For years, the Interior Department resisted proposals to raise the height of its towering Shasta Dam in Northern California. The department’s own scientists and researchers concluded that doing so would endanger rare plants and animals in the area, as well as the bald eagle, and devastate the West Coast’s salmon industry downstream.
Federal officials suppressed a lengthy environmental document that details how one of California’s unique salmon runs would be imperiled by Trump administration plans to deliver more water to Central Valley farms. The July 1 assessment, obtained by The Times, outlines how proposed changes in government water operations would harm several species protected by the Endangered Species Act, including perilously low populations of winter-run salmon, as well as steelhead trout and killer whales, which feed on salmon. But the 1,123-page document was never released.
Some of the world’s most famous conservationists have been hunters. Teddy Roosevelt, John James Audubon, and Ernest Hemingway each have the somewhat dubious distinction of saving animals’ habitats to try to kill them. Pacific salmon aren’t often mentioned alongside Roosevelt’s elephants or Hemingway’s tigers, but in Tucker Malarkey’s Stronghold (Random House, $28), fish is the biggest game of all. Malarkey’s protagonist is a charming misfit named Guido Rahr, who also happens to be her cousin. A naturalist almost as soon as he could walk, Rahr got hooked on fly fishing in his late teens, only to realize, to his horror, that the hydroelectric dams, agricultural runoff, commercial fishing industry, deforestation, and climate change in the Pacific Northwest could bring wild salmon to extinction.
The San Joaquin River – the second longest river in California – was once home to one of the largest populations of spring-run Chinook salmon, a species of fish that is now classified as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Thanks to a collaborative multi-agency effort that includes the Department of Water Resources (DWR), spring-run Chinook salmon are successfully returning to the San Joaquin River for the first time in more than 65 years. At the end of May 2019, 23 adult spring-run Chinook returned, surviving their nearly 370-mile round trip journey to the Pacific Ocean as juvenile fish and the trip back to the San Joaquin River as adults to spawn – typically a two to five-year process.
Salmon fishing been superb this summer in the ocean off the Sonoma and Marin county coasts, but you can also catch hard-fighting landlocked Chinook salmon at Lake Oroville, located on the Feather River.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
