Video: Salmon Swim Across Road in Washington State

People driving in Washington state captured salmon swimming across a road on video this week.

U.S. Highway 101 in Shelton, Washington, became inundated after the Skokomish River reached flood stage. According to the National Weather Service’s Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service, the river reached minor flood stage near Potlatch on Nov. 4.

“We kind of saw one fish dart across the road,” Alexis Leonard, a fish hatchery specialist, told CNN. She captured the video for her sister.

She said that salmon come from the Skokomish River and head to its creeks in order to spawn, or have babies.

“If they’re lucky, it'll meet up with the creek on the other side of the road, if they’re not they’re stranded,” Leonard said of the flooding.

She said that due to heavy rain, the fish population generally explodes.

“You can go from a few fish to a few thousand fish overnight,” she said.

Shelton is located about 20 miles northwest of Olympia, the state capital.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, “Salmon first travel from their home stream to the ocean, which can be a distance of hundreds of miles. Once they reach the ocean, they might travel an additional 1,000 miles to reach their feeding grounds.”

Meanwhile, the fish “come back to the stream where they were ‘born’ because they ‘know’ it is a good place to spawn; they won’t waste time looking for a stream with good habitat and other salmon,” said the agency. “Scientists believe that salmon navigate by using the earth’s magnetic field like a compass. When they find the river they came from, they start using smell to find their way back to their home stream. They build their ’smell memory-bank' when they start migrating to the ocean as young fish.”