Babcock Family Forum

Our organization produced a video of our restoration work. Short on the details, but it shows what we do. Ada didn't get a speaking role, just provided eye candy.

http://youtu.be/7HNOFy3Y4h8

Chris and Ada: Congratulations on a great job!! The changes are amazing. Especially when you see the salmon in your other post about the spawning run this year. Does this same picture extend through the new ranch, too?
Dad

Yeah, this is outstanding! so with the big run you had last year as dad said, and all things being equal or getter with the current negative PDO index, there should be a really good run from the cohort in four years? or do these run on a shorter interval? sure to be another step change in river quality by then, cant wait to see!

Yeah, we're expecting another good spawner return for this october. The chinook (king) salmon goes to sea to mature for a variable number of years (2 year olds returning are called jacks) and they made up a large proportion of the october 2011 return, 3 and 4 year old returners are in the bulk of the cohort, so last year's big run should be echoed by a big run this year, and some fish stay at sea 5 or even 6 years, and these are the odd huge KING salmon that get up to 40-45 kg. Yeah this cohort is the first one that was spawned (2009) without cattle trompling the nests in over 100 years, we did do that. But there are a lot of factors that affect survival and transition probabilities. The best guess on the recent big returns is ocean conditions related to the PDO. Lots of kings in the Klamath, Sacramento and Columbia, but by the same token piss-poor returns to the Copper, Kuskokwim and Yukon, with a gradient of good to poor returns north through BC and Pacific coast/ Gulf Alaska. (By the way, did you hear that some blokes from UBC or Simon Fraser found that salmon use geomagnetic fields to get from their development and growth zones in the N.Pac. to home back to the mouths of their natal watersheds? This had been a mystery given that it is well known that the fish use chemosensory cues to guide them through fresh water to natal tributaries)

So while there was a relatively good return to most of the southern watersheds this past year, the return to the Shasta was an order of magnitude greater than the average in these other rivers and the other Klamath tributaries. I'd like to think our work had something to do with this, but I'll need a sample size of 30 to have confidence (30 X average return age of 3 years = 90 years), but we're in this for the long term, and we'll have to wait for the data to roll in.

Cool, I didn't realise there was that much variability in the at-sea period, its good you may be able to see an effect so soon, and possibly already. I was never very good at maths, so i am convinced by an n of 1! The timing of your work is good for getting all those positive feedbacks happening, not least in the human context, once people see how things can turn around quickly.