Coho salmon found in Sonoma Coast creek for first time in 60 years

by Amie Windsor, The Press Democrat, December 8, 2025

[excerpt:]

The excitement started with a flash of silver followed by a hefty dose of disbelief.

A team of conservationists and biologists from The Wildlands Conservancy, the nonprofit that manages the 5,600-acre Jenner Headlands Preserve on the Sonoma Coast, couldn’t believe what they were seeing: the telltale color and shape of juvenile coho salmon, darting back and forth in the clear current of the East Branch Russian Gulch.

It had been decades since the endangered fish had made its way to that arm of the watershed.

And yet there they were, as Ryan Berger, Corby Hines and Luke Farmer of The Wildlands Conservancy looked on.

Coho salmon once thrived in the coastal watersheds of Sonoma County and the broader North Coast, where winter rain, summer fog and the protective canopy of towering redwood forest sustained young fish and spawning adults over millennia.

Decades of logging, including industrial-scale operations that picked up after World War II, decimated much of the forestland, unleashing enormous amounts of sediment into the stream channels, burying the gravel beds that salmon and steelhead trout needed for spawning.

Development, gravel mining and other human activities eliminated flood plains, channelized flows, and limited the woody debris and shade that keeps the water cool enough for young fish to survive.

By 1965, the last year Russian Gulch was surveyed for coho salmon, water temperatures were past the 70-degree threshold for salmon survivability. Coho, the rarer of two native salmon species, were gone and steelhead, an ocean-going rainbow trout, were a rarity.

That changed with the confirmation that came after the flash of silver this summer.

Hines and California Fish and Wildlife biologist Mary Olswang returned days later and documented the presence of coho during a snorkel survey.

The biologists didn’t find just one fish, but 239 young coho and 336 young steelhead or fry, the term for fish that are less than a year old.

Coho had been sighted in the main stem and West Branch Russian Gulch in 2005, but hadn’t been seen in the East Branch since 1965, Hines said.

. . .

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Coho salmon found in Sonoma Coast creek for first time in 60 years