On Thu, 14 Jul 2005 09:38:18 -0600, rw
wrote:

San Francisquito Creek is near my house in Menlo Park, along the
boundary of Menlo Park and Palo Alto. This in on the Peninsula, on the
opposite side of the bay from Berkeley. There are occasional steelhead
in the creek, which is amazing to me because it's completely dried up in
the summer. I suppose the fish spawn in the headwaters, which have at
least some water year-round.

Really a stretch trying to remember where I read about rainbows and
the advantages of spring spawning but I did go to my fav-o-rite and
best of all books about trout & their habitat - Trout Streams by Paul
Needham and found this about steelhead - "They are good fish to plant
in small, cold lakes; for being spring spawners, they will utilize the
tributary streams that later in the summer may dry up or become very
low."

From somewhere else - don't remember whrere but I'll haunt the
bookcase & hopefully will find it - the spring flows of cold water
with high oxygen content serve the rainbow, their eggs and young well
as they spawn, hatch, grow and are out before the streams dy up in the
summer and they are thus favored because of the lack of predators in a
seasonally flowing stream.

Kiyu