Shasta coho populations to crash in the first place,” Klamath Riverkeeper’s Erica Terence wrote in an e-mail. “The agency’s incidental take permitting program does not do anything meaningful to ensure that fish will get the water they need.”

However, the program does succeed in establishing the first regulatory framework for maintaining flows in the two rivers. Like most rivers in California, both the Scott and the Shasta are far over-allocated under legal decrees that date from the 1920s. If every landowner were to fully exercise his water rights, as some have begun to do, there would rarely be any water left in the river.

Increasing surface and groundwater diversion has caused base flows in the two rivers to steadily decline since the 1970s. In the past 15 years, farmers have begun to switch from grains to water-intensive alfalfa crops, which are more lucrative. Some farmers grow the alfalfa well into the autumn, diverting water at the same time that coho need it the most.

Private landowners, in conjunction with government agencies, have spent tens of millions of dollars on habitat-restoration and fish-safety efforts on the two rivers, such as fencing off the riverbed from cattle, planting trees, removing flashboard dams and developing ponds.

But these cooperative efforts have prevented Fish and Game wardens from strictly enforcing laws to protect the coho, as landowners would immediately stop cooperating with the government if such enforcement was undertaken. Meanwhile, fish populations have dwindled.

Farmers contend that conditions outside their control, such as disease, are also culprit. But the lack of water has made many of their restoration efforts futile.

“There is a lot of restoration that occurs in areas that fish can’t get to because there’s not enough water,” said Crystal Bowman, the environmental director of the Quartz Valley Indian Community in the Scott Valley.

One practice that the CDFG’s nascent program fails to consider is groundwater pumping. California is one of only two states that does not regulate the endeavor. There is an ordinance in Siskiyou County that does so, but no one enforces it.

Landowners often drill more wells and pump the most groundwater during droughts, Bowman said. They also do so when they expect regulations against diverting surface water to tighten. By drilling a well directly adjacent to the river, one can effectively skirt such laws.

The 2002 federal farm bill included a section subsidizing improvements to Klamath farmers’ irrigation systems. Although the improvements made those irrigation systems more efficient, said Felice Pace, who has been a Klamath environmental activist for several decades, they lead to landowners pumping more groundwater than ever for high-pressure sprinklers that can irrigate larger areas than surface diversions can.

According to a report written by California Trout, 65 percent of salmon species in California will be extinct within 100 years if current trends continue.

“If we can’t save the Scott and the Shasta, the whole thing’s going down,” Pace said, sweeping his hand across a wall map of Northern California.

Despite the dire state of affairs for the silvers, Bowman is optimistic that a solution balancing the needs of farmers and fish is possible.

“There’s enough water in these rivers that farmers and fish could coexist,” she said. 

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