Bundling Like Beavers

Joe Stoltz, right, passes a bundle of willow stems to Charles Wickman as part of a project to provide better cover for juvenile coho salmon. The tactic mimics one of the features of beaver dams which Karuk and Yurok fisheries biologists has shown have a beneficial affect on coho survival. / Photo by Will Harling, Mid Klamath Watershed Council.

Helping the Coho Salmon

By Malcolm Terence, Two Rivers Tribune Contributing Writer

Karuk and Yurok tribal biologists long noted the benefits of beaver activity for the survival of the increasingly rare coho salmon. So, field crews are taking a lesson from the beaver playbook and submerging bundles of willow stems in the cold water where tributary streams spill into the Klamath River.

Charles Wickman is co-director of the Fisheries Program of the Mid Klamath Watershed Council (MKWC), one of a few groups in the area working to help coho survival. He said the fish are drawn to the cold water tributary mouths as the river water warms to lethal temperatures and beyond.

The brush bundles and their foliage provide cover for the juvenile salmon from the predation of birds, bigger fish, and mammals like otters and raccoons. Typically, as a creek hits the river, its channel will form a cold pool in the summer. Besides laying the bundles, crews often move rocks to enhance these stream mouth refuges and open up passage for juvenile and adult salmon.

In a recent project, Wickman surveyed an area and counted 40 coho plus a few young Chinook and steelhead. He will return after the bundles are placed, like big submerged brooms, and do a new count. He predicts, from monitoring earlier projects, the vulnerable young fish will be drawn in large numbers to the new cover.

The bundles are similar to sticks that beavers dump into their ponds to save for future food supply. Wickman says the young fish benefit from the small diameter stems with leaves from larger structures like root wads.

“Coho like the messy stuff,” Wickman said.

He also surveyed the amount of existing cover—zero at this particular site—and the five workers were careful to cut no willows that might provide any riparian shade.

Wickman said Laverne Glaze, a Karuk tribal member who has long organized and promoted basketweaving camps and classes, coached the crews in the way to cut the willow. The new shoots are used for baskets and Glaze urged them to cut bug-infested stems and to cut all the way to the ground. She has also showed the crews a few pieces of tribally owned land that she’d like cut.

Before MKWC, Wickman worked with Forest Service Fisheries Biologists Leroy Cyr in Orleans and Jon Grunbaum in Happy Camp.

Drawing on their tutelage and his own observation, he said, “The coho is a relatively delicate creature. Morphologically, they’re different, the pectoral fins are smaller, and they can’t move through the water column like steelhead or Chinook, so they hold to the margins of the channels and that’s where they’re more vulnerable to predation and temperature variation.”

This is compounded in the Klamath, which runs warmer than the Trinity or the Smith. The Klamath is sometimes called an upside-down river because it starts in the desert and gets colder as it runs through the mountains and picks up cold-water tributaries.

He said the bundles were only a mitigation to help young coho rear in natal streams where they were born, and also in non-natal streams where they escape from the Klamath when the water gets too hot. Finding suitable rearing habitat allows these fish to grow larger and survive better when they enter the estuary and the ocean. The bigger problems that threaten their survival remain. He listed dams, logging, agriculture and road building as a few of the major threats.

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