Trout colony thriving in urbanized stream / Discovery buoys effort to restore Codornices Creek

Trout colony thriving in urbanized stream / Discovery buoys effort to restore Codornices Creek

By Patrick Hoge

Source: sfgate

9/9/2004

Credit: Mark Costantini

Workers beginning the long-sought restoration of one of the East Bay's largest urban creeks have discovered an unexpected treasure -- scores of trout thriving in a concrete channel.

Biologists last week removed more than 100 trout -- some of them 12 inches long -- from an overgrown section of Codornices Creek in West Berkeley that is part of a $2 million series of projects that, among other things, will create a half-mile-long park along a revitalized creek.

everal more fish were found Wednesday. The number and size surprised everyone, and it is very possible that some are steelhead, meaning they have traveled to the ocean, fisheries biologist Jeff Hagar said Wednesday. The only way to tell the difference is to kill a fish and test it, he said.

About half of the fish removed from the creek were found in a 270-foot long, 3 1/2-foot-deep concrete sluice that was completely overgrown with willows and nonnative blackberry bushes.