April 23, 2019 — The Skagit River is one of Puget Sound’s most important rivers for Chinook salmon and the killer whales who depend on them.
Last week, KING 5 visited a fish trap that looks like a floating hut. Each morning, state wildlife technicians check to see what’s been caught.
“We operate from January through mid-July to catch juvenile salmon as they are migrating towards Puget sound,” said Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist Clayton Kinsel.
Kinsel’s team is mostly counting chum salmon right now, some 3,000-4,000 each night. Southern Resident killer whales do eat chum, but scientists believe their diet depends on Chinook salmon.
Those salmon are dwindling like the whales who depend on them, and the fish trap is helping scientists figure out how to stop that.
“It tells us how many fish are coming down stream to Puget Sound. It’s a tool that we use to set fisheries, to manage fisheries to inform habitat restoration,” Kinsel said.
“Habitat restoration” is the buzz phrase when it comes to Chinook salmon recovery, especially on the Skagit River, where dikes and levees have cut off side streams that are important for young salmon trying to grow bigger and stronger for their journey to the ocean.
“These are places where the river used to flow many years ago. They are now cut off. In particular, the levee right along the Skagit River, it’s cutting water access off to all those side channels,” said NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Science Center research biologist Correigh Greene. “As a result, those places are inaccessible to juvenile salmon moving down the river.”