On the Nisqually, at the south end of Puget Sound, a run of Chinook is doing something almost no other Puget Sound Chinook run is doing: trending back up.
It didn't happen by leaving the river alone. It happened because the Nisqually Indian Tribe — carrying the legacy of the great treaty-rights leader Billy Frank Jr. — rebuilt the estuary the young fish depend on, and ran an active hatchery alongside it. Habitat and production, worked together, on purpose.
Young Chinook rear in the tidal marsh of a river's delta before they head to sea. On the Nisqually, most of that marsh had been diked off and drained for over a century. So the Tribe brought it back.
The Nisqually Tribe restored more than nine hundred acres of the delta — the largest estuary restoration in the Pacific Northwest.
A 2009 dike removal returned tidal flow to roughly 750 acres at once, reopening the nursery habitat juvenile Chinook need to survive their first months.
The surrounding delta is protected as the Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge — named in 2015 for the Nisqually leader who spent his life fighting for these fish.
Here is the part that matters for the argument. The Nisqually is the strongest habitat-restoration story in the state — and its Chinook recovery is not a story of habitat alone. The Tribe runs active hatchery production (at Clear Creek and Kalama Creek) right alongside the restored delta. Rebuild the nursery, and put fish in the system to use it. That combination — habitat plus active production — is what turned the trend line up.
And there's a second lesson here worth naming. The Nisqually has dams — the Alder and La Grande dams, which power tens of thousands of homes — but they sit above natural waterfalls that salmon never passed anyway. They block no salmon habitat. Not every dam is a fish problem; the data decides that river by river.
Twenty-two of the Puget Sound Chinook populations are listed as threatened, and most of them are flat or falling after twenty-five years of the hands-off approach. The Nisqually is one of the few pointed the other way — and it's the one where somebody did the most, and did it deliberately: the biggest estuary restoration in the region plus an active hatchery, run by the Tribe closest to the fish.
That's the template. Not "restore the habitat and wait," and not "run the hatchery and ignore the river" — both, together, on purpose. See the rest of the record, read about how we work, or get involved.
"Trending toward recovery" is not "recovered" — Nisqually Chinook are still a listed, at-risk run, and ocean conditions and harvest all play their part in a given year. The estuary work is young in salmon terms, and the full payoff will take decades to read. We don't claim the job is finished.
But in a Puget Sound where most Chinook runs have gone nowhere under protection alone, the one that's rising is the one where a tribe rebuilt the habitat and produced the fish. That direction, against that backdrop, is exactly the proof we point to.
The figures on this page are drawn from public, authoritative records:
Questions about our facts and figures? Contact us.