A Record Summer Chum Run
In September, a Seattle Times article tipped us off to a chum run in Puget Sound’s Hood Canal that was having a record breaking year – “the largest run here since counts began in 1975.” On a Sunday we headed out to see for ourselves.
Kitsap Peninsula’s Union River runs south into the tip of the hook shaped Hool Canal at Belfair. A few blocks off the main drag a sandwich board announced the Hood Canal Salmon Enhancement Group’s (HCSEG) counting site and we pulled over.
The board noted the tally – reported at about 10,000 in the article – had risen to 12,631. A volunteer greeted us as we strode toward HCSEG’s tent at the river’s edge. The run was nearing its end, she told us. The weir was quiet for the time being.
We scoped the operation: panels of close-spaced metal rungs spanned the narrow, shallow river, blocking upstream traffic for the chum. On the far shore a crate of the same metal rung construction was open on the downriver side. It was here that volunteers and researchers, who staff the counting station night and day for the duration of the two month run, identify the species and sex of each fish before releasing them on the upstream side of the trap. A chain link panel could be lowered over the top of the trap to protect the temporarily stranded fish from avian predators.
A week later when HCSEG’s 2024 salmon census ended, 12,689 chum – more than three times last year’s returning population on this same run – had passed through the metal weir to be counted. A number of coho and chinook were also tallied bringing the Union River salmon total for 2024 to 13,098.
This year’s record chum count on the Union River has a lot to do with favorable ocean conditions, but local conservation efforts have played a supporting role. Hood Canal chum were classified as threatened in 1999 under the Endangered Species Act. Their numbers in some years dwindled to double digits, “an experience shared across Pacific Northwest streams where salmon are struggling to persist amid habitat loss, warming waters and low flows,” reports Isabella Breda.
Conservation efforts to support Hood Canal chum focused on habitat restoration. The Skokomish Tribe led the effort by restoring 1,000 acres of the Skokomish River estuary where it meets Hood Canal. The land, like so much critical juvenile salmon habitat throughout Puget Sound, had been diked and farmed for generations.
Chum, like all salmon, begin their lives in freshwater rivers and smaller tributaries as alevin – hatchlings with the egg yolk sac still attached. This yolk sac is the alevin’s food source until it matures enough to leave the gravel redd where it was born. Each salmon species spends a certain amount of time in its natal waters before heading for the sea. In the case of chum, this transition occurs almost immediately.
The amount of time a salmon spends at sea also varies by species. Chum spend three to five years in salt water before returning at their lives’ end to spawn. Imprinted scents draw them back again. “Remarkably, almost all the individual salmon in a given population are synced to the same timing,” reads Kitsap County’s Salmon Field Guide.
A chart in the Field Guide indicates the incredible odds of a salmon egg reaching maturity as a spawning adult, having survived predation at every phase of life from the redd where they hatch as alevin, out to sea and back again to their natal river. From 3,000 eggs, only a pair of fish will survive to spawn again.
In 2000, HCSEG began supplementing the stock with an artificial spawning program on the Union River. This effort, combined with restoration work on the river’s mouth, was the boost the salmon needed to make their comeback. After just three years of the spawning program, the chum numbers on the Union River rebounded so well that the organization was able to redirect the fry stock created by the spawning program to the nearby Tahuya River, where chum had been listed as recently extinct. Stock supplementation ended in 2015 when both river systems’ chum runs were recovered enough to self-sustain.
As far as salmon species go, chum are among the least celebrated. They’re also known as dog salmon, both because the males grow teeth on their hooked jaws in their final life stage to fight off contending spawners, and because they were once used to feed Alaskan sled dogs. When discussing the state of Pacific salmon we tend to focus on chinook – the species that we prize most as food, the historical heart of the Pacific Northwest fishery, the ones that feed our resident orca pods, the ones most endangered.
It’s fair to consider that recovery efforts might be better aimed elsewhere. In terms of Puget Sound salmon, there are bigger (and tastier) fish to fry, so to speak. HCSEG’s website carefully and repeatedly makes its case for supporting local chum runs – it’s clear that the organization has to defend its focus regularly: “Chum are the first run of ‘fertilizer’ for the Hood Canal during this time of year, keeping the biodiversity of this watershed high,” reads the webpage discussing their restoration and research on the Union River. “Many species of fish depend on nutrients brought in by Chum during summer, including Chinook, sea-run cutthroat, steelhead, and young coho. Summer Chum bring marine derived nutrients back to the trees, shrubs, insects, birds, and other creatures as well.”
And later, “By saving Summer Chum, you are really working to protect so much more. You are helping all other species of salmon, trout, and native plants. They are a keystone species just as much as Chinook – and in fact, chum support the culturally and economically revered Chinook. Summer Chum are important, providing vital fertilizer, nutrients, and supporting our unique ecosystem when no other fish can.”
We wandered downriver from the weir and spotted three fish slowly advancing against the gentle flow. The irreverent sounds of cars rushing past us at forty miles an hour contrasted with the effort of the chum, the holy murmur of the river, and the stunning interplay of the October sun, the maple canopy, and the water’s surface. Dead fish rotted on the low banks. Each of the fish counted had or would turn into such a smell I considered as I took it all in. The smell of the release of nutrients into the riparian ecosystem, feeding everything from black bear to cedar.
In an instance of childhood dogma transforming with time into a beautiful truth, Jesus’ words from Matthew keep surfacing for me, leaving concentric rings in the river of thought through which these chum have swum since I witnessed them in early October at the edge of the Union. Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.
In other words, the health of the whole cannot be separated from the health of each of its species, from its most celebrated to its least. And I, we, have a place in that wholeness. Just as our culverts and dams and dikes have led to the threatened status of these fish, our removal of those impediments has led and is leading to their recovery. That recovery, in turn, promises to positively affect the whole of the place – Chinook included, Orca included, us included.
