Made of Salmon

Wherever there are salmon, people come together to celebrate what they symbolize and what they provide. We marvel at their might, and appreciate their ability to sustain our traditions and our livelihoods. Wild salmon connect the land and water, showing us that caring for the land plays a key role in how we care for our waters. These are stories of our relationship with salmon.

Caring for Salmon is Indigenous Tradition

After the heydays of old-growth logging in the coastal rainforest of Alaska’s lush Tongass National Forest, a lot of salmon streams weren’t faring so well. Some were left cut off by logging roads and their fish-blocking culverts. Streams once sheltered by goliath trees got warmer and faster.

The changes were harming baby salmon’s chances at survival. And here, where families tend smokehouses to put up their harvest for the year, people were alert to all the ways salmon were struggling. Repairs were needed, and soon, help was on the way. 

Salmon Get Help from Working Farms

On the Oregon coast, the Coquille delta means so much to so many. Farming is a way of life here, a place where agricultural bounty anchors the local economy. Natural wonders like birds and fish abound, yet not as they once did. Populations of Coquille River coho salmon, for one, aren’t so abundant anymore—a hard truth on the Oregon coast. Since 2008, Oregon’s threatened coho salmon have had Endangered Species Act protections. 

Finding the common ground to bring coho salmon back takes tremendous community will. It also means asking the right questions and doing the science—seeing the problems, creating solutions, and relentlessly tracking progress. These efforts can work, and they’re restoring water flows on the Coquille delta at places like Winter Lake. Farming and salmon are both coming out ahead thanks to restored streamside forests and smart changes in how the flow of water is controlled. 

So far, in these restored habitats, the youngest coho salmon are leaving these renewed tidelands and estuaries in better shape and fit for the journey ahead. That’s heartening, because for a growing salmon, the ocean calls. 

Migrating Salmon Go Upstream—and Far

The Pahsimeroi River meanders through a mile-high valley in Idaho known for working ranches. For hayfields. For mule deer and pronghorn, too, and wintering herds of elk. The Pahsimeroi River, with its source near Borah Peak, Idaho’s highest point, may feel far from the Pacific Ocean. And at 900 river miles away, it is far. Yet this clear-flowing stream is one of the very important places where Chinook salmon can get a start in life. That’s especially critical today, because Snake River Chinook, listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act more than three decades ago, are in trouble.

Even if there’s no simple fix, wherever salmon live there are ways to turn things around. This is why TNC works with Pahsimeroi ranchers like Nate Hull, whose family runs the Hanging T Ranch, to pay them for protecting land and critical places where willows grow alongside the river and adult salmon return to spawn. Protecting natural lands like these along the Pahsimeroi River helps to keep water flowing clean and cold, and adds to ongoing efforts in the Pacific Northwest to help Chinook salmon return in bigger and better numbers. 

Science. Then Action.

For a salmon, the Stillaguamish delta at the edge of the Salish Sea is a place in between. While one end of a salmon’s journey reaches far out into the Pacific Ocean, the other end stretches upstream into mountain forests. Yet the Stillaguamish delta in Washington State is more than a halfway point between the snowy peaks of the Cascade Range and the Gulf of Alaska’s far-off ocean gyres. It’s an estuary. Estuaries are places of mixing, where salmon transition from the freshwater of the river for the saltwater of the sea—and back again.

Healthy estuaries are like safe harbors for baby salmon, offering the food they need to grow strong enough to survive a long journey to the ocean. But estuaries all over the world are also places where people have built dikes to push back the sea and levees to confine the rivers, making space for everything from cities to farm fields. And so like many others, the Stillaguamish delta is a changed estuary. This is why scientists like TNC’s Dr. Emily Howe are reconnecting life-giving tidal and river flows across estuarine deltas like the Stillaguamish. Over the next few years, the Stillaguamish Tribe of Indians, a sovereign federally recognized tribe, and TNC will reconnect a network of marsh channels across TNC’s 4,000-acre Port Susan Bay Preserve and nearly 800 newly acquired acres by the Tribe, providing young Chinook salmon with an abundance of new places to feed.  

Yes, Chinook salmon in the Stillaguamish River and beyond, as a species, face a tough comeback journey. Bringing life back to the estuary is one of the ways we’re working together to give them a fighting chance.