Counting kokanee in creek

The annual kokanee salmon run is well underway, with fish trying out the newly renovated spawning beds installed this summer in place of Penticton Creek's old concrete flume bottom. 

Every morning, workers with the Freshwater Fisheries Society of BC and the Penticton Fly Fishers are checking the fish fence built at the mouth of the creek near the art gallery, in order to keep track of the number of kokanee swimming upstream to spawn. 

"[The creek] used to be a major produced of kokanee and trout," said Paul Askey, biologist with the Fisheries Society. "We're working on some habitat projects upstream to restore the capacity to produce fish. So for the next few years, every fish that swims up into this stream, we'll count what comes back."

Askey said they have seen 2,600 fish so far this fall which is a little lower than expected on this date, but nothing to worry about yet. 

"The fish are just coming a little later than other years, so it might still turn out that we see the number we've seen other years," he said, which is roughly 4,000.

The restoration project has provided three new pooled areas in the creek bed, filled with gravel and rocks designed to calm the water so fish can spawn. Without these areas strategically placed throughout the creek, the fish would have an upstream struggle the entire way and find nowhere to rest and deposit their eggs.

"Kokanee live typically a four-year life cycle, so these fish are coming up as three-year-olds," Askey said. "They'll go up to the gravel, lay their eggs in the gravel, and then they die. You can see three or four sections where we've added gravel, and those are just loaded with fish. For sure this year there will be some wild fish produced out of that gravel."

Though the improvements to the creek bed are a good start, Askey said regular maintenance and further development is needed. Because the creek is so narrow, when floodwaters come in the spring, much of the newly added gravel could be washed away downstream. 

"So we still need to find other areas of the stream with a little bit wider area and lower gradient so the gravel will actually stay there," Askey said. 

Later this fall, the sockeye salmon run will begin in the Penticton Channel, which has also been retrofitted to encourage spawning. Sockeye are a partially ocean-dwelling cousin of the kokanee, which only ever live in fresh water. 

To learn more about the kokanee spawn, check out a free educational walk on Saturday — meeting at the fish traps near the mouth of the creek by the art gallery at 9 a.m.