After nearly 100 years, adult winter-run Chinook salmon seen in California river | California

According to California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW), adult winter Chinook salmon was spotted in the McCloud river in Northern California (CDFW).

The salmon was confirmed to be seen near the ash camp, nestled deep in the mountains of northern California where Hawkins Creek flows into the McCloud river. A video published by CDFW and taken by the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission shows a Female Salmon Quinat keeping her egg nest on the bottom of the river.

The Chinese salmon managed by winter is considered an endangered species by the NOAA and is marked by the organization as “one of the nine species considered to be the most at risk of short -term extinction”.

The Winnemem Wintu tribe has long fought the widening of the Shasta dam, which has embarrassed the hatching of the salmon by warming water temperatures above the cold range in which salmon prefers to lay their eggs.

The introduction of the “extinction” of salmon managed by the hatching and winter, according to Rebekah Olstad, project to restore salmon for the Winnemem Wintu tribe, including a longer road to come, that which depends on the complete restoration of self -sufficient wild salmon.

“The salmon that exists at the moment, they don’t know how to get in the mountains, they don’t know how to go in a waterfalls because they are blocked,” said Olstad. “It is therefore generations and generations of eggs and salmon that no longer have these genes to be wild.”

Olstad works to help Winnemem Wintu achieve two other objectives.

The construction of a voluntary passage for salmon, which allows the salmon to spawn and finish a complete life cycle from the ocean to the stream, is crucial for ecosystem restoration, given the status of salmon as a key key.

“The salmon is in the McLeod river, and it’s a good thing. But there is no way for them to return to the ocean,” said Michael Preston, tribal member of Winnemem Wintu. “It’s the real salmon, right? They have to go to the ocean to come back.”

Wild salmon from the McCloud river has long been thought that Winnem Wintu was off. But the international coverage of a Winnemem war dance protest against the Shasta dam in 2004 led to the discovery of the McCloud river salmon in an unexpected place – the mountainous rivers of New Zealand.

The five-year salmon was exported worldwide by the Baird hatch in the early 1900s, where some of the McCloud river settled in New Zealand. The Winnemem Wintu work with the NOAA and the CDFW to bring back the fish, and their wild genetics, in their homeland.

The restoration of the salmon is not unique at Winnemem Wintu or their ancestral lands, but to the land of the western United States and Canada that fish have been swimming historically. For Winnemem Wintu and other tribal countries, salmon is part of their cosmology.

“The restoration of the salmon is part of a prophecy that we follow. Prayer is that it connects to our creation stories,” said Preston.

Last year, the salmon began to “go home” on the Klamath river along the border of Oregon-California after a harshly disputed and long legal battle of the decades led by the tribal nations of Karuk, Klamath and Yurok to remove four dams along the river. The project was the biggest in the genre in American history.

Conversely, a historic agreement removing the dams on the Columbia river, part of a stage to restore indigenous fishing rights and revitalize the northwest peaches, was reversed by a Trump decree in June.

Whatever the political climate, Olstad is determined to help the Winnema Wintu to continue to put pressure for the restoration of the salmon.

“Each administration has been a difficult administration for indigenous peoples,” said Olstad. “This does not mean that we are going to stop.”