Nov. 30, 1993 I got the call. "They're in the culvert!" whispered the voice on the other end, as if it might not be true if she said it out loud.

It was Nancy Malmgren. Members of the Carkeek Watershed Community Action Project had been looking out for the salmon for several weeks, although each year they expected only a few stragglers to return. The last salmon disappeared from Piper's Creek in 1927 because of sewage, habitat loss and contaminated runoff from the growing development in the watershed.

Now the watershed that feeds the creeks in Carkeek Park with water is paved with streets for businesses and thousands of households.

What Malmgren was telling me was that there were chum salmon at the entrance to Piper's Creek in Carkeek Park. The high tide the next morning would allow them to jump the first weir into the creek. These salmon had been here before; they were not born here but were released as fry by hundreds of children and volunteers three to five years earlier.

Members of the Carkeek Watershed Community Action group began salmon enhancement efforts for Piper's Creek in 1980, but returns were not predictably observed until 1994. Over the years, many agencies and hundreds of volunteers have contributed to the effort.

The program has grown more than tenfold since the group began, and in 2008 children and volunteers released more than 50,000 chum fingerlings from the Suquamish Tribe's Grover Creek Salmon Hatchery. Local school children in the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife's Salmon in the Classroom program who raise chum salmon from eggs release another 5,000 into Piper's Creek each year.

The young salmon are held in an imprinting pool with Venema Creek water for two weeks under the painstaking care of the watershed action Salmon Committee, then released on a high tide at night to help them avoid predators on their way down to Puget Sound.

Chum salmon were selected for the stock supplementation program, managed by the Salmon Committee and Seattle Parks staff at Carkeek Park in cooperation with department of fish and wildlife Volunteer Fisheries Resource Program. Chum are well suited to shorter drainage systems like Piper's Creek, as they spawn very close to the entrance of a creek or river. The young chums have a shorter residency time in the creek, moving out to the eel grass beds soon after emerging from the gravel.

As a result, they have less exposure to pollution and flashy stormwater flows from urban runoff in the creek. The young salmon spend three to five years at sea, traveling about 3,200 kilometers, before returning to their home creek to spawn.

Less than 1 percent of the fish will survive to return. Many fall prey to predators, including larger fish, birds, marine mammals, and human fisheries or succumb to habitat loss and pollution.

To everyone's amazement and delight, more than 300 salmon returned to Piper's Creek in the winter of 1994. More than 400 chum salmon returned to Piper's Creek in Carkeek Park last year.

A lot of hard work feeding and caring for the young hatchery fish is needed to make that happen. And there would be no point in releasing young fish if there was not good habitat and plenty of clean water for the returning adults.

The adults need clean gravel in which to lay their eggs in nests called redds. Weirs were built so that the chums could swim up to the choice spawning areas in the creeks. Cedar trees and shrubs were planted to hold the banks of the creek in place as the water from the streets above rushes by, too much for the urbanized watershed to absorb.

There is a great deal more to do, though, and neither the volunteers in the park nor Seattle's local agencies can do it all.

Seattle Public Utilities Natural Drainage Projects in the neighborhood are helping slow the flow. People in the watershed above the park are learning that everything that goes into the storm drains and ditches on the streets where they live feeds the creek, and that they must be kept clean. Everything that impacts Piper's Creek Ultimately affects Puget Sound.

Hundreds of people came to the park last year to see the miracle of the urban salmon. Many people who have released salmon fry into the creek since 1989 have come back to welcome their fish home. Our returning chums are left to spawn naturally in the gravel.

They spash quietly in the water below, each female laying two to four thousand eggs. Soon their tired bodies lie in the shallows and along the banks. As they dissolve into nutrients for the food chain and the next generation, the smell of their decaying flesh wafts up into the neighborhood....It smells like history, and like hope.

Next spring, if young salmon from the redds survive the flows from our urban watershed, they will emerge from the gravel. They'll quickly move out to the shelter of the eelgrass beds in Puget Sound, beginning their long and perilous journey in the hope they will return in three to five years' time.

Piper's Creek is not a natural system any longer, it is an urbanized creek. So for now we will have to help the salmon runs by supplementing them with hatchery fish. Each salmon return is like a report card and a reminder for us to keep working to protect and restore the water quality in the Piper's Creek Watershed and Puget Sound.

Now we're approaching the winter of 2009, and again we await our grade.

Call 684-0877 to get involved.

Upcoming events:

Salmon Steward Training, Oct. 18. Volunteer some of your weekends at Carkeek to help educate visitors about Piper's Creek salmon and the watershed. We'll teach you all you need to know.

Work Party, Water Quality and the Clean Water Act, Oct. 18. Help us with some habitat work! Get your hands dirty and find out how dirty the creek is. Call 363-4116.

Salmon Watching, Nov. 8- Dec. 14. The chum usually start entering Piper's Creek in November. We will have Salmon Stewards available near the creek from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays and on Friday, Nov. 28.