The salmon of the Northwest are the stuff of legends.
Pioneers talked of rivers so thick that they were tempted to cross on the backs of the fish. When Meriwether Lewis led his band of explorers through the Northwest in 1805, he marveled in his journal of “almost inconceivable” numbers of salmon.
Salmon were once plentiful, but that was yesteryear. Now salmon abundance is a different story entirely. It is common knowledge that many of the Pacific Northwest salmon stocks are endangered due a variety of human caused sources including climate change, loss of habitat along spawning streams, ocean warming and acidification, pollution and over-fishing.
Related and equally distressing is that our local resident Orca population is also endangered due to many of these same factors as well as the lack of salmon which are their main source of nutrition. Human actions despoiling our waters are felt throughout the food chain.
I have reported before on a number of our local efforts at restoring salmon habitat in the hopes that every little bit helps sustain what we have left. (I have noted a number of previous buckets at the end of this post for those interested.)