Coho & Steelhead Blog

As the San Francisco Bay Area Network coho and steelhead monitoring crew wraps up the 2024-2025 spawner season, we are looking back at one of the busiest winters since the beginning of this monitoring program! We observed increased coho spawning in all three creeks we monitor—Olema, Pine Gulch, and Redwood Creeks. Olema took the cake with the strongest cohort of all.

For two weeks in October 2024, the San Francisco Bay Area Network fish crew travelled daily to Lake Sonoma’s Warm Springs Hatchery. There, we marked approximately 3,000 juvenile coho for release into Redwood Creek. This effort was time well spent, as these fish present unique research opportunities—as well as a chance to increase the future viability of the small wild population in Redwood Creek.

Meet Justin Jang and Val Kostelnik, Watershed Stewards Program corpsmembers who recently began 10.5-month terms with the salmonids monitoring team based at Point Reyes National Seashore.

Each summer, the San Francisco Bay Area Network fisheries crew spends a majority of its time in three Marin County, CA streams, Olema Creek, Pine Gulch Creek, and Redwood Creek, monitoring juvenile coho and steelhead populations. After completing this season's surveys, we found that 2024 was a decent year for juvenile coho!

Some years, the San Francisco Bay Area Network coho and steelhead monitoring team is alarmed by the low number of coho salmon returning to spawn in Marin County creeks. Last year, they didn’t spot a single live adult coho salmon. This has not been one of those years!

Last fall, as the coho and steelhead monitoring crew was counting juvenile fish in Olema Creek, they spotted a familiar species in an unexpected place. Normally, they see tiny, translucent, California freshwater shrimp in the lower two miles of the creek. Now, crewmembers were seeing them almost a half mile farther upstream than their previously recorded upstream extent.

The second phase of a major restoration project aimed at improving habitat for salmonids in Muir Woods National Monument is underway. The San Francisco Bay Area Network’s coho and steelhead monitoring team assisted with the restoration project by removing fish from the construction areas prior to the arrival of heavy machinery.

A productive coho spawning season during the winter of 2021-2022 led to the highest summer juvenile estimates ever recorded in the San Francisco Bay Area Inventory & Monitoring Network’s history. This spring, these juveniles have been making their way out to the ocean as smolts. Though there was a delay in installing traps due to unexpected late-winter storms, the coho and steelhead monitoring crew still captured a record number of smolts journeying out to sea.

Science communication intern Avani Fachon joined the San Francisco Bay Inventory & Monitoring Network salmonoid monitoring team at Redwood and Olema Creeks in May 2023. Here, she shares her wonder at witnessing coho salmon's migration out to sea, and what she learns about the process of "smolt trapping" and its importance to better understanding and supporting coho salmon, a federally listed endangered species.

This spring, corpsmembers at Point Reyes National Seashore planned two restoration events to improve habitat quality for coho salmon and steelhead trout monitored by the San Francisco Bay Area Inventory & Monitoring Network coho and steelhead monitoring team.