Coho salmon
Corte Madera, Bear, and West Union creeks. In addition, three independent oral history sources indicate that coho salmon were abundant in the creek through the first half of the twentieth century. According to local historian Dorothy Regnery's notes from her 1966 interview with Edgar H. Batchelder, who was 2 years old when his father became caretaker of Searsville dam in 1897, "When the dam was "wasting", or overflowing, in the winter salmon would swim upstream as far as the base of the dam. Using a pitchfork Mr. Batchelder could spear them to supplement the family's menu." His "favorite place to fish for trout was in the Dennis Martin Creek". A second source described catching "steelhead and silver (coho) salmon in San Francisquito Creek and the Guadalupe River System in the 1930s and 1940s. He said that the Guadalupe River also had runs of Chinook salmon ("Oncorhyncus tshawytscha") that were very large in wet years." Thirdly, Dennis L. Bark, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, recalls playing on San Francisquito Creek around 1947: "Salmon swam up it, and in winter it was a dangerous place." The historical range of Coho salmon overlapped geographically with San Francisquito Creek. It is definitely established that Coho salmon were historically present in other San Francisco Bay streams such as San Mateo Creek and Alameda Creek. Also, the southern limit of Coho salmon in coastal California streams was recently confirmed to extend through Santa Cruz County based on both archaeological evidence and historically collected specimens.