All that stuff
about the geology and the glaciation and the erosion was the preamble, this is
what you really need to know: We've just about lost the fish.
We've put heroic
amount of effort into restoring the runs by rebuilding their habitat over the past decade or so, and have seen
an exciting comeback, but we could still lose the fish while we as a community
try to figure out what to do about hydrologic continuity and instream flows and
while the legislature tries to avoid setting up a real water court and starting
to do water rights adjudications.
If we were to count the cost of the fish-permit buy-backs and the litigation and
the failed hatcheries and all the process that has followed the Boldt decisions,
we have probably spent more money on "not losing" the last of these fish than we
spent putting astronauts on the moon. And gicven all the money we have spent not
solving the problem, the fact that you can often buy the flesh of an endangered
species in the supermarket for less than you pay for cheese, is at least deeply
ironic. In fact, it seems every bit as absurd as buying gasoline at the pump for
under $10/gallon when we are spending $100,000/minute in an even less effective
effort to control the world price of oil.
So, we need to ask ourselves, and one another: what is really going on?
I am going to tell you that the reason that these particular fish are having
more trouble now than they had after the Vashon Stade in the last glaciation,
when the whole place, up to about the 3500 foot elevation level, was about as
habitable as a supermarket parking lot, is actually twofold: it’s because we -
them and us - have a lot in common. We are both really just
top-of-the-food-chain predators and we are both "opportunivores" - that is to
say: we eat anybody smaller or slower or dumber than we are for dinner, and not
only that: they taste good and are full of stuff that is hard to find elsewhere,
and they are easy to catch and we really like to eat them.
So problem #1 is that we have never looked at them in terms of their "functions
and values " in the ecosystem – even though these crazy anadromous fish are the
ONLY process in all of nature that actually reverses the landscape depleting
processes of erosion and returns nutrients from the oceans to fertilize the
terrestrial ecosystems, the only process that brings energy back from the oceans
to the headwaters of our streams. Instead, we have always looked at them simply
as a limitless supply of free food and hunted them w/o mercy.
But it now appears that a problem #2 is at least as serious as over-fishing. The
problem is that we have each gone blindly after the same physical territory. And
right or wrong, we are cleverer than the salmon, and so we have been winning
consistently in our own efforts to develop and maintain our nests in and along
their rivers for about 100 years.
That does not mean we are wiser than the fish, but we are certainly cleverer and
more destructive. And very few of us have even considered the disproportionate
consequences of our actions until quite recently. The huge advantage that we
have over them, at least for the moment, is that we can easily move out of their
way, and we are going to have to if we want to save them, because they really
can't move out of ours. We've tried that over and over again with trap and haul
schemes and we tried it with hatcheries.
This image by Amanda Kingsley does not completely communicate the interleaving
and tangled web of issues involved, because it does not really/clearly show the
hydrograph - the fluctuating amount of water that runs down the rivers. But it
does an excellent job of showing who is in the river, and when they are each
there. And it is still very useful to know who is in the river when, because we
can easily compare it against the hydrograph below. This is a really important
version of the hydrograph for the Big Quilcene
River, the primary source
of our community’s water, because it clearly demonstrates that we have “known”
about having a “deficit for fisheries” for more than 25 years. 
The other problem with Amanda’s poster (somewhat harder to remedy) is that it
does not really geolocate the spawning gravels of the different species, either.
And there is the rub, because these are fish who have slowly,
conservatively, "co-evolved" with these streams to effectively utilize every
accessible reach of the stream, and in a way they have no way to understand, we
have substantially and rapidly and dramatically changed the lower reaches, both
with outright barriers to fish passage and by the unintended consequences of
diking to protect our foolishly mislocated structures from the "natural" and
predictable migration of the river channels.
These two images from the Dungeness River illustrate the precise nature of the
problem. When river channels narrow, the water accelerates. At these higher
velocities the river moves more and larger cobbles. When the channel
modification is past - in this case just after the bridge – the water slows
dramatically and drops the payload of gravel it was carrying, locally raising
the level of the bottom of the stream.
To understand this from a fish’s point of view you have
to consider that is something that almost never happens in nature. In nature,
when a river is blocked, for instance by a tree falling across it, or by a
debris flow, it solves the blockage by building up a dam behind the barrier
until there is enough pressure to blast the barrier out of its way. This
normally happens more or less immediately – if not during the next few weeks,
certainly within the season after the event. But these dikes are different: they
were built by people and have been persistently maintained by people and
defended from the river by people. And these people were almost never thinking
beyond the ir immediate goals of protecting their structures along the banks.
During periods of low flow, this elevated bottom
presents obstacles to fish passage, and if fish foolishly spawn in these gravels
(as they have done very successfully for the past hundred centuries) when there
is clearly adequate flow, their nests may very well dessicate when the flow goes
subterranean - when the high water is past and most of the water in the river is
running subsurface, through the gravel that was deposited several feet above the
level where the bottom of the river would have been, had it not been for the
dikes.
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