One fish, two fish, three fish...

Biologists are making daily counts of young salmon and steelhead migrating down the Russian River to the ocean, a barometer of how well the attempt to restore the fisheries is going.

“It’s important, it gives us indices of how salmon and steelhead production is doing,” said Sean White, a Sonoma County Water Agency biologist. “Some of the fish are wild fish, some are part of coho recovery program happening at the hatchery. It gives us an understanding of when smolt are in the river.”

It is the only program in California’s coastal rivers counting chinook, and in the past few years has also seen a return of coho, White said. Both are on the federal endangered species list.

The count occurs in the Russian River just below the Water Agency’s rubber dam downstream of the Wohler Bridge, where biologists have moored two rotary-screw fish traps.

The giant traps turn in the slow current of dark green water, the blades drawing the small fish into a holding tank.

Every morning, biologists scoop out the small fish, measuring from an inch to four inches, to count, measure and, for some, to clip a fin.

“During the season, we will touch 30,000 fish,” White said.

It is estimated the traps will catch about 10 percent of the fish going downstream, representing roughly 250,000 smolt, will make their way back to the ocean every year, White said.

The number of smolt are an indication of the survival rate of the smolt, as well as how many adults have actually returned to spawn in the fall.

“There are so many stages in the life, you can have a poor return, a fantastic survival and smolt production, or a large return and then a flood that wipes out the smolt production,” White said.

The Water Agency’s fish counting program has been run since 1999.

The smolt run will go to mid June.

“This year has been a solid year, we have had a fair number of chinook every day, we have been seeing coho from the recover program almost every day. The first five years we didn’t get any coho.”

Coho have been raised since 2001 at the Warm Springs hatchery in a program by UC Davis and state Department of Fish and Game.

The smolt are then planted in Russian River tributaries, where the returning adults go to spawn.

White said it is in only the past few years they have seen any coho smolt at all.

“One day we got five or six and for us it felt like an avalanche,” White said.

They have been seeing 50 to 100 chinook smolt a day, considered a large number, with occasionally a spurt of 1,000.

That follows a year in which biologists only counted 1,900 chinook adults going upstream to spawn. In a normal year, biologists will count 4,000 going upstream.