"Hooray!" declared Friends of Five Creeks in a newsletter emailed Wednesday.
The organization, which works to protect and restore East Bay creeks, said a two-foot-long fish seen in Codornices Creek on Monday appears to be a Chinook salmon – the first ever reported in that body of water (at least in contemporary times).
The Friends of Five Creeks December e-newsletter said, "On Monday, as water cleared after the storm, Codornices neighbor Dan Dole photographed what appears to be a chinook salmon – as far as we know, the first reported ever."
Codornices Creek (whose name is the Spanish word for quail) runs along the Albany-Berkeley border.
Also on Wednesday, Berkeleyside reported news of the big fish under the headline, "First Chinook salmon reported in Codornices Creek."
Fisheries biologist Jeff Hagar called finding such a large fish in a small creek "pretty rare” and “very unusual,” according to the Berkeleyside article (written by former Albany Patch editor Emilie Raguso). “It’s pretty exciting to have a salmon in any stream, and particularly in a stream in an urban area like that.”
A video of the fish taken Monday was posted to YouTube by RestorationDesign. (See attached video link on this article.)
A salmon cousin, steelhead trout, have been seen in Codornices for years, according to Friends of Five Creeks.
