The collapse of the state’s Chinook salmon runs has reduced many ports to relative ghost towns.

At Bodega Bay, Sausalito and other seaside harbors, fishing boats that once targeted the coveted fish have been idled for almost two years after officials determined there are not enough salmon off the California coast to support harvest.

Once abundant, Chinook have been devastated by habitat loss, water diversions from the rivers where they spawn and drought. If they are to recover, the salmon will need improved spawning grounds and more floodplain nursery habitat.

They also need more cold water. And in 2023 and 2024, both exceptionally wet years, they got it—until, that is, they didn’t. Water temperatures in the middle Sacramento River soared to lethal levels this spring, exceeding basic environmental objectives and threatening salmon born last summer and fall.

The temperature troubles can be traced upstream to Lake Shasta, California’s largest reservoir. The lake is almost full—typically a great boon for fish downstream. But its water is also unusually warm this year, according to local irrigation districts, who say this has produced similar, and unavoidable, temperature profiles in the river downstream.

Fishery advocates frame the story differently. They say the warm water spike in May was an avoidable outcome of water management decisions, and they’re blaming officials for prioritizing human water supply over basic environmental needs.

“It’s a violation of state law, and they know they’re doing it,” said Tom Cannon, a retired fisheries ecologist and consultant.

He says the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, with the approval of state regulators, released so much of Lake Shasta’s water through the spring to Sacramento Valley farmers that keeping water cool enough to protect migrating salmon smolts, then ocean-bound, became impossible.

Environmentalists also accuse the State Water Resources Control Board—the top water referee in the state—of setting weak temperature standards in the first place and failing to enforce them. If this continues, they say, the fish may never recover.

“They are managing salmon to extinction,” said Tom Stokely, a water policy consultant for the group Save California Salmon.

In mid-May, a gauge at a site called Wilkins Slough registered 72 degrees Fahrenheit—surpassing a state limit of 68. Such warm water is dangerous for small salmon, making them sluggish and predator fish more active.

Fishery advocates say the 68-degree objective, ordained by the state water board’s “Basin Plan,” could have been achieved without disruption if the Bureau of Reclamation had slightly reduced water allocations to valley farmers.

But the Bureau of Reclamation—which operates Keswick Dam, a few miles downstream of Shasta—claims no responsibility.

“Reclamation does not manage Keswick Dam releases for water temperatures at Wilkins Slough,” a staff member explained in an email. He elaborated that water outflow from the dam is used to meet water supply demands and keep salty ocean water at bay, away from the major pumping stations in the southern Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. 

These facilities, which send water to millions of people and vast farming regions, were the site of another recent controversy when the pumps exceeded “take” limits on protected winter-run Chinook and steelhead trout, sucking them into the facilities and injuring or killing thousands.

To Jon Rosenfield, science director for the group San Francisco Baykeeper, such losses in a wet year bode poorly for the species’ futures.

“If they’re making decisions that cut against the fish in 2024 when reservoirs are full and many contractors are receiving full deliveries, is there a year when they won’t harm imperiled fish species?” he said.

Some good news has also emerged on the horizon for California’s troubled salmon. The water board recently approved the Bureau of Reclamation’s 2024 Sacramento River temperature management plan. This planning document shows that water releases will remain cold through the fall, leading to minimal losses of fertilized salmon eggs. Assuming this forecast holds, it would be a promising turnaround from recent years, when most eggs of spawning salmon were killed by warm dam releases.

While 2023 and 2024 are shaping into a decent time for the Central Valley’s salmon, it could have been a great one, owing to the abundant water and snowpack it produced.

“Mother Nature gave us two good years in a row,” Rosenfield said. “We need to rebuild the population that was decimated during the last few drought years.”

Rosenfield wants to see a systematic increase in average river flows through the Delta, all the way to the ocean. While this would likely benefit struggling species, it’s a divisive idea since it would mean reducing Delta water exports.

“There are a few groups that always point to the farmers whenever they believe there’s a water need for the fishery,” said Lewis Bair, the general manager of Reclamation District No. 108, which provides water to Sacramento Valley farmers.

Bair says unusually warm water in Lake Shasta has made it difficult to meet the physiological needs of Chinook salmon, even though the reservoir is nearly full.

“It’s unheard of to have a reservoir this full and to have this temperature challenge,” he said.

Climate change and warming trends, Bair said, existentially threaten salmon and steelhead. Saving them, he noted, will require expanding upstream spawning habitat and providing access to cold tributaries currently blocked off by dams.

Environmentalists tend to agree, but many argue that state policies are just as dangerous as changing climate. Of particular contention is a rule known as Water Right Order 90-5, which sets a 56-degree threshold for spawning salmon in the Sacramento and also the Trinity River, a major Klamath tributary connected to the Sacramento basin by an 11-mile tunnel bored through the Coast Range mountains.

That 56-degree limit is widely considered to be scientifically outdated and a potential death sentence for salmon eggs. In June, a group of organizations requested that the water board initiate a process of amending the rule by reducing the threshold to 53.5 degrees—what would align with federal endangered species guidelines.

Water board staff told Weeklys in an email that they plan to “assess this issue further” later in the year.

Stokely isn’t holding his breath. He said he has been encouraging the board to amend the order for years. He and his allies in conservation want them to write in lower temperature limits for both the Sacramento and the Trinity, where coho salmon have recently suffered almost complete spawning failures.

“If they don’t change Water Right Order 90-5, we’re certainly looking at the end of salmon fishing and salmon in general,” Stokely said. “They’re on the road to extinction. They can’t go on like this.”

On Friday, June 14, media and volunteers gathered at the small inlet of Horseshoe Bay of Fort Baker to watch as 27 brown pelicans were released back into the wild.

The inlet, on that sunny day with only a bit of wind and the towering stanchions of the Golden Gate Bridge unclouded by fog in the background, seemed the idyllic place for the bird release.

“It’s an iconic spot,” said Russ Curtis, the communications director of International Bird Rescue, who put on the media event. “But there’s also enough space here, and it’s far away from the public. And the public can often get in the way.”

International Bird Rescue, the Bay Area-based bird rehabilitation center that focuses its efforts mainly on water birds, put on the event to showcase their efforts to help prevent a massive starvation event across the Bay Area and the greater California coast.

As the volunteers opened the cages in front of the water, each filled with two or three birds, the majestic pelicans took off, soaring into the sky, landing at the water in front of the dock.

JD Bergeron, executive director of IBR, said, “It never gets old for me. This is emotional.”

The release, also a means for the organization to ask for public donations to help the birds, was a small glimmer of hope in an otherwise alarming event for the brown pelicans in the area.

Since April, from Monterey to Sonoma County, brown pelicans have been found starving and malnourished along the coast and in places where they are rarely, if ever, seen. Hundreds of birds have been found and sent to bird and wildlife rescue centers across the region, and many more have died in the wild before caretakers could reach them.

This influx of starving birds has overwhelmed rescue center spaces and budgets. And while it seems that this starvation event is nearing its conclusion, researchers and conservationists are still uncertain as to why the birds were starving in the first place.

IBR, the area’s main caretaker of brown pelicans, said they first received calls about starving pelicans in late April. The situation started to increase, with many birds coming in so starved that they were nearly half their weight.

Reports of strangely acting birds appeared all over the Bay Area, but mainly around Santa Cruz, with one pelican walking into a bar. One viral video showed a brown pelican flying into the outfield at Oracle Park on a sunny day, disoriented and eventually flying out of the field. From April on, the starving birds were found, and the concern from rescue centers and researchers grew.

As of today, IBR has reported caring for 375 pelicans, with only 91 releases of healthy birds so far. What’s most significant, however, is that they are noticing many more adult birds. While these numbers seem high, important factors make this event significant beyond the numbers.

With many wild populations of birds, the young will often have a hard time learning to fish or fall ill from natural causes. However, a sign that there are greater issues around the population or the environment at large is that even adults are starting to suffer.

Since being inundated at their main facility in Fairfield, IBR began to mainly care for the birds.

“In this particular crisis, there’s a wide range of ages. So it’s not just baby pelicans or birds that are, you know, unfamiliar with fishing,” Curtis said. “The age of the birds is kind of all over the map. It’s a wide variety of first, second, third and fourth year birds.”

Notably, Kirsten Lindquist, a National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration scientist working at the Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, which stretches to the Marin and Sonoma coast, said that they found 25 emaciated birds in May in the region. Of those birds, almost half of them were adults.

As the situation has grown to require IBR’s increasingly intensive care of these birds, both in their space and in the cost, this has meant that they have been financially strained. According to the Wetlands Wildcare Center in southern California, it costs $45 a day to feed these birds, some of whom will stay in their care for nearly five weeks. The cost is similar for IBR as well. Currently, they are taking care of nearly 200 pelicans. That’s nearly $9,000 every day.

Because of this strain, IBR hasn’t been able to help care for as many other species of birds as they otherwise would have. This has put additional strain on wildlife centers in the region.

The Sonoma Bird Rescue Center, based in Petaluma, is one such place. While only receiving two starving adult pelicans related to this event, both of whom sadly passed away the same day they were brought into care, the pelican starvation event has strained the center in other ways.

As one of the region’s main care facilities for birds, SBRC is comfortable providing care for any bird species. However, because IBR is so close, SBRC often receives hurt or sick water birds and gives them to IBR for better care. However, SBRC has had to care for more water birds because IBR facilities have been so full.

“With them [IBR] being inundated, we’ve actually had to kind of turn around ourselves and provide additional care and time for patients that normally would have been transferred,” said SBRC executive director Ashton Kluttz. “That includes, for us, receiving about 200 herons and egrets from West 9th Street rookery in downtown Santa Rosa.”

The 9th Street rookery is a line of trees in downtown Santa Rosa where many herons and egrets make their nests. While this event has strained the birds and the facilities that care for them, this seems to be slowing.

“We’re still getting a trickle of them in, but it’s slowed down,” Curtis said. “We’ll probably continue to see some birds in the next couple weeks, but not as frequently as April.”

Many are curious why this event happened in the first place. Some initially thought it was possibly related to disease or some chemical in the water, but that was quickly dismissed. Everyone the Bohemian spoke with pointed to climate-related events and access to their food.

As Mike Parker, executive director of the California Institute for Environmental Studies, explained, this could be due to several factors.

“It seems to be that there were these weather events, and maybe even water temperature or other variables in the water column are a factor,” Parker said.

The weather event Parker referred to was a long stretch of heavy rains across southern California in late March. Due to brown pelican nesting in that area, Parker supposed that must have been a part of what caused this event.

Parker noted that some cormorants, who also dive for fish, were showing signs of starvation, indicating a greater possibility that this was a weather and climate-related event. However, he and others pointed to the rising water temperatures brought on by climate change and how this might be affecting where pelicans’ food might be.

Northern anchovies, the main diet of brown pelicans, are supposedly doing fine, according to NOAA fisheries numbers.

Due to storm events, heavy winds at sea and warmer water temperatures, northern anchovies might be diving much deeper to seek cooler water and avoid roiling surface waters, making it harder for pelicans to find the fish out at sea. Once again, this points to climatic factors because adult and mature pelicans are having trouble finding food.

As Lindquist, the NOAA scientist, mentioned, “This is the second largest mortality event of brown pelicans in 30 years,” making it a great concern for researchers and rescue facilities going forward.

However, Curtis pointed out that it’s very soon to claim anything as the de facto reason for this event.

“It’s still too early to even make grand pronouncements because science just doesn’t work that quickly. There are lots of things that they need to study. And they also need to look at the number of birds that came out of some of their roosting areas, especially in the Channel Islands, and even further down to Mexico,” Curtis said.

Unfortunately, brown pelicans are familiar with these kinds of strains. As a part of both the IBR and the Wetlands Wildcare Center logos, brown pelicans have been the poster child of caring for the California coastline, mostly because of our own damage to the species.

Since the 1800s, human activities have threatened the birds. Originally caught and killed for their feathers, for down and for hats, they were eventually killed on the spot by fishermen. As they feared they were eating too many northern anchovies, the fishing vessels saw them as a threat.

Then, due to the notorious pesticide DDT, their eggs began to grow thin, killing off future generations of the bird. In 1970, three years before the Endangered Species Act passed, brown pelicans were federally protected. As DDT was banned in 1972, their populations slowly began to soar back, with the federal government eventually delisting the bird in 2009.

However, since then, they have faced many troubling events.

In fact, in 2022, a similar starvation event occurred. Parker pointed out that back then, there were many high wind events, and many of the birds going to rescue centers were juveniles, which to him and others seemed less of a concern, pointing to bird inexperience of fishing rather than some greater environmental event.

While there is still much for researchers to discover about this event, the determination of those involved, from researchers across the West Coast, means there will always be hope for the birds. As researchers look into this mysterious and worrying starvation event and rescue centers work almost tirelessly to help save the birds, there is always room for them to bounce back.

At the Horseshoe Bay pier, the 27 brown pelicans flapped their wings as small droplets shining in the sun burst from the water.

“They’re getting their sea wings back,” Curtis said as we watched them return to the bay.

Winston Churchill coined the phrase, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat,” and, as it turns out, that’s what most of humanity and the citizens of Marin County also have to offer.

Luckily, blood, toil, sweat, and volunteers are the resources most in demand across California’s North Bay this coming summer. And no, that’s not a metaphorical call to action — Marin County needs blood. 

Local blood and plasma donations are in great demand this summer, says Vitalant, a national health organization dedicated to collecting blood donations for medical facilities.

“Nonprofit Vitalant is urging all eligible volunteer blood donors to help prevent a summer shortage by giving blood this July,” the organization said in a statement. “Donations around the Fourth of July are typically among the lowest of the year but patients’ needs don’t take a vacation.”

The Vitalant website lists more details and interesting factoids about blood donations and the ever-present need for more. For instance, Vitalant states that one person in the United States needs blood and/or platelets every two seconds. The organization estimates this metric to mean that the daily need in the U.S. is approximately 29,000 units of red blood cells, nearly 5,000 units of platelets, and 6,5000 units of plasma.

“Donors of all blood types are urgently needed, especially type O, the most transfused blood type,” lists the Vitalant press release. “O-negative can be used to help any patient in an emergency, and O-positive can help any patient with a positive blood type.”

Type O-negative blood is especially valuable for donations since it is considered the “universal donor” type. For those who do not know their blood type, donating to a collection center can be a great way to learn more about one’s own body, blood, and medical needs. Knowing what kind of blood one has can’t hurt and can only help.

“Human blood falls into four different blood groups: A, B, AB, and O. Your blood also has what is known as an Rh factor: It either contains a certain protein or it doesn’t,” explains the Vitalant website. “(This is the positive [+] or negative [-] after your blood type.) The possible combinations create eight different blood types: A+, A-, B+, B-, AB+, AB-, O+ and O-.”

That said, some conditions can exclude individuals from being able to donate blood. According to the Vitalant website, those who wish to donate blood must be in good health, over the age of 16, and weigh more than 110 pounds. This list is non-exhaustive, and those who want to follow through on the blood donation process should check out the site and see if recent tattoos, travel, or other random tidbits of personal history can prevent one’s efforts to donate blood.

Before going to the donation centers, be sure to follow the suggestions and guidelines listed on the Vitalant website: bring a valid ID, be sober from alcohol and recreational drugs, eat within two hours before the donation, and hydrate a lot in the day or two leading up to the donation. Also, donors may only donate blood every eight weeks.

Upcoming blood drives in Marin County include 11am to 2:45pm on Thursday, July 11 at the Rotary District 5150 at San Rafael Elks Lodge;  11am to 3pm on Sunday, July 21 at Marin Rod and Gun Club in San Rafael; noon to 4 pm on Thursday, July 25 at the Sports Basement in Novato and from 10am to 1:30pm on Friday, July 26 at the Mill Valley Community Center. 

As an extra incentive to get more people to donate blood to a good cause, Vitalant is throwing in a special giveaway for anyone who donates between July 8 and July 27. Those who donate blood between these dates will be automatically entered into Vitalant’s Summer Car Giveaway and will be eligible to win a vehicle valued up to $30,000.

More information at vitalant.org.