"The viewing is excellent these days, with lots of drama going on in the creek. A new, fresher female has kicked out the "Coho Queen," the first female we all saw near the parking area at Leo Cronin, and is busily building her redd, accompanied today by a lovely fresh hooknose and a couple of jacks. When new females build redds right on top of other females' redds, it's called "superimposition," (as well as unfortunate for female #1). Further upstream, the redd begun last week is in fine shape, the female is still spry and enjoying the attentions of a couple of hooknoses and a couple of jacks, AND there is a new redd in the site of last week's digging, just upstream of the boulders with the I-bolts.
"Our group stood under the only-slightly dripping canopy, observing a male/female pair on a redd, when what to our wondering eyes did appear, but three sleek river otters, cruising their way upstream, we thought in search of their favorite December meal! The otters swam right by the pair, apparently not seeing them! The two coho moved out of the way for less than a minute, and were back on the redd post-haste. To say we were gobsmacked might be a slight exaggeration, but only slight. A possible reason for their lack of interest in the fine fat coho was that they'd seen our group of 10 up on the bank, and may have been a little spooked.
Otters are very shy of humans. Or, perhaps they were the same otters that Julie, Camp Host at Samuel P. Taylor, had reported playing tug-of-war with a huge dead salmon that very morning in the park, and were not hungry. We know the Lagunitas river otters are a fine, healthy and exciting medium-sized carnivore to have in our watershed. Hurray for the otters!"
SPAWN is running tours on the weekends. Click here for more information. (San Francisco Chronicle Outdoor writer, Tom Stienstra, also wrote about the salmon walks in the Thursday, December 17 edition of the paper).
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