Stranded

By MALCOLM TERENCE, TRT Contributing Writer

ETNA—The valley of the Scott River before White people was a paradise for Coho salmon. It’s gradient was not steep and it was a maze of interconnected marshes. Great gallery forests of cottonwoods and other towering trees extended well back from the river.

Channels of the river and its tributary streams wandered in lazy meanders and beavers flourished. It was the habitat conditions where Coho had evolved and they thrived there in their three-year life cycle.

Fast forward to the Scott Valley of today with the river confined between huge fields that produce famously high grade alfalfa and upslope areas laced with log roads and old clearcuts.

Many of the tributaries now run dry in the summer and juvenile fish get stranded in the last small pools left in the dewatered creeks. Erica Terence from Klamath River Keeper last week found one of these pools filled with 300 Coho two to three inches long. They were trapped in a shallow pool no more than 18 inches deep and an area little bigger than a couple of parked cars. The pond was in Patterson Creek just below Highway 3 but Terence said she had heard reports that there were similar isolated pools in Kidder and Shackleford Creek and expected that there were similar strandings in other Scott River tributaries.

The Coho is listed for federal protection and this year’s run of fish is the last that is considered biologically viable. The other two year classes of Coho are so reduced in numbers that they are considered functionally extinct. The high rainfall and snow melt last winter heightened hopes for a high survival rate but the creeks in the area are already drying up.

Pat Higgins said the drying is a product of diversion of surface water and pumping of ground water for agriculture and aggradation of the stream channels, fishery language for the years of sediments eroded into channels that eventually drop the weak water flow underneath the gravels.

 Higgins is a consulting Fishery biologist who has worked with five lower basin tribes and first started researching the Klamath in the late 1980s.     

 The day after Klamath River Keeper photographed the trapped juveniles in Patterson Creek, the Department of Fish and Game dispatched game warden Steve McDonald to check upstream diversions. He found that all three were closed or nearly closed but that the creek went dry despite that. Fish and Game workers had earlier rescued and moved some of the stranded fish in neighboring Kidder Creek.

Higgins said that pumping of underground water had surpassed use of diverted surface water and cited a 2008 study by Rob Van Kirk and Seth Naman from Humboldt State that showed that water shortages in the Scott corresponded to increased reliance on pumping.

Federal monies available in the Farm Bill funded installation of many new pumps in Scott Valley in recent years under the rationale that pumping doesn’t affect surface water. Farmers claim there is no connection but Higgins said that records of pumping are closely held secrets and underground water use is not regulated in California although it is in other western states.

 Officials at California Fish and Game speculated that aggradation was the reason that the flow had disappeared and Higgins said that the log roads and clearcuts upslope of the affected streams were built in decomposed granite, a sandy fragmented rock that is very subject to erosion.

In locales like this, Higgins said, the road system acts like a de facto extension of the creek system so all the runoff exits in one day rather than percolating into the sponge-like forest soil. Still, he thought pumping was the main culprit.

Four days after Terence spotted the trapped Patterson Creek fish, the pool had dried up and all the trapped juvenile fish had died.