From: Alan in PV, PA, MP
Creeks: San Francisquito, Bear, Los Trancos
Howdy, howdy. Just a couple notes after a few days in the creek. First, there are fairly large numbers of large sticklebacks upstream from the Lunar Rocks. While this is not all that exciting nor wildly unexpected, I find the dynamic nature of fish distribution interesting – we haven’t had sticklebacks upstream from Lunar Rocks since we started annual work in 1997. It took a couple years for roach and stickleback to reinvade Los Trancos after the 1998 season, but it always seemed puzzling that sticklebacks weren’t able to make it past the not-so-great falls at Lunar Rocks. Kind of neat anyway. I’m not sure how far up they’ve made it – we’ll check over the next month.
Secondly, there are a lot of YOY steelhead in San Francisquito Creek this year – likely more than we’ve seen in nearly a decade (as our methods have changed, exact comparisons are tough to make, but each pool upstream from the old Boething pumphouse to 500 meters upstream from Lunar Rocks has 10 to 20 young steelhead). Not many 1+ steelhead – but each of the bigger pools has a few. So steelhead seem to have had a good year in SFC – more areas need to be checked, but it looks good. And contrary to the early season observations (which found basically no fish of any types), roach, stickleback and suckers are also doing well – large schools of young fishes.
Thirdly – while I haven’t done the upstream reach of SFC, I haven’t seen any non-native fishes in the creek. This is very good as in 2006 large numbers of largemouth bass and some sunfish were found scattered all the way from Searsville dam to the golf course (2007 water conditions made surveys difficult and not too effective). It looks like most did not survive the high flows. Good.
And lastly, for some reason our observations of turtles is way up – a minimum of 16 have been observed. This is not all good news as a fair number of these are turning out to be non-native red-eared sliders, but it looks like at least four of the individuals sighted are western pond turtles (which is still better than we’ve seen during the last five plus years). Note that no red-eared sliders have been seen at JR – a bunch are at Felt and one was seen in Lagunita. Obviously someone is moving turtles around……….. So please be on the lookout for turtles.
With water levels dropping, I’m not sure how well the rest of the surveys will go… but well see.
