The Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, Olympic National Park, and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife announced that a tribal ceremonial and subsistence fishery for coho salmon on the Elwha River will be open for a limited time during fall 2024.
The Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission last week voted unanimously to select Debbie Colbert as the new ODFW Director.
A parasitic worm that can infest the brains of moose appears to be playing a role in the decline of the iconic animal in some regions of North America.
In the 1940s and 1950s, the ocean off the coast of Los Angeles was a dumping ground for the nation’s largest manufacturer of the pesticide DDT – a chemical now known to harm humans and wildlife. Due to the stubborn chemistry of DDT and its toxic breakdown products, this pollution continues to plague L.A.’s coastal waters more than half a century later.
Two conservation groups followed up on their threat to sue in federal court against federal, state and local governments, saying that lower Columbia River hatcheries downstream of Bonneville Dam are a threat to wild salmon and steelhead listed under the federal Endangered Species Act.
NOAA Fisheries denied a request by Alaskan Native communities for an emergency action requiring that no Chinook salmon be caught in the Bering Sea pollock fishery – a proposal that would basically cap the bycatch at zero and limit or close the largest fishery in the United States.
Nearly $5 million to move forward on the removal of northeast Washington’s Enloe Dam is included in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announcement that 29 states will receive just over $70 million to support 43 projects that will address outdated or obsolete dams, culverts, levees and other barriers fragmenting the nation’s rivers and streams. Another $8 million will go to projects in Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington.
American Rivers is leading a project team to remove the Kellogg Dam at the mouth of the Kellogg Creek, a tributary of the Lower Willamette River. The work will help threatened Upper Willamette River Chinook and steelhead, Lower Columbia River coho, and Pacific lamprey to access upstream spawning and rearing habitat for juveniles.
Approximately 1 million young Chinook salmon have died at the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Samish Hatchery near Burlington after a mechanical failure at 1 a.m. on Monday morning, April 29.
Washington’s wolf population grew for the 15th consecutive year in 2023, according to the Washington Gray Wolf Conservation and Management 2023 Annual Report released by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.
With the fishery expected to have already met its allowable catch, recreational spring Chinook fishing on the Columbia River mainstem from Bonneville Dam to the Oregon/Washington border was closed Tuesday, April 30, by fishery managers from Washington and Oregon.
Nearly 18,000 young salmon died after a vandal poured bleach into a southern Oregon Coast fish hatchery tank last week, according to law enforcement authorities.
Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks is seeking public input on a potential project that would place nearly 33,000 acres of private timberland in northwest Montana under a conservation easement and protect working lands, public recreation access, and wildlife habitat.
The U.S. Department of Energy, Washington State Department of Ecology, and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency this week announced a landmark agreement that the agencies say proposes “a realistic and achievable course” for cleaning up millions of gallons of radioactive and chemical waste from large, underground tanks at the Hanford Site near the Columbia River.
FISH WAR, a documentary film produced by Northwest Treaty Tribes Media and North Forty Productions, will have its world premiere at the Seattle International Film Festival at 5 p.m. Saturday, May 11, with an additional matinee screening at 1 p.m. Sunday, May 12.
2023 was a year of accelerated activity in the ongoing process of modernizing the Columbia River Treaty.
The status of southwest Washington salmon and steelhead listed under the federal Endangered Species Act is generally stable, although none of these fish populations are close to meeting recovery goals, says a recent report by the Lower Columbia Fish Recovery Board and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Asotin Creek adult summer steelhead survival is at its lowest in the Bonneville Dam pool as the fish migrate upstream to the Snake River tributary, according to a presentation last week that focused on survival of steelhead listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act. Temperature and harvest (catch and release mortalities) are cited as the main reasons for steelhead struggles in the Bonneville Pool.
Researchers who created “family trees” for nearly 10,000 fish found that first-generation, wild-born descendants of hatchery-origin Chinook salmon in an Oregon river show improved fitness.
The minimum known count of wolves in Oregon at the end of 2023 was 178 wolves, according to the Oregon Wolf Conservation and Management annual report released this week by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. This is the same number documented in 2022 and does not include 10 wolves translocated to Colorado in 2023 to help establish a wolf population there.
The Pacific Fishery Management Council acted unanimously to recommend closure of California’s commercial and recreational ocean salmon fisheries through the end of the year, mirroring recommendations made last year to close the fisheries in 2023.
The Center for Biological Diversity this week filed a petition with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service seeking Endangered Species Act protections for the ashy pebblesnail and shortface lanx.
With lower-than-average water flow in the lower Columbia River expected during the spring juvenile salmon and steelhead outmigration, fishery managers at the interagency Technical Management Team last week asked for additional flow augmentation from Lake Roosevelt, the reservoir backed up behind Grand Coulee Dam on the upper river, to aid fish migration.
The Department of the Interior announced a $19 million investment to install solar panels over irrigation canals in California, Oregon and Utah, simultaneously decreasing evaporation of critical water supplies and advancing clean energy goals.
Well-placed woody debris in streams results in a two- to three-fold increase of juvenile salmon, according to a recently completed review.
An Earthwise Knowledge Initiative Publication
