Don's Home California Putah Creek Salmon Habitat Restoration

Contents: History | Current | 2024 Spawning | Research | | Putah Creek Fish and Wildlife Observation

Winters Salmon Festival - Saturday, November 1, 2025 11AM - 4 PM

Restoration efforts began in 2000 following the Putah creek accord a court-mediated agreement that established water management guidelines for Putah Creek in 2000. The accord was a result of a lawsuit filed by the Putah Creek Council against the Solano Irrigation District and Solano County Water Agency. The accord's goals were to:

• Restore a more natural flow regime for the creek
• Benefit native and anadromous fish species
• Keep the creek from drying out
• Create spring flows for native fish
• Attract spawning Chinook salmon in the fall
• Displace nonnative fish

Chinook salmon have been observed in the creek since 2014, but studies had shown them to be lost strays from hatcheries.
In 2025 A UC Davis study, published in the journal Ecosphere, is the first to document Putah Creek-origin salmon.
Lead author Lauren Hitt, a graduate student in Rypel's lab during the study, used otoliths—or ear bones—from adult Chinook salmon carcasses recovered from Putah Creek between 2016 and 2021 to determine their origin.
She showed that while hatchery-origin fish were most abundant, a handful-11 of 407-of returning salmon analyzed were born in Putah Creek, completing their full life cycle as wild salmon.
See: Restored stream sees return of wild salmon population

Total to date
2024  155
2025  220

A series of (salmon) pulse flows starts in the middle of October by releasing more water for Lake Berryessa. Cooler water will stimulate salmon in the Toe Drain on the eastern end of the Yolo Bypass to start heading up Putah Creek all the way to the diversion dam at the end of Lake Solano west of Winters.

file:///Users/dtmcbride/Sites/donsnotes/places/california/putah-creek/images/ It takes 1.5 days for the pulse to travel from Lake Solano to the Yolo Bypass Wildlife area.
Chinook salmon can from 6 to 8 MPH, so it takes a couple of hours to swim the 12 miles from the toe drain to Pedrick Rd.
The 4th even got cut short because we expected a storm and needed to remove the wooden fish ladder at the Los Rios check dam in the bypass.

2024 Chinook Salmon count

Peak Times in November are spread out - They only report the peak time and not the number of salmon at that time. e.g. on the days when the peak time was 2-4PM there were 40 salmon recorded for the whole day.
2/3 (14) of the peak times for the 21 days with data for November were at night. Sunrise was about from 6:30-7 and sunset was about 4:45-5 (1 hour later on the 1st & 2nd before the time change.)

Peak time	days	Daily salmon
Midnight -5 AM	4	56
6-7 AM	3	35
8-10 AM	2	-1
2-4PM	2	40
8-9 PM	5	29
10-11PM	5	40
Total	21	199

night 14 125 AM 5 34 Mid-day 0 0 Afternoon 2 40 Sources:
Pulses:
Solano County Water Agency, Max Stevenson, Streamkeeper.

Salmon Run:
Average new salmonids as recored by the underwater cameras just upstream from Pedrick Rd.
They compute net Salmonids from the camera as upstream passage minus downstream passage.
There were 35 salmanoids in October and 173 in November thru the 18th.
The cameras were removed on the 19th because of a storm.

Table 2
                         2016 2017  2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024
Adult Carcasses Recovered 126  208   211    1   70   81  180  446
Juvenile Fish Sampled *        215 33,513  26   200 5,078 165 980 1115
Juvenile Fish Tagged * *             100   18    63  168   *  145   92

Node 24,

Chinook Salmon Face Habitat Challenges | UC davis October 14, 2024

Solano County Water Agency:
Underwater cameras have been installed near the UC Davis research spot:
Note: The camera labels say Winters and Vacaville, but they are between Davis and Winters.
Node 24, Node 25.

< Journey from the Pacific:

Ocean to Sacramento River
below Rio Vista           53 mi.
Sacramento River to 
Yolo Bypass Toe Drain     15 mi.
Toe Drain to Yolo Bypass  21 mi.
Yolo Bypass to Pedrick Rd 12 mi.
Pedrick Rd. to Winters    9.5 mi.
Total Ocean to Winters   111 mi.
Winters to diversion dam   2.75 mi

- Directions/Map

Deck on the Putah Creek South Fork Preserve. Parking on the South side of the River on Mace Blvd. file:///Users/dtmcbride/Sites/donsnotes/places/california/putah-creek/images/s-fork-preserve-deck-s.jpg Stream is wide and slow moving there so it is not the best place for observing.	A small dike just downstream from the bridge at Old Davis Rd Trailhead. Take the Raptor Center exit on the North side of the creek and turn into the parking lot on the right.
RR1 Parking   Putah Creek Riparian Reserve, Levee Road Trailhead (Fire Ring Picnic Grounds) . Go down the South stairs from the parking lot and across the picnic area to the trail which heads down to the right about 250 ft. to the creek. Stream side	BBB Brooks & Levee Rd
About 100 yards upstream from the Pedrick Rd. bridge Trailhead there is a narrow spot in the river where you can get close to a fast moving section. The fish will jump to get thru that section.
Under the Putah Creek Bridge in Winters. Go down from the south side between the road and railroad bridge.	1/4 mile downstream from Putah Creek Bridge in Winters.

You have to be patient to see any Salmon:
There were 15 salmon at Winters during the Salmon Festival on Nov 2, 2024, but no one saw them that I know of.
2024 count as of December 7th 2024 the count was 218
Robert and I have spent hours each week trying to spot salmon between TARGET="_blank">is Rd and Pedrick Rd. with no luck.
The big run in 2024 was from November 3-6 (The day after the Salmon Festival in Winters, nice try Max, I guess you were 1 day late with the pulse) with greater than 20 fish per day, and peak times at midnight, 6 AM, 4 PM, 10 PM and midnight.
If you look at the peak count per hour, except for Nov 3-6 and 18th there were less than 2 per hour, and the times are spread out thru the night and day, and over the 23 miles from the Toe drain to the diversion dam, so you'd have to wait for hours to see one.
I did see one downstream from Winters moving upstream, but couldn't my camera up fast enough to capture it.

Pictures

Putah Creek fish cam and fish counts Node 24,
Biotactic Fisheries and Monitoring - North America, Brazil, Netherlands, Sweden, China
Putah Creek fish cam and fish counts | Biotactic Research and Videographic Observatory (BRAVO):
Node 24, Node 25, 2024 Chinook Salmon count
As of November 19, 2024 the cameras were removed because of the forecast flooding. As of Dec. 1 I haven't seen any new data.

Putah Creek here

University of California, Davis of Wildlife, Fish and Conservation Biology
Andrew Rypel, a professor of Wildlife, Fish, and Conservation Biology and Co-Director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the rypel@ucdavis.edu
Peter Moyle - UC Davis professor emeritus - "Godfather of California fish biology".
A team from the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences Facebook
A team from theis doing fish counts upstream from Pedrick Rd at a site not open to the public unless you paddle upstream.
Andrew Rypel, Rich Marovich ; Chris Lee ;
Dennis Cocherell decocherell@ucdavis.edu

Joe Merz, Fish Sciences | jmerz@fishsciences.net