Stepping in when streams dry up

Dave Brown wades through Mill Creek, which adjoins his 16-acre property, to look for salmon returning to spawn. “This place is full of fish, and it wasn’t before,” he said. (Zachary Kaufman/The Columbian)

Dave Brown, fish rescuer.

Volunteers tag thousands of the 16,000 juvenile salmon and steelhead rescued by Dave Brown and his cadre of volunteers. A few years ago, Brown started rescuing juvenile salmon stranded in drying streams. By implanting fish with coded wire tags, researchers hope to find out how well Brown’s initiative is working to rebuild local salmon runs.

BATTLE GROUND — Nature versus nurture?

When it comes to saving salmon in a degraded landscape, Dave Brown figures it takes a little of both.

The lifelong fisherman has established a series of pens on his property near Daybreak Park. For the past few years, he’s used the pens as temporary shelter for thousands of wild salmon and steelhead juveniles stranded when creeks in the area run dry. He releases the fish after streams are flowing again in the fall and winter.

Year by year, Brown believes his effort is paying off.

He sees it in the ever-increasing number of adult salmon and steelhead returning to streams such as Mill Creek, which runs through the canyon near his pens.

“This place is full of fish, and it wasn’t before,” he said.

Brown’s effort amounts to a lifeline for fish suffering from the effects of a changing environment. A proliferation of asphalt and rooftops is steadily constricting the landscape’s natural ability to absorb rain and recharge groundwater, leaving juvenile salmon trapped in drying pools.

Out of necessity, Brown has hit upon a hybrid formula that combines the protective aspect of a hatchery with the evolutionary vitality of fish hatched in the wild.

Brown believes his model can — and should — be duplicated throughout the Pacific Northwest.

“I’ll bet in five years, we’ll get this turned around,” he said.

With other efforts under way to improve stream habitat in north Clark County, Brown and his cadre of volunteers are taking a more direct approach to salmon recovery. But how much credit does Brown deserve?

To find out, volunteers last week injected about 8,000 coded wire tags into the heads of about half the fish Brown and his helpers collected this year.

Each magnetized wire tag, smaller than an eyelash, contains a six-character code embossed in four different places.

Volunteers anesthetized the fish, marked them by clipping their adipose fins and used an automatic injector to slip the tiny wire into a fatty area in their snouts.

Each fish will carry the tag through the rest of its life. When it’s caught in the ocean, corralled in a hatchery, or collected in a survey of spawning habitat, biologists waving a wand will be able to detect the tag’s presence. The head then will be lopped off and shipped off to a laboratory, where technicians can extract the tag and read the code.

Brown expects the tags will merely verify what he can see with his own eyes: more and more adult salmon and steelhead arriving to spawn in the streams draining into the East Fork of the Lewis River.

“We can go back and say, these are my fish,” he said.

He attributes this success to the fact that his fish are the offspring of adults that spawned naturally in the gravelly bottom of local streams.

“In the wild, in all species, the female picks her mate,” Brown said.

Romance has no place in the hatchery.

Human workers harvest the eggs and milt, swirl them all together in a bucket, and spread the fertilized eggs into trays. By salvaging wild-spawned fry, Brown believes his fish possess the single overriding characteristic necessary for the long-term survival of a species — the ability to reproduce.

There may be something to Brown’s theory, according a fisheries biologist tracking Brown’s experiment.

“The fittest male will spawn with that female,” said Lee Blankenship, a retired state biologist who heads the biological staff of Northwest Marine Technology in Olympia.

Blankenship, a member of a group of scientists reviewing hatchery programs in the Northwest, arranged to provide the coded wire tags to Brown’s project. This is the second year fish collected by Brown have been implanted with tracking tags, and biologists expect to start seeing returning adults within the next year or so.

It’s unfortunate the fish have to rely on Brown’s rescue mission, said John Weinheimer, district fisheries biologist with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

“We’ve got a lot of streams, especially here in Clark County, that dry up during the summer,” Weinheimer said. “That’s not a problem that’s going to go away. Whether you want to talk global warming or you want to talk urbanization, everybody has a use for the water that’s flowing in these creeks.”

Brown, a gregarious traveling leather salesman, has built up an ever-growing list of landowners who call him to save stranded fish. With the onset of autumn rains, he’s already started to release some fish back into the streams where they were scooped from drying pools a few months ago. He’s trained some of those landowners to feed the fish rearing in streams running through their backyards.

All of this gradually builds a constituency of people at least as interested in conserving streams as they are in building the next big box retail store, subdivision or road-widening project.

“To me, ultimately, that’s what’s going to save these tributaries,” Weinheimer said. “What we really want is the habitat to drive these fish, not this program.”

For the time being, Brown is in the ironic position of saving fish that are ill-suited to survive on their own in the degraded environment of today. By definition, he’s collecting the offspring of fish that spawned too high in the watershed and too late in the year to survive without help.

Biologists working with Brown see no easy alternative.

“The rivers are dropping far below what would be natural,” said Geraldine Vander Haegen, a biologist with Northwest Marine Technology. “Because we’ve made such a mess of it, they can’t survive without our help.”

Brown is careful to avoid releasing his fish where they might overwhelm fish that managed to survive the summer in the lower reaches of streams.

This was illustrated by the Darwinian sight of a steelhead fingerling that caught Vander Haegen’s eye. Sticking out of the steelhead’s mouth was the tail of a smaller coho.

“Lunch.”

Erik Robinson: 360-735-4551 or erik.robinson@columbian.com.