From the Department of Fish and Wildlife:
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) and its partners have initiated a second year of spring-run Chinook salmon reintroduction efforts into historic habitat in the North Yuba River.
Roughly 350,000 spring-run Chinook salmon eggs were collected and fertilized recently at the Feather River Fish Hatchery in Oroville. The eggs will be hydraulically injected into the North Yuba River’s gravel substrate next month, as was done successfully last fall.
The North Yuba River Spring-run Chinook Salmon Reintroduction Program is a multiagency, multifaceted effort to bring the state and federally listed threatened species back to its historic cold-water spawning and rearing habitat in the mountains of Sierra County. Access to this habitat has been blocked by two dams for almost a century.
Since launching in late 2024, the ambitious program has advanced several successful reintroduction methods.
Last fall, CDFW and its partners – including the Yuba Water Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries and the U.S. Forest Service – conducted the first large-scale hydraulic egg injection in the North Yuba River, planting approximately 300,000 fertilized spring-run Chinook salmon eggs over a 12-mile stretch of gravel riverbed along Highway 49 just east Downieville.
In the months that followed, juvenile salmon were detected through both screw trap collections and snorkel surveys, confirming the method’s success and the river’s potential to support salmon at early developmental stages.
Building on that success, the program marked another milestone this spring with the release of 42 adult spring-run Chinook salmon from the Feather River Fish Hatchery into the North Yuba River.
This represents the first time in California that adult spring-run Chinook salmon have been reintroduced above a rim dam – a landmark achievement for salmon recovery in the state.
Acoustic telemetry has since detected the salmon moving throughout the system, and biologists expect them to spawn naturally this fall — an event not seen in generations. Their offspring will be monitored alongside those from the hydraulic egg injections to compare survival and rearing outcomes.
“The return of adult salmon to the North Yuba River is an exciting milestone, but it’s just one piece of the larger reintroduction strategy,” said Michelle Forsha, Senior Environmental Scientist with CDFW’s North Central Region. “Our goal is to evaluate multiple approaches that can help reestablish a self-sustaining population in this watershed.”
The North Yuba River effort is part of a larger statewide initiative to return salmon to cold-water habitats upstream of dams and other barriers – work that is central to the long-term survival of salmon in California and a key priority of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s California Salmon Strategy for a Hotter, Drier Future (PDF)(opens in new tab).
