Chinook salmon
Fish have not fully returned to our mountains since the last Ice Age. Where glaciers advanced, aquatic life necessarily retreated before them; when the glaciers retreated, fish were able to return only so far as they could swim, so each stream is generally fishless above a certain impassable waterfall. Only strong-swimming, cold-loving species—mostly salmon and trout—make it into our mountains at all, and many of these fight their way to their upper distributional limit just once in their lives, when at their peak, and at a cost of total and terminal exhaustion. They may be phenomenal waterfall leapers, but still, there are limits. Above the critical waterfall live healthy aquatic communities whose animal members—invertebrates, amphibians, and small mammals—all got there on foot or on the wing.
Higher still, mountain lake communities have been joined (and altered) by trout who rode up the trail in saddlebags or flew there in airplanes. Fish populations of our high lakes are a product of human management—again favoring trout. Sometimes trout competitors have been introduced accidentally (as bait) and lakes have then been poisoned with rotenone and restocked with trout. High lakes with and without finny predators support different species of amphibians, with effects that ripple down through the food chain. North Cascades National Park has been clearing its high lakes of fish and turning them back over to their native amphibians.
Many popular fishing lakes are stocked with catchable-size trout before and during the fishing season, and get nearly fished out each season. Remote high lakes may be stocked only occasionally and have near-natural, self-sustaining populations. Or they may support healthy trout for years at a time but lack reproducing populations for want of a proper spawning bed. The bed must be clean gravel of the right size, at the right depth, with a moderate current to keep it aerated and silt-free.
Check a lakeshore near an inlet or outlet stream and follow the stream to its first waterfall. If you find a shallow gravelly spot in early summer, you may see a trout swimming back and forth over it. A logjam at the outlet stream, or slabby shallows nearby, tend to be good places to spot fish at any time of year. Polarizing sunglasses can help you see them. Trout don’t feed all day—only when the insects are most active. When the lake is first ice-free, feeding may go on from midmorning to midday. In October they may feed all afternoon. If luck brings you a calm feeding period after an extended blow, look for frenzied feeding where floating insects collected near the downwind shore.
High country trout spend a long, leisurely winter under the ice. In the smallest and highest bodies of water that support trout, they mature and spawn at 3–6 years of age while only 3–5 inches long and still displaying the parr marks typical of juvenile trout elsewhere. Fish are as cold as the water they’re in, and if it’s especially cold it slows down their metabolisms and their growth rates, but it doesn’t threaten their health. In contrast, water that’s prone to warming up in the sun (shallow and with insufficient flow in and out) can exclude trout.
Some lakes are too clean. The aquatic food pyramid rests on algae, which depend on minerals not present in rain or snow; water has to pick these up while passing over or through the earth. Small drainage basins, high snowfall, barren or impermeable terrain, and rapid turnover of lake water often combine, in our region, to severely limit nutrients. Stocked trout may fail to thrive, or to reproduce.
The fish in this chapter are carnivores. When small they eat zooplankton, then move up to larger crustaceans and insects of all life stages. If they outgrow that phase they add snails, worms, isopods, freshwater shrimp, amphibian larvae, and fish eggs and fry to their diets. Any fish species may be fair game, even their own at younger stages.
Oncorhynchus spp. (onk-o-rink-us: swollen snout). These three species have more than twelve rays in the anal fin. Salmonidae. Illustrations are of spawning ♂,.
Chinook salmon
Chinook salmon, O. tshawytscha (cha-witch-a: a Kamchatkan native name). Also tyee, king salmon. Black spots on back and both lobes of tail fin; black gums on lower jaw; spawning adults dark, rarely very red; juveniles at 4 in. have tall parr marks bisected by the lateral line, and a dark-margined but clear-centered adipose fin. Rivers.
Sockeye salmon
Sockeye salmon and Kokanee salmon, O. nerka (ner-ka: the Russian name). No dark spots on back or tailfin; 28–40 long thin rough gill-rakers in first gill arch; spawning adult has greenish dark head, crimson body; ♂, is slightly humpbacked; 4-in. juveniles have small, oval parr marks almost entirely above lateral line. BC and WA rivers and lakes; hatchery population in Deschutes River system in OR.
Coho salmon
Coho salmon, O. kisutch (kiss-utch: Kamchatkan native name). Also silver salmon. Black spots on back and upper half of tail fin; white lower gums; spawning ♂, have brilliant red sides; 4-in. juveniles have tall parr marks bisected by lateral line, all-dark adipose fin and dark leading edge of anal fin. Mostly smaller streams.
Pacific salmon range the Pacific Rim from California to Korea; some range the Arctic from the Mackenzie to the Lena. First described to science by Georg Steller (p. 422) in Siberia, they were given species names from Russian and Kamchatkan languages. They are called salmon after the Atlantic salmon, a different genus (Salmo).
Salmon are anadromous, meaning that they migrate upstream from the sea to spawn. They require clear, cold, well-aerated gravelly creeks to nurse their spawn in infancy, and larger bodies of water richer in animal life to rear them to maturity. Big lakes can suffice for some species if they become landlocked by new dams or natural topographic changes, but all grow much larger if they spend time in the ocean. Salmon are among the very few few animals that have adapted to handle the chemical shock of moving between breathing salt water and breathing fresh.
Even more remarkable is their ability to navigate back to their natal stream from thousands of miles away. Once they get close to the right river, they zero in on the mineral recipe of the precise tributary of their birth by means of smell, a sense located in two shallow nostrils unconnected to their mouths. Some go only a few miles upriver, but chinook navigate the Yukon River for more than 2000 miles.
Once back at the spawning grounds where she was born, the female chooses a gravelly spot, usually in a riffle, and begins digging a trough, or redd, by turning on her side and beating with her tail. A dominant male moves in to guard her, attacking other salmon who come too close. He may nudge her repeatedly. When she signals her readiness by lowering a fin into the redd, he swims up alongside her, they open their jaws, arch their backs, quiver, and simultaneously drop her eggs and his milt. Other males now dash in and try to eject some of their own milt onto the eggs. Orange-red eggs by the thousands come out tiny, then quickly swell, absorbing water along with the fertilizing milt. The female’s last maternal act is to bury them in gravel. She extends her redd, digging the next trench immediately upstream from the last, with intermittent resting spells. Different males may attend her subsequent efforts. Both parents die soon after spawning.
The eggs take a few months to hatch. The newly hatched alevin remains in the gravel several weeks, sustained by a yolk-sac attached to its belly. As the yolk is depleted, the fish adapts to a diet of zooplankton and emerges from the gravel as a fry. In a year or two fry grow to parr size, displaying the parr marks that make them easier to identify. They are smolts at whatever age they go to sea—from month-old, ¾-inch pink salmon fry to ten-year-old, 12-inch cutthroat trout in severe Alaskan habitats.
Salmon were incalculably important to all the Northwest Coast and Columbia River nations. The Indians expressed their gratitude in ceremonies and in stories of dreadful times before someone (Coyote or Raven) gave salmon to the people. Archaeologists confirm that people were in the Northwest for millennia before developing a region-wide economy based on storing salmon through winter. At around that time, about 3500 years ago, Northwest culture blossomed.
The people sure did learn how to catch salmon: with hook and line, with spears, from platforms over waterfalls, with one- or two-man dip nets of spruce-root twine, with larger basketry nets or long seine nets or wicker traps or wooden weirs. Most fishing was during spawning runs. Smoking and drying kept the bounty in season as long as possible, long past what we might consider palatable. Many tribes are thought to have consumed well over a pound of salmon per person per day. But the runs couldn’t be completely counted on. Elaborate taboos were observed to prevent any offense to the Salmon and to assure his return. These practices, and manipulation of stream beds, probably significantly enhanced and sustained the salmon crop, and anthropologists have taken to calling them “cultivation” of salmon. Fishing-and-trading camp was Fat City—particularly at Celilo Falls on the Columbia, which, for one month a year for thousands of years, became the biggest city west of the Mississippi. (Today it lies drowned under a reservoir.)
Nineteenth-century white men promoted a worldwide market for canned Pacific salmon, reassuring each other that they were developing an inexhaustible resource and sparing scarcer resources on land. By the end of that century, salmon were badly overfished. Salmon populations of Washington, Oregon, and California rivers today are a fraction of what they once were—less than a tenth. Even a total halt to fishing could not restore them, as the loss of spawning habitat, and now climate change, are intractable problems. (That said, 2015 was a good year for Columbia and Snake River runs—the best since the Columbia was dammed.) Alaska and British Columbia built very few dams on salmon streams, and their runs are fairly healthy. But the run on British Columbia’s Kitlope River, an entire watershed that’s pristine and protected, is dwindling; the causes must lie out at sea.
For the future, the chief determinant of salmon numbers seems to be ocean conditions, including ocean temperature and its effects on all kinds of sea life. Unlike productivity on land, ocean productivity is higher toward the poles, because colder water holds more dissolved oxygen. Salmon like their water cold—both their streams and their ocean. In recent decades, they seem to do well when the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (p. 40) is in its cold phase; over the very long term they did best in the Little Ice Age. Curiously, though, populations in Alaskan lakes over the past 500 years underwent huge century-scale ups and downs that did not match up from one drainage to the next. There must be complex systems of variables at play. It looks safe to say that the more southernly salmon runs are the ones least likely to survive the next century. But northerly and southerly runs of our larger species (chinook, sockeye, and steelhead) all share the same pond, the Gulf of Alaska, during their sea years.
Chinook, the largest salmon, spawn in the largest streams and swim the greatest distances upriver. Though Chinook runs are called “spring,” “summer,” or “fall,” actual arrival dates in Cascadia freshwater occur sporadically from April through December, and even in the other months. Two dams on the Elwha River in the Olympics wiped out a run that frequently produced individuals over 100 pounds. Between 2011 and 2014, those two dams were removed—easily the largest of more than 800 US dams demolished in recent years. Plant succession and riverbank development on the former lake bed will be fun to watch over our lifetimes, but the fish aren’t waiting: chinook, coho, and steelhead have already spawned above the dam sites.
Spawning sockeye typically turn deep red both inside and out. (“Sockeye” is a crude imitation of Coast Salish words meaning “red fish.”) Whereas other salmon prey on fish as adults, sockeye are filter feeders on plankton. They get their deeper color from their staple food, tiny crustaceans. They swim nearly as far upstream as chinook, and climb much higher—to 6500 feet at Redfish Lake, Idaho. That’s part of the Snake River run, which has to fight its way past eight large dams, and is endangered. In contrast, the famous Fraser River run has few dams to deal with, and returned 30 million sockeye in the best recent year. Sockeye are by far the most abundant salmon in British Columbia. They seek a lake twice during their life cycle—one or two juvenile years, and then a final summer before spawning. In our mountains, branches of the Fraser run go to Chilliwack, Harrison, and Lillooet Lakes. Kokanee salmon are a smaller, landlocked form of sockeye esteemed as a sport fish in lakes east of our range.
Coho spawn in slow, low-gradient lowland streams—even urban ones. Beaver ponds make ideal rearing pools for the fry. Coho historically made up in numbers what they lacked in size, enough to rank them high in both sport and commercial catches, at least for Oregon. But today the upper-Columbia runs are extinct, the mid-Columbia runs are in danger, and the coastal and Willamette runs are down to less than 5 percent of historical numbers. Coho declines are blamed partly on warming of offshore waters with consequent loss of overall fertility and increase in warm-water predators, especially mackerel. Coho don’t swim very far north during their ocean phase, leaving them the salmon most vulnerable to global warming.
Two other species, chum (O. keta) and pink salmon (O. gorbuscha), forgo the upstream heroics, limiting their efforts to a few weeks. The fry float back to sea immediately upon emerging. So they are found only in our lowest coastal streams. Chum were called “dog salmon” by Alaskan tribes who fed them to their dogs, favoring the richer chinook for themselves. (Never let your dog eat salmon or trout raw. Many dogs are lethally susceptible to a bacterium in some salmon; wild canids and bears acquire immunity from a sublethal infection in youth.) Pinks spawn and die as they approach their second birthday, so they remain the smallest anadromous salmon. On any given river they run mainly in odd- or mainly in even-numbered years. Washington and Oregon runs are in odd years.
Salmon and trout that reach large size in freshwater even eat waterfowl chicks, adult amphibians, and water shrews. In salt water they become voracious predators on fish. On their return to freshwater for spawning, most eat little or nothing, but metabolize stored fat and muscle. (There are exceptions. Sockeyes will feed during a last summer in a lake.) Spawning, they may look like they’re at death’s door, and they are.
The rapid decomposition of spawners is not a creepy detail, it’s a central glory of salmon, one whose loss, with their decline, is an ecocatastophe in progress. It evolved because the parents’ dead bodies become the major food source for their offspring.
Salmon used to move 8 million tons per year of high-nitrogen fertilizer (their bodies) from the sea up coastal valleys and far into the interior. Bears, wolves, mink, and birds that ate them spread the nutrients around, dropping them in urine and feces. The resulting fertilization of plants has been confirmed in dozens of studies: the isotopic signature of marine-based nitrogen is in plants a mile from salmon streams, but not in similar leaves in watersheds that lack salmon. Since nitrogen is a main limiting factor on plant growth here, the decline of salmon literally stunts tree growth in much of the region—as well as the populations of bears, wolves, mink, and bald eagles.
We always knew fish are good fertilizer; we knew the rivers used to shimmer crimson with spawners; the people who lived here told us in many ways. It was staring us in the face, but no one got it, no one saw the huge role of salmon in the forest nitrogen cycle, until some scientists ran the numbers in 1999.
Oncorhynchus mykiss (me-kiss: a Kamchatkan tribal name) Coloring extremely variable; spawning adults usually have a red to pink streak (the “rainbow”) full length on each side, much deeper on ♂,; returning sea-run fish (steelhead) are silvery all over with guanine (a protein coating on all salmonids fresh from the sea) which obscures any coloring; dorsal fin rays typically 11–12, pelvic fin rays 10, anal fin rays 10 (range 8–12); juveniles have a distinct row of 5–10 small dark spots along the back straight in front of the dorsal fin, plus 8–13 oval parr marks along the lateral line. Rainbows common in high lakes and streams; steelhead in rivers and streams. Salmonidae.
The sea-run form of this species is revered among anglers who, with good reason, think of it as an altogether different fish—steelhead. (Russians call them both mykizha.) At sea the trout grow faster, and grow many times larger than those who stay in freshwater. Big and strong, steelheads are hard to land, and harder still to locate. A favorite riffle for steelhead is a fiercely guarded secret.
The freshwater form is rainbow trout, the world’s best-known sport fish. It is native up and down the Pacific Slope from Mexico to the Alaska Peninsula, inland throughout the Columbia River system, and in Siberia. (It is also the trout of dinner tables, both farm-raised and naturalized in streams all around the globe.)
Rainbows and steelhead are not firmly separated genetically: their progeny can go either way, though there’s at least a statistical likelihood of their following in their parents’, um, finsteps. Researchers found they could identify the two types of small fry within hours of hatching, with the more territorial, fast-metabolism ones becoming steelhead. Overall, more females go to sea, because females have more reproductive potential to gain by growing large. Thus rainbow males mate with steelhead females more often than the reverse. These fairly recent findings support efforts to conserve native rainbows because that can help conserve steelhead, which are threatened.
Wild steelhead usually swim to sea when two years old, and feed in the Gulf of Alaska for one to four “salt years” before their first spawning run. They take their time running upstream, and continue to eat, so they’re in better condition than spawning salmon and also more inclined to bite. Ours spawn in early spring. They enter freshwater in various months, divided into “summer” and “winter” steelhead, with summer ones more often heading the longer distance to the east-side.
Oncorhynchus clarki (clark-ee: for William Clark, p. 362). Jaw lines streaked red or orange underneath; jaw longer than other trout, opening to well behind the eye; base of tongue has tiny teeth, usually palpable; dorsal fin has 9–11 rays, pelvic rays usually 9, anal rays 9 (range 8–12); adults dark-speckled; juveniles develop the throat streaks quite early. W-side; and e-side of n CasR. Salmonidae.
Nonanadromous coastal rainbow.
A 5- to 8-inch nonanadromous coastal cutthroat.
The reddish “cuts” on a cutthroat’s throat serve to emphasize gestures and displays. As an ID character, they are less than reliable, especially when the fish is young, newly returned to freshwater, or dead. Coloring is notoriously variable in salmon and trout. Like chameleons only much slower, trout alter their camouflage in response to colors they see; experimentally blinded trout eventually contrasted sharply with their associates.
Cutthroats include a range of migratory patterns. Some populations are nonmigrating residents of small streams, maturing at just 6–8 inches; that can happen above a waterfall barrier. (How can there be trout above barriers? Hatchery stock, of course, but also trout may have predated barriers, especially in Oregon where glaciers never extended far down the rivers.) Sea-run cutthroats don’t go far out to sea; many stay in an estuary. They merely “summer” in near-shore waters for a few months annually, and some of them spawn in two or more years. With less time at sea, they don’t grow as large as steelhead. Our coastal subspecies coevolved with rainbow trout and steelhead; even though they are interfertile, they maintained reproductive isolation by spawning at separate times and places. Hatchery rainbows have broken that separation down, such that hybridization of the two may be the greatest threat to cutthroats. Cutthroats were as abundant here as rainbows before hatcheries favored the rainbows and hybrids. Many cutthroat sea runs are extinct or endangered. The freshwater populations, though diminished, are now stable in virtually all rivers of the Coast Range and Vancouver Island.
Salvelinus spp. (sal-vel-eye-nus: the German term Latinized). Salmonidae.
Freshwater bull trout, 8–10 inches, not at spawning time.
Bull trout, S. confluentus (con-flu-en-tus: of rivers). Adults broadly built, the head and midsection typically as high as they are wide. Olive-greenish back and sides regularly pink- to yellow-dotted; juvenile parr marks wider than the light spaces between; dorsal fin unmarked, with 10 or 11 rays, anal fin usually with 9. Widely scattered; more common e of CasCr.
Dolly Varden trout, S. malma (mal-ma: Kamchatkan term). Like bull trout but slenderer: head height greater than width. Rivers in BC and nw WA.
Brook trout
Brook trout, S. fontinalis (fon-tin-ay-lis: of springs). Dark green back and sides with “wormy” patterns and red spots surrounded by blue haloes; dorsal fin dark-spotted, with 8–10 rays, anal fin with 7–9; juveniles’ broad parr marks overlaid with lighter red and yellow dots. Native to eastern NA, scattered here due to stocking.
Char are distinguished from true trout (at least when mature) by having light spots against a darker background, rather than vice versa.
The bull trout, once an abundant western trout with huge catch limits and even bounties (because it eats salmon fry), is now in dicey condition, extinct in many watersheds and endangered in others. It requires even colder, cleaner gravelly streams for spawning than our other salmonids. After logging high in a watershed muddies the gravel and warms the water by reducing shade, it may take decades before the stream is again good enough for a bull. In an effort to preserve spawning habitat, the standard for unlogged streamside buffers is now 300 feet. But further global warming could make even a pristine stream too warm. Another threat to the species comes from introduced brook trout, which breed with bull trout to produce sterile hybrids. Brookies were, after rainbows, the second most commonly stocked trout; they are no longer stocked in watersheds with bull trout.
While our native char all spawn in mountain-stream headwaters, populations vary in how far they migrate: they may live the bulk of their lives in small streams (nonmigrating) or bigger ones, or in lakes or the ocean (anadromous). They migrate far for trout, over 115 miles on the Skagit and in the Rockies, where they reached a record 32 pounds. The Cascades record is 22½ pounds.
Dolly Varden and bull trout are hard to tell apart, and were formerly treated as a single species. Dollies were named—allegedly by the first pioneer woman to see them—for their resemblance to a polkadot print fabric of the day, which was named after a gaudy character in Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge. It was probably a bull trout that she first called Dolly V., but when the species was split, the polkadot name went, along with the Latin name, to the coastal species on which the Dolly dots are obscured by a silvery coating. Dollies are almost always anadromous; coastal bulls sometimes, inland bulls rarely. Information on the distribution of the two species is murky, because past records are rarely identifiable to species, and even now, catches and sightings are rarely identified.
Prosopium williamsoni (pro-soap-ium: mask). Trout-shaped pale silver fish without spots; average 12 in. fully grown; mouth small, without teeth; scales large, bumpy; 10–13 rays in anal fin. US, mainly e-side, and Fraser R system. Salmonidae.
Mountain whitefish
Whitefish use their small mouths to grub around on the bottom for insect larvae; occasionally they will rise to a surface hatch. Some individuals, called pinocchio whitefish, have a distinctly longer but puggish snout, perhaps an adaptation for overturning some types of streambed material. Whitefish spawn in late fall and winter, in water as cold as 35°F. The eggs stick to rocks, so no redd needs to be dug.
Thaleichthys pacificus (thay-lee-ic-thiss: plentiful fish). Also candlefish. 5- to 8-in. fish, blue-gray above, silvery below; distinguished from salmon and trout by pelvic fin attached forward of dorsal fin and lacking an axillary process, a small flap or scale just above the base of each pelvic fin. Rare; low w-side rivers in brief February or March spawning runs. Osmeridae.
Our once-common smelt, the eulachon or candlefish, may be the fattiest of all fish, so oily that it can be burned like a candle, once dried and threaded with wick. Its oil was the universal condiment in the cuisine of coastal peoples; inland people also went to the coast to trade for it. Its name (“you-la-kon”), is from the Chinook trading jargon. Some groups called it “salvation fish” because it returns to rivers in the hungry months of late winter. It fetched a handsome price in British Columbia well into the last century. The bitter froth of whipped soapberries suffused with eulachon oil was so popular it was nicknamed “Indian ice cream.” In later times it came a teeny bit closer to ice cream with the addition of plenty of sugar.
Eulachon eggs have an outer membrane that bursts and sticks to the bottom, leaving the egg in its inner membrane attached by a thread. The larvae drift to sea immediately on hatching, so the species is seen in rivers only briefly, as spawning adults.
Dipnetting for these smelts was a quintessential regional tradition on lower Columbia tributaries during the 20th century, requiring so little skill or patience during heavier runs that bucketfuls of smelt were wasted by people more enthusiastic about hauling them in than about cooking them. Those days are over, the eulachon a threatened species in the United States, an endangered species in southern British Columbia, where the ten-year decline is estimated to be at least 98 percent. The cause has not received the scrutiny that salmon decline has. Climate tops the list of suspects.
William Clark’s first scientific description of the eulachon.
Cottus spp. (cot-us: Greek name for some river fish). Also muddler minnows, bullheads. Scaleless, sometimes prickly, minnow-sized fishes with wide mouths, thick lips, depressed foreheads, very large pectoral fin on each side just behind the head, a ¾-length dorsal fin in 2 parts, and unforked tail fin. Widespread in streams. Cottidae.
Torrent sculpin, C. rhotheus (rowth-ius: of noisy waters).
Slimy sculpin, C. cognatus (cog-nay-tus: related).
Shorthead sculpin, C. confusus (con-few-sus: clouded).
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
— Oscar Wilde
Shorthead sculpin
These funny-looking little fish are adapted for life on the bottom: wide, depressed mouths for bottom-feeding; motley drab colors for camouflage against the bottom; eyes directed upward, the only direction there is to look; and huge pectoral fins to anchor them with little effort in strong current. The eggs, laid in spring, adhere to the underside of stones, and are guarded by the father.
Big fish eat little fish, true, but in the case of sculpins vs. salmonids the little fish get even by eating the eggs of the big fish. Some anglers view sculpins as a threat, but in all likelihood, nearly all the salmon eggs ending up in sculpin bellies were those not adequately buried in gravel by their mothers, and would have perished one way or another. Trout are so fond of them that they inspired a trout fly pattern, the “muddler minnow.” In the balance, sculpins are not a threat to game fish.
Sculpins are found above impassable waterfalls on some of our rivers. They probably got there via waterways that crossed present-day drainage divides during unique geologic moments as the ice sheet retreated.
