Santa Clara River (California) - Ecology

Ecology

The surrounding riparian natural area is of interest to conservancy organizations because it is habitat for the threatened species such as the unarmored three-spined stickleback, southern steelhead, southwestern pond turtle, and least Bell's vireo.

Historic documentation of an important recreational steelhead trout (Oncorhyncus mykiss) fishery occurs for the Santa Clara River into the mid 1900s. The steelhead trout run on the Santa Clara river prior to 1940 is estimated to have had thousands of fish and to have been one of the largest steelhead runs in southern California. Construction of the Vern Freeman Diversion Dam and other migration barriers on the mainstem, Santa Paula Creek, Sespe Creek, Piru Creek, and other tributaries during the mid 1900s appear to be correlated with the demise of the steelhead run as habitat availability decreased and surface flows decreased. Adult steelhead still try to migrate up the river with an adult trapped at the Vern Freeman Dam in 2001. A wild, self-sustainable rainbow trout population still exists in the headwaters of the Santa Paula, Sespe, Hopper, and Piru Creek tributaries and is producing out-migrating steelhead smolts bound for the Pacific. However, challenges to outgoing smolt migration include low to no stream flows downstream of the dam or predation in the coastal estuary. Genetic analysis of the steelhead in the Santa Clara River watershed has shown them to be of native and not hatchery stocks.

Pronghorn antelope (Antilocapra americana) used to roam along the Santa Clara River, as Father Pedro Font, describe in his diary on the de Anza Expedition February 1776, "We saw in the plain a very large drove of antelopes which, as soon as they saw us, fled like the wind, looking like a cloud skimming along the earth." Also for antelope, there is a Ventureño word for antelope: q'aq, which is different from their separate words for deer and elk.(personal communication with Timothy Henry, January 30, 2011)

The Santa Clara-Mojave River Ranger District of the Angeles National Forest is named after the Santa Clara River.