Kelcee Smith stared into the water at Big Creek Hatchery one recent November morning, watching as dozens of chum salmon circled below.

Chum return to Big Creek from the ocean every fall to spawn, but for these fish, something else also lay in store: a road trip.

Working a dozen or so at a time, Smith’s small crew lifted the fish in a metal elevator and emptied them into a large bin of water, sending splashes across the concrete floor. From there, the striped swimmers made their way from one set of hands to the next and into a tank at the back of a white Chevrolet pickup headed for Gnat Creek.

“It’s kind of like TSA,” Smith said, crouching down in her rubber boots and bright orange raincoat. “The fish have to move through all the security checkpoints before they get to their final destination, which is the truck.”

Smith is the coordinator of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s chum salmon reintroduction program. Her team of four, along with people from the community and nonprofit partners like the North Coast Watershed Association, are working to recover one of the state’s most overlooked fish species.

Chum are considered functionally extirpated in Oregon, meaning there aren’t enough of them returning to local rivers and tributaries each year to be self-sustaining. A century ago, millions likely made their way back to the Columbia River basin — but over time, habitat destruction, overfishing and climate change have prompted a dramatic population decline, landing them a listing as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

Now, chum have some of the lowest returns of any salmon on this side of the lower Columbia River.

“The word chum is actually a Chinook term, and so literally, if we lost this species, we would be losing a word from a tribal language, which is really tragic when you think about it from a human perspective,” Smith said. “Something like that disappearing would be hard to reconcile.”

Recovering a threatened species

Each year when the chum return, the Department of Fish and Wildlife team and their partners at the Oregon Adult Salmonid Inventory and Sampling Project suit up in waders, grab their data sheets and venture into nearby streams to conduct spawning ground surveys. These surveys, along with counts at Big Creek Hatchery and other encounter data, help piece together a picture of seasonal chum returns.

Smith said Big Creek has seen strong returns over the past three years, with a record 2,386 fish in 2021, about half of which originated at the hatchery. Although this year’s spawning season is only partway through, she estimates the final count will be around 1,000. Those strong returns are thanks in part to the team’s conservation broodstock.

“The broodstock is really important because it provides the foundation of all our recovery efforts,” Smith said. “We can’t do any recovery unless fish return to Big Creek Hatchery … so if we make our broodstock bigger, theoretically, we should have more fish that return, which means we can do a lot more.”

The Department of Fish and Wildlife established its chum salmon broodstock in 2010, using eggs from the Grays River Hatchery in Washington state, where the fish are more plentiful. Generally speaking, wild salmon tend to be better adapted to natural environments than hatchery salmon, making them important for maintaining biodiversity. Because there are so few wild chum left in Oregon, however, the state supplements some areas with hatchery chum. Smith said they aim for 30% wild chum in their conservation broodstock.

One goal of the reintroduction program is to find ways to encourage chum to imprint on other streams instead of the hatchery so populations can become more widely distributed. Of the eggs spawned at Big Creek, some are immediately moved to a remote site incubator, while others remain at the hatchery before being released as fry. Other fish — like those in the Gnat Creek road trip fleet — are taken to nearby creeks to spawn.

The Department of Fish and Wildlife’s efforts at Big Creek Hatchery are only part of the conservation equation, though. Once the chum return, they need healthy habitats to continue to survive. Through its Return of the Redds campaign, the North Coast Watershed Association is helping to fill some of the gaps.

Good fish for good folks

Return of the Redds launched in 2021 with the goal of connecting with local landowners and the forest products industry on chum habitat restoration projects in the Youngs Bay and Big Creek watersheds. Graham Klag, the executive director of the North Coast Watershed Association, said the program offers alternatives in the face of a public land shortage.

Chum bring a range of benefits to riparian ecosystems; they remove predation pressure from other fish, provide nutrients for plants and animals and kick up sediment while spawning, helping to clean up the watershed. A focus of outreach with landowners has been exploring how habitat restoration can benefit them, too.

Over the last couple of years, the watershed association has sent out mailers, gone door-knocking and sat down with landowners to discuss ideas for mutually beneficial projects.

“Sure, there’s things we’d like to do right away, but oftentimes, getting everybody to the table and describing the issue and hearing multiple perspectives is really key,” Klag said. “We can’t just say, ‘Well, we’re just doing this for the fish.’ No, we’re doing this for the folks as well.”

One of those folks is Cheree Kennedy.

When Kennedy and her husband first moved to their 35-acre property, they never anticipated it would start shrinking — but over the last several years, heavy erosion from Big Creek has made a deep cut into the east end of the property.

Kennedy pulls out her phone camera any time she’s down by the creek.

“If you go back and look at the pictures, over the years, that’s changed drastically,” she said.

The erosion is tied to open pit gravel mining practices from the 1970s, Klag said, which caused Big and Little creeks to merge and created an incised flood plain. The combined streams mean potential trouble for landowners, but they also mean less available spawning habitat for fish, including chum.

For Kennedy, a connection with the North Coast Watershed Association offers a path toward a solution to both problems.

“Personally, it is a very important relationship to have,” Kennedy said. “It’s twofold for us — I mean, we’re feeding our families with the fish, and if we don’t have that, the rest doesn’t really matter too much.”

The watershed association has also established a partnership with Hampton Lumber, which has provided woody debris for a number of restoration projects and led construction on a wetland reconnection project near Knappa. The partnership offers a means of addressing a complex issue at the intersection of forestry, estuaries and the ocean, said Kristin Rasmussen, Hampton Lumber’s director of public affairs and communications.

“It’s really hard to tackle a problem like that when you go it alone. Partnerships are really, really important, and organizations like the North Coast Watershed Association really take a collaborative approach working with landowners,” Rasmussen said. “At the end of the day, we all want good outcomes for these fish.”

A promising future for chum

Looking ahead, Smith said the future of chum recovery is uncertain in some ways. Since the species spends three to four years in the ocean before returning to fresh water, the team won’t know how effective their adult outplanting and remote site incubator efforts are for another year or two, respectively.

But in other ways, it looks promising.

“The Oregon populations are not in the greatest shape, but the good news is that a lot of the Washington populations are, and since chum don’t really care which side of the river or which state they belong to, it means that we can use some of the Washington populations to support recovery in Oregon,” Smith said. “That means that there’s still some hope. There’s still a lot of work that we can do to recover these populations.”

Smith hopes the strong chum returns she’s seen over the past few years are a sign of what may still be to come. The Department of Fish and Wildlife’s overarching goal is to reestablish self-sustaining, naturally producing chum — but with such a small team, that’s only possible with the help of volunteers and coordinated efforts with partners like local watershed councils. In Oregon, chum recovery is a team effort.

Klag feels similarly.

His hope for the future? More good fish for more good folks.

“You can start to see that when the ecosystem functions we all function, and we all thrive,” he said.