A few days after a certain November election did not go quite the way we wished, my wife and I glumly ventured forth for a Great Peninsula Conservancy guided tour of Kitsap County’s Chico Salmon Viewing Park, the Erlands Point Preserve and the Chico Creek Estuary, which recently had a culvert removed to improve salmon habitat.
The tour was led by Gabriel Newton, community engagement manager for the GPC, a nonprofit that purchases, protects, rewilds and stewards rural and other habitats in western Puget Sound country. Newton has 15 years of experience as an elementary and middle school science teacher, and it shows: he is warm, engaging and funny as he rattles off salmon minutiae (e.g., a salmon’s lateral lines — small holes extending from head to tail — fill up when nearby water is disturbed, giving the fish an additional means of detecting a potential predator. Salmon have such sensitivity that using only smell, the Earth’s magnetic field, and who knows what else, they return to their precise freshwater spawning site after years in faraway salt water. Whoa!).
What we saw that day though, was awe-inspiring in a different way. The mostly chum salmon were migrating en masse, back from the ocean to the creeks and rivers, to spawn. Many of them were dying in the attempt, exhausted and spent, their carcasses piling up along the waterways. It was haunting, morbid, stinky and beautiful. I felt privileged to witness this ancient life-and-death rite.
What impressed me most: these animals never give up, right until their dying breath. Almost as if they know that, in this arduous, epic fight against the current, they’re living on borrowed time. Which they are. As Newton explained:
“When they reach the estuary, the point where salty ocean water meets freshwater inland flows, that’s the staging ground where they mass up and wait until the signal that the water is moving at a depth and flow that they can swim through, along with other seasonal factors that they detect. And then, when they sense the conditions are right, they break through and swim upstream, up the rivers and creeks, as fast as they can. Once they start that process, they only have about 10 days before they die. The amazing physiological changes they go through allow them to survive that last journey through freshwater, but it quickly degrades their bodies. That’s why their predators — including humans — prefer to eat them when they’re still in the ocean. Once they start to degrade they don’t taste as good.”
That explains why so many birds were feasting on dead salmon at the estuary. We saw hundreds of seagulls and no fewer than eight eagles. But amid all the death, the theme of this year’s salmon migration is one of remarkable renewal. Newton tells me they were expecting a run of 350-400,000 chum through the South Puget Sound’s rivers and creeks this season. As of mid-December, they estimated over 900,000 — the largest run in decades, possibly since at least the 1970s. The Suquamish Tribe is fishing salmon at the mouth of Chico Creek, something that hasn’t happened in 15 years.
And while it will likely take years of study to figure out why the 2024 run turned out so well, Newton wanted me to know that the things we do, large and small, to help preserve the environment — they matter.
“I like to believe that this is at least partially due to the efforts over years of environmentalist organizations, land trusts, landowners, our native tribal partners and others, to restore creek habitats, to get rid of culverts, to remove dams, to allow the water to flow,” he said. “We like to believe that our measures are adding up to something bigger, something more than the countering effects of habitat loss, unrestrained development, pollution, climate change, etc.”
So, some good news, for once. I asked him if, in this despondent (for many of us) political season, it was right to turn to fish for, well, hope? He pondered and said:
“The story of salmon is a life cycle with an end that leads into a beginning. In a clutch of 3,000 eggs, only two — two! — individuals are ever likely to grow to adulthood, migrate to open ocean, and return from the ocean back up the waterways to spawn. Even those that don’t make it, who die of exhaustion in the creeks and rivers, trying to get to their home waters, well, their bodies are bringing vital nutrients from the ocean inland; they’re cycled back into the ecosystem. They enrich the soil, the creek beds, the forests, the bellies of various scavengers and predators. To me, all this implies a success story, a great circle of life.”
I don’t know what to call it, or if I want to call it anything at all. But the awesome sights we witnessed on the GPC tour made us feel better, lighter. The experience put things into perspective in the most dramatic way possible. We were reminded what it means, in the face of horror and loss, to never, ever give up.
José Alaniz is a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Department of Cinema and Media Studies (adjunct) at U.W. He lives blissfully with his wife and many animals in Longbranch.
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