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THE START OF SOMETHING NEW
The Willow Bend site near Colusa offers precisely this po-
tential. While it is small it may, by the same token, be a very
manageable project to carry out. Henery, Katz and their col-
leagues are hoping to move it forward — through a variety of
state and federal permitting processes — as soon as possible.
They hope it will serve as a stepping stone to bigger resto-
ration efforts.
“As we start to bring online large projects, such as Yolo
and Sutter bypasses, we will start to see a population-level
response in salmon numbers,” Katz says.
Standing beside the river, Cook, Dion and Henery are af-
forded the relatively novel experience of watching the river
while discussing its specific needs.
“We spend so much time negotiating nature and water-
ways in windowless conference rooms in Sacramento,” Hen-
ery says as the water flows past. Things might get done faster,
more efficiently, he speculates, if meetings were held on the
riverbank, where the sometimes abstract dynamics between
fish, flows, food and floodplains come more easily to life.
Another fish splashes downstream. It sounds significant-
ly bigger than the last.
“That could have been a real fish,” Henery says.
In this river, of course, a real fish is a Chinook salmon. n
ship to succeed, farmers must play a major role.
More than a half million acres of the Sacramento Valley
is used to grow rice, and, fortunately for fish advocates, the
California Rice Commission is a member of the salmon part-
nership. Paul Buttner, the commission’s manager of environ-
mental affairs, says using rice fields to boost bird numbers 20
years ago was relatively easy.
“You just flood a field, and the birds come — sometimes
you wake up, and the fields are filled with ducks,” he says.
“The fish folks want to use the same principle of using rice
fields as surrogate wetlands.”
But whereas birds can fly and access just about any flood-
ed field they want, fish cannot. This complicates things for
everyone involved. It might, for instance, require that salm-
on be transported by truck to remote, flooded areas, released
and recaptured several weeks later, after they’ve had their fill
of wetland invertebrates.
But the gold-standard scenario, Buttner says, is one in
which baby salmon can swim into a flooded field, feast for
weeks and leave when they want.
Alastair Bland is a freelance journalist based in San Fran-
cisco. He writes about agriculture, the environment, fish-
eries and beer. His work has appeared online in NPR’s food
blog The Salt, Smithsonian.com and Yale Environment 360
and in print in the Marin Independent Journal, the East
Bay Express and the Sacramento News & Review.

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