Chinook Salmon Spawn in Redwood Creek for a Second Year Running

Written by Catherine Masatani, a Watershed Stewards Program corpsmember with the San Francisco Bay Area Network's salmon monitoring programme, in February 2023.

A second surprise

In the 2021–2022 spawning season the San Francisco Bay Area Network's fisheries crew saw something unusual: Chinook, or king, salmon swimming up Redwood Creek to spawn. In January 2023, for the second year in a row, the crew found a female Chinook on her redd, or nest, in the creek.

NPS fishery biologist Mike Reichmuth examines a spawned-out female Chinook salmon in Redwood Creek, January 2023. NPS / Matt Millado.

Historically only coho salmon and steelhead trout had been seen in Redwood, Pine Gulch and Olema Creeks. The previous year's run was treated as an anomaly, partly because unusual October storms coincided with the fall Chinook run: after an atmospheric river in late October, many Chinook used the open creek mouths and spawned in places they had never been seen. The crew counted more than 85 adult Chinook across the three streams, most of them in Redwood Creek.

This season there was no significant rain until December. After a series of atmospheric rivers, steelhead returned to Olema and Redwood Creeks, but coho numbers were low compared with earlier years. On Redwood Creek the crew came across a lone salmon a few metres upstream of her redd. At first they took her for a coho, but her size, the colour of her mouth, and the pattern and size of her spots showed she was a Chinook. Could the return of king salmon mark the start of more Chinook using this small coastal stream?

What comes next

The Chinook will probably remain the season's biggest surprise. With the coho spawning window closed, surveys will become less frequent but continue through the spring in expectation of more adult steelhead, and the crew will turn to assessing winter habitat for young salmon in the Muir Woods stretch of Redwood Creek, to judge the success of large-scale restoration projects.

More information

• San Francisco Bay Area Network salmon monitoring
• Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center: coho and steelhead, and its blog

Sources

• National Park Service, Bay Area Nature and Science Blog, "Spotted: Chinook Spawning in Redwood Creek Once Again." https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/sfanblog_chinook-in-redwood-creek-once-again.htm
• A photograph of the female Chinook, credited jointly to the NPS and the Point Reyes National Seashore Association, is not reproduced here.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.