The good news about the fall salmon run on the Cosumnes River is there was one, according to the Fishery Foundation of California.

While the Central Valley salmon run suffered a precipitous drop experts are struggling to understand, for the Cosumnes, the immediate question was whether the rains would get here in time for the annual run.

"If the river doesn't connect by mid-December, typically the run is over by then," fish biologist Trevor Kennedy, the executive director of the Fishery Foundation, said Wednesday.

In past years, the salmon run through the Granlees Dam fish ladder has been more plentiful. (2004 RanchoMurieta.com file photo)

The Cosumnes River runs through the community, dividing the North from the South. The community's water is diverted from the river from November to May after river flows reach required levels.

When the rains arrived in early December and connected summer-dry segments of the river below Rancho Murieta, about a dozen salmon made their way upstream to spawn. Then the river dried up again until mid-December. At that time, it reconnected at a much higher level and water flows became strong. "That's when we got the bulk of our fish. It's been connected ever since," Kennedy said.

But instead of "a big, giant pulse of fish like you normally see, it was more of a trickle, a few fish here and there. You didn't have the concentration," he said.

About 60 fish have been counted in more than a dozen surveys conducted on the river this season, compared to 150 counted in 2006, according to Kennedy.

"Last year was a decent run. This year was a lot better than I thought it would be," he said. "(The count) is low across the board, so we're pretty happy with what we got so far.

They're actually calling it a collapse of the Central Valley salmon population. Last year the Central Valley-wide run was almost 300,000. This year it's 90,000. Five years ago it was 800,000. So nobody really knows what's going on. ... It could get worse, it could rebound. It's hard to say."

On the Cosumnes, fish are still finding their way up the river and Kennedy will be checking out reports of additional salmon this week.

He said the bulk of the spawning activity is taking place from below Highway 16 to Dillard Road. "It's so late in the year the fish kind of stop at the first available spawning habitat," he explained. "We saw very few fish above the fish ladder. Less than five."

Kennedy was in charge of the foundation's project to build a new fish ladder on the south side of Granlees Dam in 2002. The $376,000 cost was paid with grants from federal and state agencies.

Kennedy said other projects planned for the Cosumnes include introducing new gravel beds in the river below Highway 16 to encourage spawning.

The larger question about the future of the Chinook salmon in the Central Valley's network of rivers is more complicated. "The forces at work here are really big," said Kennedy. "A lot of people say it's water quality. It's water exports from the Delta ... ... It could be something as big as global warming. ... If this is truly what everybody says it is, and it's a run collapse, then it's going to take a long time to recover and it's going to require a lot of big changes.

"There's a lot of things you can do individually to reduce the stressors on the population of fish in the Bay Delta and then in all the rivers. ... You can conserve water, you can watch where you change your oil, know you're not pumping toxins into the ecosystem. ... Look at the population of California. If everybody thinks their little change, their incremental change is going to add to the collective change, then imagine what a difference it could make."