Through Fairhaven and Happy Valley’s backyard, chum salmon are swimming as far as Interstate 5 for the first time in over a century.
Nothing. Nothing all Fall. Padden Creek, which flows from Lake Padden at the southern edge of Bellingham to Bellingham Bay in Fairhaven, was full of fall rainwater and swimmable to fish for the first time 100 in years, but still nothing. Then, suddenly, something.
One after the other, chum salmon showed up by the dozens. They kept coming for weeks, fighting each other for space. Then they all washed back downstream in a grand procession of ghostly white carcasses. Mission accomplished.
Chum salmon are one of five species native to the Pacific Ocean. Like all salmon, they grow up in the ocean then return to their natal streams to spawn and die. The next generation of chum hatch between six and 20 weeks later and the smolts (young salmon), go directly to the ocean where the cycle begins anew.
“It’s like a big sack of fertilizer that the fish brings back from the ocean,” said Wendy Scherrer, a longtime environmental activist and regional coordinator for the Bellingham Salmon in the Classroom education program. “These creeks are pretty sterile, particularly if you have a chemical flush and everything dies — you need something to start the food chain again.”
The peak of this chum salmon run was between late November and early December when up to 40 salmon were seen per 15-minute observation period, as reported by Sarah Brown, stewardship program manager at the Nooksack Salmon Enhancement Association.
Reclaiming traditional territory
But it’s not just about the numbers, it’s about where they are able to go.
After the creek plunges from its headwaters in the Chuckanuts and Lake Padden, it is crossed by I-5. From there it follows Old Fairhaven Parkway, part of State Route 11, and is crossed by more streets for its entire course through the Happy Valley neighborhood. Once it enters Fairhaven, it flows through Fairhaven Park and then is surrounded by neighborhoods all the way to its mouth near the Bellingham Cruise Terminal.
Scherrer was looking for chum salmon spawners in November. She saw 24 in Connelly Creek, in various locations throughout the Connelly Creek Nature Area where schoolchildren release salmon fry in spring. When she returned two weeks later, she saw salmon carcasses along the creek.
From the 1890s until 2015, a 2,300-foot stretch along Old Fairhaven Parkway about midway up the creek was in a tunnel, which blocked fish from going any further up the creek. Once the creek was daylighted — made to flow through an open channel again — Connelly Creek became naturally accessible again.
“It was a 6-foot-wide ovoid brick tunnel,” Scherrer said. “The last time I was in there, there were chum salmon, literally nose to tail in a groove at the bottom of the tunnel and they couldn’t get up any further beyond the end of the tunnel at 22nd Street.”
Before the city finally removed the tunnel, Scherrer and other concerned citizens trucked salmon around the barrier to help them go on to their spawning grounds upstream.
Joel Ingram, a fish passage scoping biologist for the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) said that, because Scherrer and others in Happy Valley gave the salmon a boost all those years, it is possible that the chum in the creek today are part of the historic run. About 5% of them may be wanderers from other creeks, which helps boost resilience through genetic diversity, he said.
The daylighting cost the city $3 million, said Stefanie Cilinceon, communications and outreach coordinator at Bellingham Public Works, in an email.
The city has spent an additional $8 million on the Padden Estuary Restoration, the Harris Street Stormwater Treatment Facility, riparian restoration projects from 24th to 30th streets and design work on several more fish passage barriers.
While the city focused on daylighting the old tunnel site and restoring the estuary near the ferry terminal in Fairhaven, the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) did culvert removal work.
“Culverts will 100% block fish, or they will somewhat block fish,” Scherrer said. “If there’s too much water, they will be like a fire hose — they’ll just shoot down and the fish aren’t strong enough to go up the current, or if there’s too little water, then there’s not enough for the fish to get up in.”
Investing in a future for fish
WSDOT spent around $32 million in 2021 replacing culverts with bridges at the points where the creek crosses I-5 and Old Fairhaven Parkway, according to Kim Rydholm, WSDOT fish passage delivery manager, in an email. With these barriers gone, salmon are making it up the creek at least as far as I-5, Rydholm said.
WSDOT collaborates with WDFW to conduct studies of salmon on Padden Creek, said Rydholm, and the City of Bellingham also does periodic studies. Their most recent were of smolts migrating down the creek towards the bay in 2018 and a spawner survey in 2020. More are planned for the future, said Cilinceon in an email.
“We are unable to attribute a specific percentage of this year’s large chum run to habitat restoration projects on Padden Creek,” said City of Bellingham environmental coordinator and project biologist Sara Brooke Benjamin in an email. “But we do know that the returning fish were likely born in the gravels of Padden Creek in 2021, so presumably restoration and fish passage work conducted prior to 2021 made a positive contribution.”
Chum salmon are seeing strong returns in creeks throughout Bellingham this year, according to Brown. In fact, more than 25,000 fall chum salmon were projected by the WDFW to arrive in the Nooksack-Samish watershed areas. The vast majority of the expected fish are wild.
Not all years may see salmon runs this large, said Lisa Wilson, vice chair of the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission and Lummi Indian Business Council member.
Salmon were plentiful every year during every season prior to the signing of the Treaty of Point Elliot in 1855, Wilson said, but diminished with habitat degradation and overfishing that came with European settlement and the invention of canning. Still, their continued presence is an indicator of improvement.
“When things really seem bleak with all of the struggles that the Tribes and salmon face, and then we have a year like this, I feel like that gives us hope to continue doing the work we do that is in our power to save our salmon,” Wilson said.
— By Jacob O’Donnell