At California’s second biggest freshwater lake, the latest fallout of drought is gruesome: dead fish in nearby stream beds that have run dry.
Some of the foot-long, silvery Clear Lake hitch have been decapitated by raccoons and other varmints, which have had easy pickings of the beached minnow.
The grim sightings by Lake County and tribal crews surveying the lake have prompted a rescue effort over the past week to save hitch, a threatened species found only in this region. Many are still stranded in what little water remains in the channels amid larger questions about the fate of the fish and the state of drought-diminished Clear Lake.
“We’re called Lake County, right?” said Marina Deligiannis, deputy water resources director for the county’s Water Resources Department. “We rely on this lake for a lot of things. ... Low water levels impact everything, whether it’s the hitch, the (recreation) economy or agriculture.”
About 100 miles north of San Francisco, Clear Lake, like other big lakes in the West, has suffered from too little inflow amid three years of drought. Heading into the warm, dry summer months, water officials expect the nearly 70-square-mile lake to drop to levels not seen since the punishing dry spell of the late 1970s.
More than two dozen Clear Lake hitch were found dead in dried-up Adobe Creek in Lake County, as on a late April day. Rescuers are trying to save fish still stranded in pools within the creek bed.
Alix Tyler, Big Valley RancheriaAbout 60% of county residents get their water from the lake. Boating and bass fishing, which have become synonymous with Lake County, also depend on the lake and its bounty of water as does a budding wine industry.
And then there’s the hitch.
A crew with the county Water Resources Department last week spotted more than two dozen of the fish lying dead in dried-up sections of Adobe Creek. The creek, which normally runs to Clear Lake’s southern shore, is one of the most important of a handful of waterways that the hitch swim up each spring to spawn.
Fortunately, some stretches of Adobe Creek still contained water as well as fish, though the fish were essentially trapped in the landlocked pools.
Aware of the of the limited population of the hitch - maybe a few thousand spawning each year - county officials coordinated with state and tribal experts to launch a rescue.
“It’s incredible how many fish were left up there,” said Ryan Carey, a water resources technician for the Lake County. “We just happened to be in Adobe Creek at the right time.”
The quickly assembled team of rescuers used backpack electrofishers, an instrument that sends a current through the water and shocks the fish without harming them, to stun the hitch into submission and then collect them in nets.
One day last week, the team netted about 250 hitch in the pools. On Wednesday of this week, another 60 were netted.
The fish were moved by truck back to Clear Lake.
“We’re just trying to help a fish that’s already in dire straits,” said Ben Ewing, district fisheries biologist for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, one of the architects of the rescue. “Thankfully we got (most of) them in time.”
The team expects to continue monitoring the creek as well as other tributaries of the lake in coming weeks to make sure there are no more strandings.
The problem, according to Ewing, is not only that streams have too little water because of the drought but that late-season rains led to flash flows that prompted some fish to respond as they would have earlier in the wet season and head upstream, where they got stuck.
“If we get another pulse flow, we might run into another issue,” Ewing said.
The Clear Lake hitch is one of many subspecies of the native California hitch, part of a broader scientific family of minnows and carps. Hitch are generally found in lakes, sloughs and other slow-moving waterways, often in the Central Valley.
In Lake County, the subspecies has experienced a dramatic decline due to many factors, including development eroding fish habitat along the shores of Clear Lake, the introduction of predator fish to the region and increasing water draws and pumping by vineyards and farms. Droughts make matters worse.
A backpack electrofisher was used by rescue crews to catch stranded Clear Lake hitch in Adobe Creek in Lake County during the last week of April.
Lake County Water Resources Department“There’s a lot of challenges for them to stay alive,” said Sarah Ryan, environmental and emergency management director for the Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians. “If there aren’t some big changes very soon, the hitch could be completely extinct within five years.”
For many Native Americans, including the Pomo Indians, the hitch was long a dietary staple held in high regard because of the sustenance it provided.
The Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians has been working with other tribes to help the imperiled fish by restoring wetlands in Clear Lake and advocating for sufficient flows in the feeder creeks.
Still, the numbers of hitch have continued to drop as too few young are being born and surviving to sustain the population. The spawning problems this year, which were similar to what happened in 2014 during last decade’s drought, haven’t helped. On top of fish die-offs, the lack of stream water is ruinous for countless eggs.
Last decade, the Clear Lake hitch was designated as threatened under the California Endangered Species Act and granted special protections. The federal government, however, declined to provide protections for the fish after a review in 2020, despite pleas by tribes and environmental groups to do so.
The Center for Biological Diversity last year sued the federal government for not listing the hitch under the federal Endangered Species Act. The organization said this week that a settlement is pending with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the agency has agreed to revisit the status of the hitch by 2025.
“It’s great news,” said Meg Townsend, a staff attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity. “But the timeline is a little long. We need to do more done sooner. Otherwise, we’ll lose this fish forever.”
Kurtis Alexander is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kalexander@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kurtisalexander
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At California’s second biggest lake, the latest fallout of drought is gruesome - San Francisco Chronicle
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