“There’s a mort. There’s another mort. OK, three males now, over there, under the stump,” Yarrow Murphy calls back as I pencil hash marks on a waterproof pad. We’re counting spawning coho salmon in Newaukum Creek, a tributary of the Green River. Morts—slang for dead fish—outnumber the still-swimming coho, but that’s OK. Even dead, decomposing salmon mean a successful spawning cycle.
A few yards upstream, a green flash darts past and frantically flips over a pile of rocks. Male coho salmon are easy to recognize because they change from ocean silver to forest green when they return to fresh water to spawn.
“He saw us; they’re pretty keen,” smiles Murphy, the project-monitoring coordinator at Mid-Puget Sound Fisheries Enhancement Group. Salmon, I find out, have excellent eyesight and a much better sense of smell than dogs.
Salmon surprise us several more times. No small fry, these adults measure 18 inches and weigh 15 pounds, so they make a lot of noise when they spook, sometimes right over the tops of our boots.
Counting isn’t easy—I had imagined standing on a bank watching fish ladders, sort of like touristing at the Ballard Locks, but it’s a different story in the wild.
Dressed in full rain gear and knee-high rubber boots, we wade upstream when possible or bushwhack along the bank, keeping close watch for the green males and dark gray females who stand guard above their redds, or spawning gravel beds. Although a female coho lays more than 3,000 eggs in her redd, on average only two of those salmon will return to their spawning stream after living for two years in the ocean.
Newaukum Creek, near Enumclaw, is one of Mid-Sound’s habitat restoration projects. One of 14 Regional Fisheries programs funded by the Northwest Salmon Recovery Fund, over the past decade Mid-Sound has worked to remove fish-passage barriers, plant native trees and shrubs along streams, and install in-stream structures (big logs) to create slack-water pools for spawning.
Counting coho once a week during spawning season in November and December is payoff for a job well done. On this day, Murphy and her volunteer counted over 75 salmon—adding to the 300-plus salmon that have already “spawned out.”
We pause above a pool to watch as a pair of coho gently flutter in the current. By a navigational process called rheotaxis, they have found their way back to their original spawning beds. Telltale white spots on their tails show they have already begun to decompose in the fresh water, but not before giving life to the next generation.
More information: www.midsoundfisheries.org.
