Bringing chum salmon back to Cooper Creek: expected and unanticipated consequences for fish and people.

In 2009, the Bainbridge Island Watershed Council, in partnership with the Suquamish Tribe and the City of Bainbridge Island, undertook a four-year supplementation program to re-introduce chum salmon to Cooper Creek, a small lowland Puget Sound stream at the head of Eagle Harbor on Bainbridge Island, WA. Cooper Creek was the site of a restoration effort in 2001 to remove a fish-impassable culvert and impoundment. Following this removal, volunteers monitored the stream for 5 years and recorded only a single adult returning salmon and a handful of juveniles and cutthroat trout. Seeking to create a return of spawning salmon to this stream, we installed a stream-side incubator/raceway and raised and released fry originating from a local west sound watershed. Each spring during the 4-year program, volunteers spent hundreds of hours caring for the fish. The project also involved students from a USAID exchange program from across eastern and southeast Asia, many of whom had never worked on a stream or seen a salmon in their lives. In 2013, we recorded the return of dozens of salmon to Cooper Creek, signaling the beginning of what we hope will be a self-sustaining run of fish that has probably not been seen in this stream in more than half a century. In addition, the experience that our local volunteers and international students took with them that expanded this local restoration program into a project with community-wide and international effects