Wonder is all around us, we have only to look.

From Penitencia Creek, an urban stream flowing through Alum Rock Park in the east foothills of San Jose.



Steelhead yearling and steelhead young of year. They are badly infested with a copepod parasite called "blackspot" - it seems to be related to water temperature and flow conditions. It can weaken or, at levels like this, kill them. Pray to the rain gods for an early onset to winter, please.



Life is like a box of chocolates... you just never know what you're going to get. Like this nearly two-foot-long adult female steelhead. She is an ocean fish, came in with last winter's rains. From the Pacific Ocean she entered via the Golden Gate, smelled her way down to the bottom of the Bay near Milpitas, where Coyote Creek empties into the swampy marshlands in between salt ponds, then fought her way up lower Coyote and into Penitencia Creek, all the way up over several significant drop structures... and maybe, if she was lucky, there was a male already here waiting. Or not... perhaps that was why she stayed, waiting for a male to fertilize the thousands of eggs she'd carried inside her all that distance. She waited too long... and when the rains abruptly stopped in early March and flows dropped, she was trapped in upper Penitencia Creek. She made her way to the deepest, coldest pool she could find, so she could slow her metabolism and wait.... and wait.... and wait. She ate nearly every other fish unlucky enough to be in the pool with her, trying to make it through the summer, all the while losing weight, losing energy, as temperatures warmed and her food supply dwindled. She was so close, so very close... she had only recently died, didn't have a mark on her. RIP girl... so damn sorry we didn't find you in time to help you.

Only about 10 yards upstream in a thicket of tree roots and aquatic plants, the shocker went on, and this flew out into the middle of the stream:

"Ack, WTF? It's a red-legged frog! The last one was reported here in the mid-sixties!" Looks like we've got them again, because this is a subadult female. So typical in this business... get all bummed out and sad by something like that magnificent steelhead we were too late to save, only to be buoyed up by this one. If frogs are expanding their range, that means something is going right. Let's keep it up...

By the way, if you are in the south Bay and want to watch steelhead jumping and maybe even spawning in Alum Rock Park, wait until February or so and head over there after a good hard dump of rain when the creeks are up. Go into the park and drive all the way up to the visitor center. Park and hang out near the bridge that spans the creek. Maybe you'll get lucky. But remember, steelhead are threatened, which means they are protected by state and federal law and it is illegal to handle them or interfere with their activities in any way, unless you have a special permit. So do not approach them or try to catch them. Just sit back and enjoy the show. If you see one in distress and you live in California, call CalTIP at 1 888 DFG-CALTIP (888 334-2258), 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Thanks for helping protect our resources.

Deadline for comments on proposed ESA changes extended to OCTOBER 15

In an earlier blog, I asked anyone who reads this to please lodge your comments with the US Fish & Wildlife Service about changes that are being proposed to the Endangered Species Act.

Here's the relevant paragraph from the earlier post. If you want to read the whole thing, it's just a few posts down if you're in the mood to scroll.

"Here is a link to the US Fish & Wildlife Service's website with the exact language changes being proposed downloadable in PDF or text format. It's an incredibly dry, nearly incomprehensible legalese read, so here's a link to the Washington Post article on the topic that explains things pretty well."

Please have a look here, on the NRDC's website, to file an online comment letter and let them know you oppose these changes and why. The NRDC will print out each online letter they receive and hand-deliver them to the USFWS.

Thanks again. I've been sampling all day today but I promise some fun pics in the morning, so please take a moment if you haven't already. Sorry to keep harping on this but it's simply too important to take a casual stance.

The decline and fall of the pacific salmon

If you haven't been living under a rock for the past year or so, you have to know that this year's salmon return in California was nothing short of disastrous. Here in central California, there are two native species of salmon: coho (Oncorhynchus kisutch) and chinook (Oncorhynchus tshawytcha). Coho inhabit the coastal streams and chinook favor the central valley streams. For both species, the number of fish coming in to spawn (called "returns") varied from zero to less than one-third of what was expected.

This is a male coho salmon. Note the bright red coloration and the large, hooked jaw. These characteristics are only present on the male.


This is a male chinook (or "king") salmon. This is what you usually get when you order salmon in a restaurant. This is also a spawning male, with a hooked jaw and the red coloration.

The differences are in size (chinook can get up into the hundreds of pounds) and coloration. Coho are also called "silver salmon" because of their silvery undertones. The chinook is darker, almost green, beneath his bright spawning colors. He's also got comma-shaped dorsal speckles on his back and fin. There are other differences, but we can stop there.

All I know is what I see.... or don't see. And this past winter (2007-2008), I didn't see any coho in my streams. None. That hadn't happened to me ever, not in the past ten years.

Coho have a rather rigid, three-year life cycle (under normal conditions without hatchery influence, then things change a bit). This means that when a coho comes back to its natal stream to spawn, it is invariably three years old, and it will be breeding only with other coho that are also three years old. They form what are known as "year classes", which means that what happened to coho in 2005 is going to directly impact what happens to coho three years later, in 2008. In central California, the 2002-2005-2008 year class was the strongest year class. It had good solid numbers and was in the best shape of the three. We were expecting to see coho all over the place last winter, the way we had in 2005, 2002 and every three years prior. We were stunned when none showed up at all. What the hell happened?

Most scientists agree that the crash was inevitable. A very lively discussion takes place on this blog: http://blog.epa.gov/blog/2008/07/11/realityaboutsalmon/

Everything from habitat loss to global climate change to human overpopulation is tagged as a culprit. And these are some of the top minds in fisheries management debating this (with a few token reactionaries thrown in to alleviate the tedium of fact exchange). Sadly, I doubt you will find our Republican VP nominee taking part in these discussions since they involve neither lipstick, nor guns, nor fuck-me pumps.

In my neck of the woods, it was all about poor ocean conditions. All of the little salmon, newly spawned in 2004 and hatched out in 2005, swam happily downstream in the spring expecting to gorge themselves on all of that delicious krill that exists because of the cold, nutrient-rich, upwellings that occur off the California coast and that drive the entire ecosystem immediately offshore. Only thing was, in 2005... the upwelling never came. The result: starvation and reproductive failure in almost every near-shore dependent species of fish, bird and mammal. And that includes juvenile salmon parr. Steelhead use the ocean much differently than coho do (steelhead are immediately far-ranging, coho stick close to shore until their 2nd year of life), so they were relatively unaffected by this phenomenon and their numbers have remained relatively strong.

But for how long?

Predictions are that the pendulum of the Pacific Decadal Oscillationhas swung back around again and that conditions should drastically improve off our shores for the coming year.

Time will tell. When the coho come back, I'll be here waiting for them.

Please comment on proposed changes to Endangered Species Act - Deadline OCT 15

The Bush Administration's Dept. of the Interior has decided to act on their belief that agencies like the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service are duplicitous, superfluous and about as necessary as a silly toesie on a rodent. (Trust me on that last part, I'll explain later.)

Please have a look at what the Bushies want to do and tell them NO. Go here, to the NRDC's website, to file an online comment letter, which they will print and deliver to the Fish & Wildlife Service. Even though this proposal supposedly does not require Congressional approval (WTF???), write your congressperson anyway, and tell them you vehemently oppose this disgusting, subversive attempt to gut the ESA and give developers, oil companies, you-name-it the ability to skirt or ignore environmental laws in order to build, drill, pillage, plunder... oops, did I say that? The deadline to get your voice heard is SEPTEMBER 15 so please don't put it off.

Dirk Kempthorne is an Idaho senator who served alongside the now-infamous Larry Craig before he was appointed Secretary of the Interior on June 7, 2006, to replace Gale Norton after she resigned. He is an industry darling and has always favored business interests over environmental ones. So it's really no surprise that he's dreamed this up.

Basically, the changes boil down to this:

only when a federal agency feels their intended actions could potentially harm a listed species must they consult an outside environmental regulatory agency, such as the Fish and Wildlife Service. Otherwise, they can write themselves a free pass (called a "No Effects Determination") and move forward with their project.

Here is a link to the US Fish & Wildlife Service's website with the exact language changes being proposed downloadable in PDF or text format. It's an incredibly dry, nearly incomprehensible legalese read, so here's a link to the Washington Post article on the topic that explains things pretty well.

A read of the proposed language clearly shows another bias - Kempthorne's DOI doesn't want the ESA used to regulate climate change. We should have seen this one coming -- the listing of the polar bear raised the spectre of climate change to the forefront. Greenhouse-gas emitting industry screamed NO FAIR! And this is the inventive way their fears are being assuaged.

Keep in mind that federal agencies often delegate authority to state agencies. Case in point: Caltrans. Whenever federal dollars are helping pay for a project, it's considered a federal project. The federal version of Caltrans is the FHWA. So basically, Caltrans assumes the role of a federal agency on many projects, usually the big, important ones. Can you imagine the insanity that would ensue if Caltrans (an engineering organization focused entirely on project delivery) were given the power to analyze its own activities and to decide when, how and where its projects would impact listed species? Yet if the changes proposed by Kempthorne somehow snake their way through, that would become a very real scenario.

A strong Endangered Species Act is a basic, vital tool if we are to accomplish anything like conservation of a species and its habitat. Without it, we are hamstrung. Believe it.

And the suckier part: I know people who work as biologists for Caltrans. Up until now, they have been able to use the environmental regulatory agencies like a club in order to force the engineers and project managers in charge to do the right thing by the species: allocate money in the budget for things like mitigation, for properly done surveys, for documentation, for road design changes that benefit sensitive species or their habitat, or for permitting. If the proposed changes go through, they will be in a world of hurt because the engineers will simply walk all over them in order to push projects through the planning process and get them on the ground. Try telling a design engineer in a meeting with all the functional groups including project management, construction, right of way, design, etc. etc. that he needs to allow for a bigger culvert in his road design because it aids wildlife passage and reduces roadkill... at a cost of 3X the cost of a smaller culvert. Why should he? Um, because it's the right thing to do? Oh yeah, that will fly.... not. The biologist will likely either get shut down and go away quietly (if he doesn't protest), or be portrayed as a money-wasting tree sitting crackpot environmentalist (if he does try to push it).

Please understand my stance on this is not about job security for myself. I'll pretty much always have a job, because people will always want salmonids around. Something like 75% of all money spent to restore listed species is spent on fish - namely, salmon and steelhead. That's the way it's been for quite a while, and I don't see it changing any time soon. But that is a whole 'nuther blog post, which I'll save for another time. This is about the Bush Administration's non-stop efforts since they took power in 2001 to circumvent the ESA any way they can. This isn't the first thing they've tried. But it is hopefully the last.

Another really sad part is that if Kempthorne's proposed new rules pass, the Dept. of Interior will simply be sued by one or several environmental organizations. Legal activity sucks up an amazing amount of time, money and resources from agency personnel, who obviously are not provided with any additional funding, nor are they allowed to hire help, to deal with the additional workload caused by responding to lawsuits. Their actual work to protect species, therefore suffers immeasurably. Please make your voice heard on this vitally important issue; if we can stop it now, we can have an important impact on how project proponents are required to adhere to the provisions of the ESA. Thanks.... from all the creatures who can't thank you themselves.

Hey everyone, let's go frogging!

And so we did. On Sunday evening, four of us ventured out into Henry Coe State Park to do a little followup work on a study involving the population dynamics between non-native, invasive bullfrogs and native California red-legged frogs in two small stock ponds deep inside the park.

A little background....These ponds were created when the park was still ranchland and the dam that created them was left in place when it was discovered that, even though artificial, the ponds were great habitat for many aquatic species. It's well documented in the scientific literature that bullfrogs outcompete and displace red-legged frogs and are a major cause of their decline, resulting in them being listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. For the past six years, researchers have been catching, PIT-tagging and releasing both bullfrogs and red-legs at these ponds and keeping track of reproduction and overall numbers of both species, in an effort to document the pervasive takeover by the bullfrogs and the eventual loss of the red-leg population.

At first, even though there were far fewer red-legs than bullfrogs, it seemed the red-legs were holding their own and it was thought, "hey, maybe they can co-exist. However, in the last few years it's become obvious that the red-legs are losing.... no recruitment (no little frogs making it to adulthood) and now we're losing the adults. So, the focus has shifted from catch and release to culling all the bullfrogs we can catch to see how quickly the red-leg population can bounce back, if at all. Wish them luck; they're going to need it.

Here is the lower pond. As you can see, it is very nearly dry, and will be completely dry by the next time it rains again. The little puddle you see was about three feet across and about six inches deep. But when we got closer, we could see it was positively BOILING with bullfrog tadpoles. Hundreds of them.

So we netted out as many as we could, and left them on the banks for the feral pigs. They taste bad, so not many critters will eat them. Worst case, they'll just turn into fertilizer for the cattails, tules and raccoon-tail in the pond.

We also have tree frogs in the ponds. They are a native species, ridiculously cute, and they are the ones you hear croaking up a storm after it rains in the wintertime.

This little guy is a tree frog metamorph, which means he was very recently a tadpole but has re-absorbed his tail and gills and turned into a real frog. He was about the size of my pinkie fingernail. He and thousands of his little buddies were hopping all over the place and swimming like crazy all over the larger upper pond.

Unfortunately, I am a dumbass and didn't take any pictures of the upper pond, but it's about the size of a football field and the deepest spot is about 3 feet deep. And that is the lowest I have ever seen it.

Onto the frogging......

After you finish checking things out while there is still daylight, you have to keep yourself occupied until it gets dark out, cuz nighttime is when all the frogs come out. You'll almost never see them in the daytime. So we took a walk in a dry creek bed (North fork of Pacheco Creek)....

over hill and dale...oops, I mean, through giant culvert and dale....

ate our dinner sitting on tectonically-folded Franciscan sandstone over looking the "falls"... well, usually there is a falls, and a 10' deep pool with fish in it. Look at the bathtub ring to see how deep it normally is. Damn but this is a dry year...

As soon as it's dark enough, on go the waders and headlamps and out come the nets.

Conditions can skunk you though. Last night was warm enough so that the frogs, having absorbed all that wonderful solar energy during the day, and sitting in the bathtub-warm pond, were extremely active and extremely skittish. We couldn't get within ten feet of them before they would duck back under water and torpedo off. We caught one red-leg (well, two actually, but in a total rookie move I dropped it) and one bullfrog. The ten-year-old among us caught the only bullfrog of the evening.

"Hey V, whatcha got there?"
"WHOA!"

The bullfrogs I've seen here at Coe are the largest I've seen anywhere in the greater SF bay area. They look mutated. These stockponds are so warm and so productive that the normal two-year life cycle of the bullfrog can be completed in only one year, which makes it that much tougher on the red-legs. This big male was almost 9 inches long from the tip of his nose to the vent (urogenital opening). If you stretched him out, he'd have easily been over a foot long from toe to toe. Contrast that with the measurement of the red-leg male, who was about 4-1/2" snout-vent length. Any wonder why bullfrogs are decimating red-legs? Look no further for your evidence.

California red-legs do have one thing working for them: they are adapted to seasonal ponds and are better able to handle dry conditions than bullfrogs, so we had hoped that the upper pond would dry up also, but it's not looking like that is going to happen this year. So, we'll keep monitoring these ponds, as well as other ponds in other areas, including the Santa Cruz coast. Doing what we can to keep the sun from setting on these incredible little amphibians.