Returning urban salmon provide a thrill and a lesson

Squirrels are dismissed as rats with furry tails. Raccoons barely outrank opossums. Eagles? They're not even endangered anymore.

But when shimmering 9-pound salmon start flopping their way up Seattle's creeks, that's something to take notice of.

	Scott Eklund / P-I
St. Anne School fifth-graders watch salmon struggle up Pipers Creek at Carkeek Park. Students tried to be quiet, so as not to startle the fish, but couldn't resist a few words of encouragement.

Each fall, the Northwest's iconic fish return to city streams -- including Pipers, Longfellow, Taylor and Thornton creeks. With water that's often polluted and muddied from street runoff, it's not the most hospitable of homecomings. But after millions of dollars in restoration, the streams are sufficiently welcoming to draw hundreds of fish and even more spectators.

Dozens of chum splashed their way up Carkeek Park's Pipers Creek on a recent morning, putting on a good show for a group of St. Anne School fifth-graders.

The students struggled to keep their voices down so as to not scare the fish floundering upstream to spawn, but they couldn't resist a few words of encouragement.

"You can make it, little man. Go, go, go!" cheered one student.

The fish swished its tail back and forth through the shallow gravel stream.

"C'mon guys, you can make it!" urged another student as a chum circled beneath a submerged notched log, preparing to leap it.

The water isn't very deep along much of the creek, leaving the fish woefully half out of water in places. The shoreline is littered with dead salmon, which, one hopes, spawned first. Their carcasses are left to be eaten by wildlife or decay and return nutrients to the ecosystem.

The students played games to reinforce the perilous journey of the salmon's lives as they hatch in rivers, swim out to sea to eat and grow, and then return to spawn and die.

They ran a gantlet of jump-ropes (spinning dam turbines), salvos of rubber balls (exposure to pollution) and fellow students chasing to "tag" them (predators and fishermen). Few completed the trip.

		Scott Eklund / P-I
	Sophie Beckley, a fifth-grader at St. Anne School, checks out the early stages of a salmon's life during a program by Seattle Parks and Recreation at Carkeek Park in Seattle.

They acted out a salmon's stages of development from egg to a hatched fish called an alevin that's attached to an egg sac filled with yolk, to juvenile smolt, then to a spawning adult.

While the fish in Pipers Creek are there to reproduce, everyone knows they won't save Puget Sound salmon runs. That's not their purpose.

There are wild salmon, hatchery salmon and educational salmon, said Beth Miller, watershed educator for Pipers Creek. "We have educational fish that carry the message about what you do upstream and how your daily life and the choices you make affect the water quality and the critters in Puget Sound. They're here to spread the word."

They were effective messengers for the St. Anne students. The children saw how muddy silt running off streets could smother the eggs and that it is important to keep trash and dog poop off streets and yards.

"I'm trying to help the environment," said fifth-grader Sam Hunter, adding that he'll recycle and be more careful about throwing away garbage.

Restoration efforts around the city have returned native trees and plants to creek shorelines and include projects that trap and hold stormwater uphill of the streams, allowing it to soak into the ground and flow more slowly to the creeks.

The fish returning to Pipers Creek aren't native. The salmon there vanished in the late 1920s after the area was logged for homes and farming. Many of the returning fish were raised by children at St. Anne, Seattle Public Schools and elsewhere.

The chum are released to the creek in the spring and return as 3- to 5-year olds. Mixed in are stray coho salmon that might have hatched elsewhere but wander into Pipers Creek.

The returning salmon give city residents a chance to see full-grown fish close up and in the wild. They let scientists learn more about the effects of urbanization on fish and insects. The hope is that what's learned here can help shape development in more pristine areas -- areas critical to wild salmon survival.

"Watershed restoration in urban areas is definitely worthwhile, you just have to be realistic about what your expectations are," said Nat Scholz, head of the Ecotoxicology Program with the Northwest Fisheries Science Center.

He focuses on human effects on wild fish, including coho returning to Seattle streams that often are dying before they spawn, likely because of exposure to stormwater pollutants.

"It's creating these touchstones for people in these urban systems," he said. "For many people, it's the only contact that they have with salmon."