Marin County, home to numerous creeks and rivers, plays a vital role in the state's salmon population lifecycle and the recent low salmon activity in those creeks has created concern for the health of the salmon population. The winter is the time when the fish normally return from the Pacific Ocean and swim up the creeks in places like the Muir Woods National Monument, in Marin County, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, to spawn in the pools and eddies where they were born. But local biologists have become concerned that this year's low precipitation has kept the fish offshore, awaiting the swelling streams that will enable their movement upstream. The dry conditions have resulted in another year of concern for the fish, given the low returning numbers seen so far.
The concerns are the result of observations in the various Marin County creeks and streams that have produced salmon counts that are reduced by about seventy-five percent of what the biologists would like to see by this time. More alarmingly, only one pair of salmon was observed in Redwood Creek in the Muir Woods National Monument for spawning, and only one fledgling salmon was witnessed.
There is still hope that a big storm will prove the concerns to be unfounded. Rain runoff swells the rivers and creeks and the increased water flow connecting with the Pacific Ocean facilitates the salmon's ability to navigate upstream to their spawning locations. The rains so far have not been of much help to the endangered Coho salmon, due to the fact that conditions have been dry for some time. The lack of precipitation has meant that any rains arriving have been absorbed straight into the ground with little of it ending up in the streams to run toward the ocean. Too much rain is also counter-productive as evident after the winter of 2006 when flooding rivers forced young salmon out to sea before they were mature enough to manage.
Salmon return to the creeks where they were born, so that they might spawn before they die. If they are unable to navigate those streams, they will wait at the mouth of the streams in the ocean until which time they can move upstream. Since they will not choose alternative locations, if their stream of interest doesn't allow them to return, they will die without procreating.
The endangered Coho salmon numbers are of great concern in California, especially in Marin County and the Muir Woods National Monument area. The rivers, streams, and creeks in Marin County harbor the better part of the population of Coho salmon in the state. Most of the other streams in California that once supported salmon have seen their numbers dwindle to near zero as development encroaches and dumps sediment into the waterways.
