Film about CZU Lightning Complex fire, salmon airs Friday on KQED

SANTA CRUZ — A documentary created by a UC Santa Cruz alum about endangered coho salmon and their struggle to survive in the Santa Cruz Mountains through the CZU Lightning Complex fire will air on the local Public Broadcasting Station KQED this Friday.

The film, called “Southern Range: Salmon in the Santa Cruz Mountains,” came about through a collaboration with the director, Kyle Baker, who earned an MFA in social documentation in 2020, UCSC professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Eric Palkovacs, and Jonathan Hicken, executive director of the Seymour Center Marine Discovery Center.

“This was a collaborative project from Day 1,” said Hicken. “Eric brought his expertise in fisheries science, I brought community connections, and Kyle brought the creativity to tell the story of our local salmon and the community-based efforts to help them.”

The documentary will air on KQED at 8:30 p.m. Friday and at 8 p.m. June 21. The film will also air at 5 p.m. on June 9 on the KQED Plus channel.

Palkovacs, who contributed his expert knowledge to the film, also serves as the director of the Fisheries Collaborative Program, which gives UCSC researchers the opportunity to team up with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association scientists at the Southwest Fisheries Science Center on projects focusing on marine life and conservation along the coast.

“I work on lots of different things but one of my main interests is anadromous fishes like salmon,” said Palkovacs. “Their life cycles, their adaptations to environmental conditions, to changing environmental conditions and their conservation.”

Baker had first reached out to Palkovacs for a previous documentary project called “Salmon Nation,” which was a collection of short interviews with individuals who are involved with salmon species in various ways.

“That’s how we started talking and at that point, we thought it would be fun to think about doing a longer form documentary,” said Palkovacs. “We let the idea marinate and then the CZU Lightning Complex fires happened and that became a really compelling story because a lot of the watersheds that we work in and have the last endangered coho salmon were severely burned in that wildfire.”

The wildfire and its effects on coho salmon, most notably in the Scott Creek watershed, then became a central theme of the documentary. Palkovacs pointed out that the fire not only affected local wildlife but all residents of Santa Cruz County.

“Everybody in the community has some point of reference with respect to those fires,” said Palkovacs. “And we wanted to tell the story of how the fish, and the people invested in these fish from the scientific perspective and from the conservation and restoration perspective, and from the community perspective, had experienced these fires and were trying to save the fish through this really rough period.”

Scott Creek is home to the southernmost spawning population of coho salmon in North America. Palkovacs said the population has been depleted over the years and there are very few fish left, which was only exacerbated by the CZU Lightning Complex fire.

“That’s why a lot of the conservation and research is going into restoring not just Scott Creek, but restoring the neighboring watersheds,” said Palkovacs. “So that we have fish in a variety of watersheds in Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties, and not just this one. If we continue to support one watershed by itself, it’s a really risky strategy.”