GRANBY — In the frosty morning mist, two government biologists wade knee-deep in the cold Colorado River, below the first of its many dams, dragging a net and scooping up hundreds of swollen-bellied kokanee salmon.
Most are females ready to lay their eggs — the natural way — in some high shallow pool.
But biologists Jon Ewert and Clark Baker intervene. They tow the net filled with shiny, crimson fish into a manmade side channel that leads, through an underwater metal gate, into a shed.
There they engage in a brisk bit of biological engineering, grabbing each slippery salmon and squeezing it over a bowl. Their fingers force streams of peach-colored eggs from the females, and milky sperm from the males. Ewert and Baker say they will squeeze the eggs and sperm from 16,000 fish over the next few weeks.
Aided by a crew of volunteers, they mix the eggs and sperm together in bowls, transfer the mixture to coolers and truck it to the Colorado Division of Wildlife hatchery at Glenwood Springs.
Then, in spring, state biologists will bring back 1 million baby salmon and dump them into the river.
Such is the elaborate engineering — using mostly non-native species — necessary to keep fish in the waters of Colorado’s increasingly-altered ecosystems.
Dams and diversions have so transformed Colorado’s once-wild rivers that native fish struggle to survive. Scouring, sediment-laden rivers prone to flooding and pooling are replaced with cooler, regulated waters and reservoirs — less conducive to natural fish reproduction.
If Ewert and Baker did not intervene, the spawn of non-native kokanees would die.
Kokanee salmon “are just not adapted to live in Colorado,” Ewert said.
Yet fish in the water is an economic engine for Granby and scores of other western towns. Drawing anglers to the reservoirs that dams have created is essential — especially as mining and ranching jobs slip away in the shifting economy.
The kokanee operation here is one of many. Across Colorado, state biologists introduce 76 million fish a year into rivers and reservoirs.
Most of the fish in Colorado lakes and reservoirs, said Division of Wildlife spokesman Randy Hampton, are non-natives that require human management to survive.
Artificial spawning and stocking “is an important tool, but it is not a substitute for having healthy habitats and healthy trout,” said David Nickum, director of Colorado Trout Unlimited, an ecosystem advocacy group.
Colorado River, greenback and Rio Grande cutthroat trout are the only native game fish in the state. Other native fish include razorback suckers, the humpback chub and the Colorado pikeminnow, bottom-feeders that need the warmer pools that form along free-flowing rivers.
“We want to make sure there are good, healthy native populations, especially of those cutthroats,” Nickum said.
State wildlife overseers imported the kokanee from Montana in the late 1950s to help maintain fisheries.
Kokanee can survive here because the reservoirs created by dams, while generally not biologically productive, contain plankton that the kokanee devour. Since 1973, 235 million kokanee have been raised in hatcheries and released.
Few of those working here in the spawn shack expect natural fisheries ever will be possible again.
That would mean taking out dams, allowing free flows. Today, major new proposals would divert more water — not less — from the western side of the Continental Divide to store in reservoirs and send through pipes to growing Front Range suburbs.
“We’ve got a lot more people in this state,” Ewert said as he herded another mass of salmon toward the shack. “Purely natural fisheries? We just wouldn’t be able to sustain them.”
A crowd of people with buckets waited on the snowy river banks. They watched as volunteer Caitlyn Taussig, 24, whacked each wriggling female salmon to end any suffering the fish might feel as they die, she said. Then Taussig and others handed out the salmon to the waiting crowd.
Retired concrete construction worker Emile Van Hoye, 70, an avid fisherman, drove all the way from Denver for this. Smiling down at the fish in his bucket, he anticipated how good they would taste.
“You can make salmon patties. You can can them. Mix them with mayonnaise,” he said. “Put them, with Tabasco sauce, on a cracker.”
Bruce Finley: 303-954-1700 or bfinley@denverpost.com
