High Country News: Three decades of persistence bring salmon back to Putah Creek
A new article in High Country News, written by award-winning environmental journalist and fiction writer Ben Goldfarb, has been published, and it documents the return of Chinook salmon to Putah Creek. The restoration of Putah Creek's salmon run is the result of more than 30 years of sustained effort to restore ecological function to Putah Creek. As an example of this success, in 2025, over 2000 salmon returned to spawn in Putah Creek! During these uncertain times, when many salmon populations across California continue to decline, Putah Creek stands as a unique example of how long-term collaboration, science-based management, and community commitment can help restore even highly altered ecosystems.
“If you do the hard habitat work, the hatchery fish can help you,” Rypel said. From a few disoriented strays, a sui generis population had arisen. [...] The flows the accord provided were fairly meager: Today, 95% of Putah Creek’s water is still diverted for human use. Yet even that small dose of water — augmented by other restoration activities, like riparian plantings and community cleanups — worked wonders. By 2012, scientists declared that native fish like Sacramento suckers and tule perch had already “regained dominance.” A year later, eight chinook salmon, lured by the attraction flows, ventured into Putah Creek — the first to spawn there in decades. The following year, several hundred salmon arrived; in 2016, around 1,500 made it. Conservation groups inaugurated a Salmon Festival in the town of Winters, an event that would once have been unthinkable. The astonishing comeback, said Christine Parisek, a postdoctoral scholar at U.C. Davis’s Center for Watershed Sciences, proves that “it’s possible to recover the ecology of a system” by bringing back its natural flows — even if you have to wait years.
Read the story here: Goldfarb, B. June 16, 2026. The curious comeback of Putah Creek’s salmon. High Country News. https://www.hcn.org/articles/the-curious-comeback-of-putah-creeks-salmon/