Everybody into the pool

What a difference a week makes. Last Sunday we were transfixed by nine fish battling it out on three active redds at Leo Cronin. Tails were flapping, fins were flying, teeth were bared, gravel was roiling, rivals fighting -- salmon spawning! (See Richard James' extraordinary high-def video capturing the best 10 minutes of hours of watching here To learn more and take action with SPAWN, click here to visit www.spawnusa.org (http://www.spawnusa.org/)
Today the creek was quiet except for the whirring kingfisher and the hyper kinglets. As we walked through the soft rain, it seemed that the fish had vanished into the mist. The redds that have been so reliably active for the last month were empty under MMWD orange ribbons, and there was not a white-tail female to be found, even the valiant old warrior who so bravely fought and fought all comers.
But then, at the end of the trail, just before the spillway, we saw a flicker, a dream, a shimmer in the shadows -- four fish lazing in the deep water.  Some were recognizably male -- indeed, particularly recognizable as the males we watched last week. But one was dark and unmarked by battle. Could she be a fresh female whiling away the hours until she was ready to spawn?
Alas, no. Concentrated viewing yielded the unwelcome sight of a pointed overbite, sure sign of the "hook nosed" male. We confirmed the sighting three times over, and had to conclude that we were looking at four males with nothing to do.
Autopsies on un-predated coho show that while females expend all their eggs, males die with milt to spare, always hoping to fertilize one more female upstream.
Before  Peters Dam was built (1953), the coho swam to the foot of Mount Tam. Now 50% of the historic habitat is gone behind that concrete wall. So these males have come to the end of the road twice over; they've run out of stream, and they've almost run out of time. (Males live about nine days after first fertilizing eggs, and we know at least some of these fish were active one week ago).
Let's hope they get to use that last bit of milt on some fresh females soon.