Spawning In A Bad Year
September on the Stillwater this year is a dry month in a dry summer at the end of a poor snowpack year, which is to say the river is doing what the climate models told us, eight years ago, the river would be doing in 2040. It has taken less than a decade for 2040 to arrive. The main stem at the county gauge is running at forty-two cubic feet per second on the first day of my autumn redd count, which is thirty-six per cent of the ten-year median for the date. The water temperature at ten in the morning is sixteen point two Celsius. Coho do not like sixteen point two. They become sluggish above fifteen and begin to show pre-spawn mortality — the cardiac collapse that can take a female before she has released her eggs — above about seventeen. Sixteen point two is inside the window where we can still have a run. It is not a comfortable sixteen point two. It is the edge of something.
A redd is the gravel nest a female coho digs by turning on her side and using powerful strokes of her tail to displace cobble and fine sediment, creating a shallow bowl a metre or more across, into which she deposits her eggs while a male, or more commonly several males, release milt. The eggs settle into the interstices of the gravel. The female then digs again upstream of the first bowl, and the displaced gravel buries the eggs of the first nest, and she repeats this pattern until she has exhausted