Northern California’s Yuba River hosts key wildlife for first time in decades
Standing knee-deep in one of California’s famed Gold Rush rivers, a scientist gingerly held up a cheesecloth sack carrying 5,000 pink salmon eggs, each slightly smaller than a marble, with a big eye incubating within. A series of dams have long arrested the natural flow of water on the North Yuba River in the Tahoe National Forest, blocking the salmon from these spawning grounds for more than 80 years. State officials are trying to bring the threatened spring-run chinook salmon back, starting this week with 300,000 eggs planted in the streambed. “Bye bye, little guys,” said Aimee Braddock, an environmental scientist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, as she poured the eggs into a wide tube leading down to a hole she’d dug in the gravelly streambed.
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