Saturday’s survey saw single digits of live salmon so that will most likely conclude our 2021 salmon survey. A huge thank you to all volunteers who participated in what was a challenging survey season due to the huge volume of fish we saw. It was inspiring to see so many volunteers out there gathering data from smelly dead fish and answering questions no matter the weather.
Our return numbers were off the charts this year! This was particularly encouraging after an extremely low return in 2019 and another small one in 2020. One thing to note when comparing across years is we increased the frequency of surveys starting at the end of 2019 from once a week to twice a week. This likely meant we were able to locate more carcasses that may have been washed out of the creeks between surveys, making our numbers more accurate but also higher than previous years.
Just a handful of live salmon remain in the creeks as of December 4th.
This scatter map shows all of our entries for the 2021 season. You can toggle types on or off by clicking/doubleclicking the legend. As you can see, most of the live salmon and spawning activity was in the upper stretch of Piper’s creek.
This year our peak of live salmon was around 11/13. This is pretty consistent with previous years, perhaps a bit earlier than usual.
Most Chum salmon were able to spawn successfully while most Coho had a difficult time spawning. Keep in mind this is a small sample size for Coho, n = 64.
We saw higher levels of predation of Coho salmon compared to Chum but once again small sample size for Coho, n=64.
Survey Totals
| Survey Date | Total Live Salmon | Total Dead Salmon | Live Chum | Dead Chum | Live Coho | Dead Coho | Live Cutthroat | Dead Cutthroat | Redds |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021-10-23 | 8 | 0 | 6 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021-10-26 | 33 | 3 | 27 | 0 | 4 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 3 |
| 2021-10-30 | 56 | 15 | 44 | 9 | 1 | 5 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
| 2021-11-02 | 95 | 16 | 91 | 12 | 1 | 4 | 1 | 0 | 14 |
| 2021-11-10 | 471 | 54 | 471 | 44 | 0 | 10 | 1 | 0 | 34 |
| 2021-11-13 | 497 | 46 | 496 | 43 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 11 |
| 2021-11-16 | 451 | 143 | 447 | 114 | 2 | 29 | 2 | 0 | 39 |
| 2021-11-20 | 287 | 269 | 285 | 263 | 2 | 6 | 1 | 0 | 2 |
| 2021-11-23 | 201 | 164 | 197 | 162 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| 2021-11-27 | 85 | 155 | 85 | 153 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
| 2021-11-30 | 42 | 77 | 42 | 76 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021-12-04 | 8 | 39 | 8 | 38 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Yearly Totals
| Salmon | Chum | Coho | Based on survey |
|---|---|---|---|
| 989 | 922 | 64 | 2021-12-04 |