Story by Tracy Record
Photos by Patrick Sand
West Seattle Blog co-publishers
Students and stewards are in the midst of a record-setting salmon-release season at Fauntleroy Creek, with more than 800 students participating in 22 release events.
But their work is being jeopardized by vandals, we’ve learned today – painful and criminal in any event, particularly so because this is all work involving students and volunteers, along an urban salmon stream whose survival is by no means guaranteed.
More on that shortly – first, here’s what the work is all about.
That group of 50 fifth-graders from West Seattle Elementary is one of the school groups scheduled to visit Fauntleroy Creek this spring to release coho fry into the creek. Speaking with them in the photo is creek/watershed steward Judy Pickens, who has long volunteered with the Salmon in the Schools program. She and husband Phil Sweetland ferry salmon eggs to local classrooms in one mad dash every school year, and then for the next step, students and teachers bring the fry to the creek.
And off they go, with volunteer Denny Hinton‘s help:
Some classes turn salmon-raising and -releasing into an even larger learning experience. A recent visit by Arbor Heights Elementary included not only a release, but also a presentation by students who are studying the creek:
In our photo are Harriet and Hannah Mae, Arbor Heights fifth-graders who, as Pickens explains, are along with classmates delving into the mystery of what’s happening with the hundreds of thousands of coho salmon that have not come back into Puget Sound from the ocean.”
They gathered on a creekside patio with Pickens, who notes, “The fall 2015 return was nearly non-existent and the fall 2016 return is expected to be at least as dismal. Under the direction of teacher Angie Nall and aided by scientists from Seattle Public Utilities, the students explored El Niño warming off the coast that killed the prey coho need to survive, ocean acidification, and pollution from stormwater runoff.”
There have been glimmers of hope. In fall 2012, more than 200 spawners returned. Every fall, volunteers take up their spots along the creek and watch with hope.
For them and for the salmon, it’s enough of an upstream swim, they don’t need any more challenges. Which brings us to the vandalism. Pickens reports two recent incidents: “One was ripping the net from our smolt trap in the upper creek. We have the trap in place in order to know how many coho have matured to migrate to saltwater – a gauge of both food abundance and water quality. A volunteer checks that trap daily and was able to make repairs within hours of the vandalism so that this important monitoring could continue.
“The other was digging stones out from a derelict section of concrete pipe imbedded in sediment at the salmon-release site. A few days ago, our volunteers discovered a sizable hole in the pipe that was diverting much-needed water from where children release their fish. A volunteer hydrologist temporarily plugged the hole with stones so that flow was restored and releases could continue. Then someone removed the stones, requiring another fix. A long-term fix can’t happen until a period of low flow this summer, so we need the pipe left alone. ‘Volunteer’ appears a lot in this report, an indication of the community’s commitment to salmon in Fauntleroy Creek and the students who cap their salmon study on release day.”
Pickens concludes, “If responsible park users can be on the lookout for destructive behaviors, we can stop this senseless vandalism.”
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