[env-trinity] Article on California Pacific Salmon

[Byron Leydecker]

This is an outstanding article by a Smithsonian Magazine staff writer.  It
originally was forwarded by Mark Rockwell, Conservation Director of the
Northern California Council Federation of Fly Fishers.  To many of us, this
provides the most comprehensive picture ever assembled and written about
Northern California Salmon.  The author is an exceptionally gifted writer.
Many of you will know some of those persons named in it.  It's a great
article.  

 

Byron Leydecker


 


 


On California's Coast, Farewell to the King Salmon 


For the first time there's no fishing for chinook salmon on the California
coast. The search is on for why the prize catch is so scarce. 

Smithsonian Magazine - October 2008

By Abigail Tucker, staff writer

 

The salmon-boat cemetery in Fort Bragg, a fishing port tucked into shaggy
pines about 150 miles north of San Francisco, is full of bleached and
peeling hulls. Over the years many California vessels have landed in Bruce
Abernathy's front yard, pitched at steep angles among the weeds, some still
rigged with trolling poles. The Anita II, the Dag. Eventually Abernathy's
son David takes them apart with a tractor and chain saw and sells what he
can for parts. Sometimes all that's left is a scrap with a painted-on name:
My Pet.

 

Bruce Abernathy himself doesn't watch the demolitions. He finds somewhere
else to be, or he stays inside his house, with its many framed prints of
trim little ships atop frisky seas. The fisherman turned resale man, and
lately junk dealer, has "a lot of remorse" about what's happening outside
his window beyond the hot pink rhododendron bush. "I know almost everybody
who owned these boats," he said. "Boats become part of you, like a wife."

 

Thirty years ago there were several thousand salmon boats in California.
More recently, as the fish became scarce, only a few hundred worked the
coast. Then salmon populations crashed, and this year for the first time
U.S. officials canceled all ocean salmon fishing off California and most of
Oregon, and curtailed it off Washington, a $300 million loss. When I visited
Fort Bragg, in late May, the harbor felt about as cheerful as a junkyard.
The docks should have quaked with activity, but the mooring basin was quiet
except for the hoarse bark of sea lions. The fishermen with the biggest
boats hoped to go way out after tuna later in the season; others had already
joined roadwork crews or cobbled together odd jobs. Disaster relief money
would be on the way, but to many second- and third-generation fishermen, a
summer without salmon felt like the end of the line. For the better part of
a century the fish supported Fort Bragg, home of the World's Largest Salmon
Barbeque, at which local politicians flip fillets on the grill and tourists
come from far and wide to taste one of the most sought-after fish in the
sea, the chinook salmon, a.k.a. the king. 

 

The sudden decline of California's chinooks, most of which originate in the
Sacramento River, has shaken scientists as well as fishermen. Typically
several hundred thousand adult fish return from the sea to the river in the
fall. Last autumn, only about 90,000 made it back, and fewer than 60,000 are
expected this year, which would be the lowest number on record. "Usually
when something like that happens, you can point to something dramatic, an
oil spill, closing of hatcheries, an earthquake," said Donald McIsaac,
executive director of the Pacific Fishery Management Council, the regulatory
group that advised U.S. officials to halt this year's salmon fishing. But no
such catastrophe has been definitively linked to the shortage.

 

Salmon is the third most popular seafood in the United States, after shrimp
and canned tuna, with about 600 million pounds consumed annually. Most of
the fresh meat is Atlantic salmon raised in fish farms. California fishermen
bring in about five million pounds of chinook meat in a good year. That's
not terribly much, considering the national appetite, but king salmon is the
largest and perhaps the choicest variety, owing to its deep reddish pink
color (a result of its krill-heavy diet), high omega-3 fatty acid content
and rich flavor. It is the stuff of white tablecloth restaurants and fancy
markets, not salmon burgers. ("You would never put king salmon in a can,"
one fish market analyst told me.)

 

What's more, local chinook, chrome-colored and strong enough to charge up
waterfalls, are revered as a symbol. We savor the salmon's story almost as
much as its flesh-its epic slog from birth stream to sea and back again, its
significance to Native Americans, who saw the fish as a dietary staple and a
religious talisman. Salmon still retain something of that spiritual power.
Called the "soul food of the North Pacific," king salmon is the flavor of
healthy rivers and thriving coastlines. It is a pepper-crusted or
pesto-smeared communion with nature, gustatory proof that in a region where
cities are sprawling, wildness still waits below the surface-if you will
only cast your fly and find it.

 

There are about a half-dozen salmon species worldwide, and populations are
further defined by their rivers of origin and migration seasons. Chinook
(Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) are found from California's Ventura River to
Kotzebue Sound in Alaska to Russia's Andyr River and northern Japan. The
species whose sudden disappearance has been in the news, prompting
Congressional hearings this past spring, is the fall-run Sacramento River
chinook, named for the river to which mature fish return to spawn and the
season in which they do so. (The Sacramento River also supports much smaller
winter and spring runs, which are classified as endangered and threatened,
respectively, and a late-fall run.) After eggs are laid in autumn, young
salmon emerge from their gravel nests as early as Christmastime, swimming
south a few weeks later. They slink seaward mostly at night to avoid
predators, lingering in brackish estuaries to gather strength. As they near
the ocean, their bodies change. Their renal systems adapt to salt water.
They lose black bars on their sides and gradually assume the silvery
color-with a scattering of black spots-that thrills fishermen. "God, they're
beautiful," exulted Dave Bitts, of McKinleyville, California, a commercial
fisherman for more than 30 years. "That's what a fish is supposed to look
like-the whole shape of them, the power of the back, the thickness of the
tail."

 

The fish typically stay at sea three years, ranging thousands of miles in
the Pacific and gaining 90 percent of their body mass (between 10 to 50
pounds, though the largest weigh more than 100). Then they head for home,
tracing the smell of minerals and organic materials to find their natal
streams. It is a brutal journey. The fish stop eating once they hit fresh
water, and their bodies begin to deteriorate even as they ascend rapids (the
word "salmon" comes from the Latin salir, to leap). Ready-to-mate males
flush crimson and grow tough-guy hooked jaws for fighting; females search
for gravel for a nest. Soon after laying and fertilizing eggs, the exhausted
adults die. But the life cycle doesn't stop there. The kings' spawned-out
carcasses nourish not only the baby salmon that will take their place but
also living things up and down the food chain, stimulating whole ecosystems.
Salmon-rich streams support faster-growing trees and attract apex predators
like bears and eagles. In certain California vineyards, compounds traceable
to salmon can be found in zinfandel grapes.

 

This is the elegant narrative that people in the West are fighting to
preserve, a tale of determination and natural destiny that somehow touches
even those of us who don't live there. And yet this ideal of wild salmon is
increasingly an illusion.

 

Coleman National Fish Hatchery, Anderson, California, 4 a.m.: Had it been
light, I could have seen the edge of the Cascade Range, which includes Mount
Shasta, the Sacramento River's source. But I couldn't make out the
hatchery's outbuildings, or anything much beyond a series of long concrete
pools, or raceways, illuminated by floodlights.

It dawned on me that the gray current shifting and flickering below the
surface of Raceway 5 was actually hundreds of thousands of three-inch-long
fall-run chinooks. A hatchery worker scooped up a couple: squiggles with
woeful expressions, they were barely princelings, never mind kings. But
every so often one would snap itself suddenly out of the big pond, a hint of
the athleticism that would one day launch it upstream.

We were there because the hatchery was taking a historic step. Usually, the
federal facility-at the northern end of California's Central Valley-releases
the juveniles out its back door into Battle Creek, which feeds into the
Sacramento River six miles downstream. This year, though, natural resource
managers had decided to load 1.4 million fish, about a tenth of Coleman's
total stock, into trucks and drive them roughly 200 miles south to San Pablo
Bay, above San Francisco Bay, bypassing the entire river, a tactic that
state hatcheries have been using for years. I had already been startled to
learn that between 50 percent and 90 percent of the Sacramento River's
"wild" fall-run chinooks are actually born in hatcheries, which were created
to compensate for the loss of spawning grounds to dams. Every autumn,
hatchery workers trap returning adults before they spawn and strip them of
sperm and eggs. The offspring are incubated in trays and fed pellets. Now
this latest batch would not even have to swim down the river.

The shipment was an effort to rekindle future fishing seasons, Scott
Hamelberg, the hatchery manager, said: "If you truck a fish from Coleman and
bypass certain areas where mortality can happen, you may improve survival.
You take out hundreds of miles of avoiding predators, water diversions,
pollution, any number of things."

We spoke in his office, which held a shrine to Popeye, a cat who must have
enjoyed an extremely happy tenure at the hatchery. Despite the low numbers
of returning Sacramento salmon this year, Coleman planned to go ahead with
its annual Return of the Salmon Festival in the third week of October, where
in years past schoolchildren have shrieked over the chinooks jamming the
creek.

Outside, a worker standing waist-deep in the raceway crowded the fish toward
a hydraulic pump, using a broom to goad stragglers. Their shadowy forms shot
up a transparent tube and into a tank on a waiting truck. In a few hours
they would be piped into net pens in the bay, then hauled by boat farther
out and released to swim out to sea. Some scientists say the hatchery fish
are less physically fit than their wild brethren, with a swimming-pool
mentality that does not serve them well in the ocean. And yet in years past,
many survived to maturity simply because they were introduced in such
overwhelming numbers. Some wildlife experts speculate that the hatchery-born
fish may even be weakening wild populations they were meant to bolster by
competing with the river-born fish for food and space, and heading home with
them to breed, altering the gene pool.

The trucked fish won't know where home is, exactly. Many will likely never
find their way back to Battle Creek, not having swum down the river in the
first place. These strays might spawn successfully elsewhere, but without
that initial migration it might seem that some essential quality of
salmon-ness is lost. 

If this is the price of keeping the species going, so be it, said Hamelberg,
who wears a wedding band etched with tiny salmon. "There's a greater public
good here," he told me. "We're providing fish to the American public to eat,
and also for aesthetic reasons-just for people to know they're in the
system, that they returned. Our obligation is to keep these runs as sound as
possible."

The hatchery workers looked weary as the trucks pulled away. As it turns
out, chauffeuring tons of pinkie-length fish hundreds of miles is trickier
than it sounds. During shipping the day before, the circulation system in
one of the trucks stopped working, and 75,000 chinooks died.

Native peoples of the Pacific Northwest used to think salmon were immortal,
and it's easy to see why. Even though the rivers hosted spectacular mass
death scenes every year and were filled for weeks with rotting bodies, the
next season's fish always mobbed the gravel beds. To safeguard this cycle,
tribes were careful to place the bones of the season's first catch back in
the river.

But the California and Pacific Northwest salmon populations have been
declining for more than a century and a half. Gold miners washed the gravel
out of streams and loggers dismembered river habitats. Fishermen caught so
many salmon that the canneries couldn't keep up; barge loads were dumped
back into the sea, and salmon carcasses were used to feed hogs and fertilize
fields. Today, the Columbia River supports at most 3 percent of the salmon
it boasted when Lewis and Clark passed through. The Klamath River, which
starts in southern Oregon, has suffered major salmon kills. Some Pacific
salmon varieties may share the fate of their East Coast cousins, the wild
Atlantic salmon, which were killed off in huge numbers in the 19th century
by overfishing, pollution and dams and are today nearly extinct in the wild.

By now, Sacramento chinooks have lost an estimated 70 percent of their
original spawning habitat in central California. Dams did the most damage,
drying up riverbeds and cutting off access to mountain spawning streams.
Shasta Dam, completed in 1945, is the nation's second largest, far too big
for the fish ladders that in some places help salmon reach their spawning
grounds. Some populations barely survived. There are plenty of complaints
against hatcheries-the main one is that artificially producing millions of
fish masks deep ecological problems-but without the hatcheries, the
Sacramento run could hardly have rebounded from industrialization the way it
did. The fall run, probably numbering about a million at its peak, was until
very recently holding steady at a quarter or more of that level, enough to
keep the West Coast salmon industry afloat. 

Then came this summer's calamity. The official list of possible causes is
more than 40 items long, ranging from bridge construction in migration areas
to a surging population of Humboldt squid, grabby predators that may or may
not have a taste for chinook. Scientists are looking back to 2005, when the
fish that should be returning to the river now would have been sea-bound
juveniles, small and vulnerable. There were poor ocean conditions off the
West Coast that spring. A shift in weather patterns-possibly related to
global warming-delayed the seasonal upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich water
that supports the base of the marine food chain. As a result, "everything
that was expecting something to eat in May died," including juvenile salmon,
said Bill Peterson, a fisheries oceanographer with the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration.

Other experts cite freshwater dangers, since fish weakened by a stressful
trip downstream are less likely to survive in a hostile ocean. This is a
politically loaded argument: many of those stresses, from pollution to
introduced species, are man-made. "Protecting this icon means protecting the
watershed, from where these things spawn in the mountains down to the
ocean," said Jon Rosenfield, an aquatic conservation ecologist based in
Berkeley, California. "If you operate the rivers in the way that's best for
agriculture, that's not necessarily how the water would be operating on its
own."

In addition to being the most populous state, California is the most
productive agriculturally. But much of its farmland, and more than 75
percent of its population, lie south of Sacramento, while three-quarters of
the precipitation falls north of it. Huge dams, the Shasta chief among them,
hoard water that's released downstream on demand and pumped to the Central
Valley and Los Angeles. The arrangement works out for millions of people but
not always for the fish, which can get disoriented in artificial flows
created by water diversions and never make it to the sea.

Such problems are expensive to fix and the solutions can mean water
shortages, especially for farmers, which heighten the conflict between
interest groups. "The environmental community exploits the problems in
nature and ignores human problems," said Jason Peltier, deputy manager of
the sprawling Westlands Water District, which supplies hundreds of farms in
the Central Valley. "That's their agenda. I can't understand how they get
away with it. I can't understand how [the groups] push a
fish-and-nature-first agenda at the expense of human socioeconomic
conditions."

Over the past decade or so changes have been made to California's intricate
plumbing to give salmon safer passage. Shasta Dam was retrofitted, at a cost
of roughly $80 million, with a device that draws from the very bottom of its
reservoir, supplying downstream areas with more of the cool water that
spawning salmon require. In addition, hundreds of millions of dollars have
been spent otherwise improving Sacramento River habitat.

But it's doubtful that any amount of effort or money can restore the
salmon's world. I didn't fully understand this until I visited the most
altered ecosystem of all, the one environmentalists are most likely to
lament when discussing the king. It's where ocean and river meet: the vast
and troubled estuary at the Sacramento's mouth, through which almost all the
river's wild-born salmon pass en route to the Pacific. The former
400,000-acre tidal marsh is California's main water hub, a place both tamed
beyond recognition and perilous for salmon in new ways, full of obstacles
far more challenging than mere rapids. 

Just east of San Francisco Bay, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta stretches
50 miles south of Sacramento and some 25 miles west. Part of the largest
estuary on North America's Pacific Coast, the delta was once a marshy haven
of cattails and bulrushes. Juvenile salmon from both the Sacramento and San
Joaquin rivers (which converge in the delta) used it as a kind of staging
ground, tarrying in its shallows before going out to sea.

But 150 years and 1,100 miles of man-made levees later, the wetlands have
been transformed. During the gold rush, they were drained and converted into
a web of farming islands with winding channels in between. Ninety-five
percent of the original marsh is gone, and what remains is the epitome of an
artificial landscape, so squarely under civilization's thumb that it's
almost impossible to imagine it otherwise. The islands-many of them ten feet
or more below sea level due to soil decomposition-are a patchwork of crops
and alien species: palm trees, European sycamores, Himalayan blackberry
bushes, spindly grapevines propped up on sticks, extensive plantings of
Bartlett pear trees and fields of lawn turf as green and smooth as a pool
table. At times the air suddenly smells of licorice-wild fennel, another
invasive species. Go around a levy bend and there might be a beached World
War II landing craft used by a local duck-hunting club, a sign for brand-new
mansion developments "Coming Soon" or the pink explosion of a garden-variety
rosebush.

The waterways surrounding these islands are about as hospitable to salmon as
drainage ditches. The remaining marshland teems with nonnative species, many
of them ravenous stowaways from the cargo ships of nearby San Francisco Bay.
Brazilian waterweed, an aquarium favorite, clogs the sloughs and retains
sediments, making the water clearer and juvenile fish easier to spot:
predators like largemouth bass-introduced as a sport fish more than a
century ago-lie in wait. Upriver farms release potentially poisonous
pesticides and herbicides. Wastewater from the Sacramento area, with its
ballooning population, also seeps into the delta, and scientists are
increasingly suspicious that ammonia from human sewage interrupts the
seasonal cycle of phytoplankton blooms at the base of the food chain. 

And then there are the pumps. Naturally brackish, the delta is now managed
as a freshwater system, because fresh water is what's needed to fill
bathtubs and irrigate fields and quench the thirst of Californians, about 25
million of whom rely on the delta for at least some of their water. Mammoth
federal and state pumps in the delta's southern end, near the city of Tracy,
slurp up roughly half of the Sacramento's flow and send it to Silicon
Valley, Los Angeles and beyond. When the federal pumps are going full blast,
six 22,500-horsepower motors pull water through pipes 15 feet in diameter,
raising the flow into a canal that helps irrigate the middle of California's
Central Valley. (The state pumps are even bigger.)

The pumps are powerful enough to alter the currents miles away, confusing
migrating salmon. Often, salmon are siphoned along with the water. More than
half of these are salvaged near the pumps at fish-collection facilities,
where the buckets are checked every two hours, the operators pawing through
seaweed to find the tiny fish, which are then loaded into trucks and driven
back to the delta. But the smallest chinooks can slip through; in past years
tens of thousands have died. In 2005, that fateful year for this season's
salmon, the pumps exported record amounts of water from the delta.

"The higher the export rate, the more fish are lost," said Tina Swanson, a
biologist and head of the Bay Institute, an advocacy group that monitors San
Francisco Bay and the delta. "Even small increases can lead to
disproportionately high losses."

Constructed mostly in the middle of the last century, the pumps are relics
of a time when fish populations were not much valued or understood. Lately
California's attitude has changed. When I visited the federal pumps, they
were churning much more slowly than usual because of a court order to
protect a threatened fish called the delta smelt. Already, farmers to the
south were not getting water they'd asked for. They were also nervous about
another lawsuit, filed by a coalition of environmentalists, fishing
associations and Native Americans on behalf of the Sacramento's winter-run
chinook and other salmon species. Among other things, the plaintiffs want
more reliable cold releases from the Shasta reservoir, which could limit
flows to the pumps.

"I can't be without [that] water," said Daniel Errotabere, co-owner of
Errotabere Ranch, which grows some 5,600 acres of almonds, lettuce and other
crops with the help of delta flows. This summer the farm got just 40 percent
of the water it had ordered from the pumps. "We're not wasting anything. All
our crops are pretty much spoonfed. I can't do any more than I'm doing,
unless there's a way to find a crop that doesn't need water."

My guide to the fantastical Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta was Peter Moyle, of
the University of California at Davis, an estuary and fish expert who made
room on his research boat to show me a bit of what the delta is and used to
be. I wanted to see some wild baby salmon, which he said was not likely,
since it was late in a dry spring. I felt sure he would be relieved to see
some too. When I picked him up in Davis, there were salmon prayer flags
fluttering in front of his house.

Moyle has spent much of the past 30 years in the grayish-brown marsh mud on
the outskirts of the delta, and he's the authority on local fish-the
California roach, the Sacramento sucker, the tule perch-much less glamorous
than salmon. He's the go-to person on the delta smelt, a homely little fish
that smells like cucumber and faces many of the same challenges as the
chinook.

Moyle's rickety aluminum research vessel, The Marsh Boat, was crewed by two
graduate students. We pulled on waders and life vests and then bounced off
into a stiff north wind, which made the tall grasses on the shore roll like
waves. We were surveying fish populations on the outskirts of the delta in
the Suisun Marsh, which has not been tampered with as much as adjoining
areas and is reminiscent of what the whole place might have looked like
before the gold rush: an expanse of bulrushes and brownish water, with snowy
egrets stalking the perimeter and white pelicans flapping overhead. It was
almost possible to ignore the bellow of an Amtrak train bound for San
Francisco and the jets landing at nearby Travis Air Force Base.

The boat stopped by a muddy beach, depositing Moyle, me and a graduate
student studying invasive jellyfish from the Caspian Sea. The other student
roared off in hot pursuit of zooplankton. We walked the shore, with the
professor periodically plunging into the water to drag a net. "If you were a
baby salmon, this is exactly where you'd want to be," said Moyle, his
bifocal sunglasses glinting as he eyed a particularly inviting stand of
bulrushes. "This would have been full of food, full of cover. You could have
escaped your predators and there were strong enough currents that you could
find your way out to sea."

Nearly everyone's unhappy with the delta as it is today. Some say that
rising sea levels and earthquakes threaten its structure, and since
Hurricane Katrina there have been calls to armor the levees to maintain the
delta as a freshwater system. Others advocate reducing water exports from
the delta, doing away with the levees and unleashing the river to become
brackish again in places and flow where it will.

The plan that has lately gained the backing of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger
involves digging a canal upstream of the delta that would send fresh
Sacramento water straight to the pumps. With the help of fish screens, the
salmon would stay in the main river and continue their migration without the
threat of artificial currents. "Separate the water for people from the water
for fish," said Timothy Quinn, executive director of the Association of
California Water Agencies. "Manage each for their own purposes." Quinn says
healthy fish populations and a reliable water supply aren't mutually
exclusive. In fact, he takes his grandkids every year to see the spawning in
Butte Creek, a Sacramento River tributary. "I don't want them growing up in
a state where they'll sacrifice fish to get cheap water," he said.

But the peripheral canal, as it's called, is so controversial it's known as
the "third rail" of California politics, and voters have nixed it before.
Building it would take more than a decade and cost billions, and California
will need to figure out how to accommodate another eight million thirsty
residents by 2025. Still, academics from different disciplines have begun to
agree that the canal may be the only way. "The devil's in the details,
though," Moyle said. "No matter what you do, it's going to be
complicated-and expensive."

Our nets yielded plenty of fish that morning on the marsh, many of them
nonnative: baby carp, yellowfin goby and inland silversides, transparent
little fish with a stripe like thermometer mercury. Moyle held flapping
palmfuls as he measured them one by one, then tossed them back into the
water. He had been right: we saw no young salmon.

To fishermen, the chinook is known as a fighter, and likewise its advocates
won't let the fish die out without a struggle. People desperately want to
save wild salmon. "DEMAND Wild Californian King Salmon" stickers adorn car
bumpers, and products like Butte Creek Brewing's Spring Run Organic Pale Ale
benefit the kings. A SalmonAid concert stirred up support in Oakland this
past spring, and an advocacy group for Columbia and Snake River salmon
hauled a 25-foot fiberglass chinook from Seattle to Washington, D.C.,
stopping at schools and farmer's markets along the way. Another lawsuit to
ensure the wild salmon's safe passage continues to wind its way through the
courts.

Even as the crisis deepens, the nation's appetite for salmon grows, thanks
largely to the farmed variety. In 1980, almost none of our fresh salmon meat
came from fish farms; now three-quarters of it does. Corporations in Norway,
Canada and Chile run many of the farms, and most of the fish are Atlantic
salmon. Raised in offshore pens, removed entirely from rivers, they eat
formulated pellets instead of krill, so their flesh is naturally gray.
Aquaculturists feed the fish color additives to make the flesh pink,
fine-tuning the hue with the help of a color wheel called the SalmoFan. As a
result inexpensive salmon meat is now sold practically everywhere, including
Wal-Mart-an abundance that obscures the wild salmon's plight.

Salmon fishing in California and Oregon will probably have to be limited for
a few years, to allow stocks to recover. Among those who continue to have
faith in the king's return is 26-year-old Cyrus Maahs, a fourth-generation
Fort Bragg salmon fisherman. He grew up trolling with his grandfather, Sonny
Maahs, who helped found the town's annual salmon cook-off 37 years ago, when
the rivers still thrashed with fish and the sea was full of them. Cyrus'
father, Mike, put himself through college on salmon money and died at sea in
a storm; his name is on the fishermen's memorial in the harbor, beside the
charred concrete barbecue pits.

Cyrus believes he has inherited the family instinct to clear the jetty in a
thick fog, to pick the perfect psychedelic-colored salmon lure. I asked him
if he ever considered a more stable line of work-serving Fort Bragg's
burgeoning tourist trade, perhaps, or leading whale-watching trips. "I'd
much rather be out there fishing, and have a job with freedom to it," he
said. "Once you get a taste of that, it's hard to give up."

The family boat, Kromoli, spent most of the summer at anchor with much of
the rest of the town's fleet. Some fishermen contemplated putting their
boats up for sale, on the off chance someone would buy them. And yet, even
in Fort Bragg, the myth of a bountiful fishery persists. Visitors to this
July's World's Largest Salmon Barbeque did not go hungry, for instance. They
were served coho salmon flown in from Alaska.#

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/salmon-king.html?c=y
<http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/salmon-king.html?c=y&page=1>
&page=1

 

 

 

Dr. C. Mark Rockwell, D.C.
Calif. State Coordinator
Endangered Species Coalition
19737 Wildwood West Dr.
Penn Valley, Ca. 95946
summerhillfarmpv at aol.com
530 432-0100 (business)
530 432-9198 (home)

The Endangered Species Coalition (ESC) is a national network of 380
conservation, scientific, religious, sporting, humane, business and
community groups across the country. Through public education, scientific
information and citizen participation, we work to protect our nation's
wildlife and wild places. The ESC is a non-partisan coalition working with
concerned citizens and decision makers from all parties to protect
endangered species and habitat. www.StopExtinction.org
<http://www.stopextinction.org/> . 





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