The 2002 spring chinook salmon return to the Columbia River has been a forecaster's nightmare, but it remains a fisherman's dream because the very worst scenario described to date still amounts to one of the biggest upriver counts on record.
Oregon's governor on Tuesday again challenged the Northwest and country as a whole to attack the salmon recovery issue at full power or be turned down a road of social, economic and legal chaos that leads ultimately to dam breaching.
For the second consecutive year, the spring chinook salmon tangle net fishery on the Columbia and Willamette rivers is showing positive results in immediate survival, according to an interim report by Oregon and Washington fisheries agencies. In addition, a recently completed study on long-term survival is showing that adults caught in the tangle net and released are surviving in high numbers.
Only the "wild, naturally producing" fish among 15 West Coast salmon and steelhead stocks should be listed under the Endangered Species Act, according to petitions sent Thursday to the National Marine Fisheries Service by a group of 17 national, regional and local conservation groups.
The Senate on Thursday passed a sweeping energy bill that would allow owners of non-federal hydroelectric dams to change new fishway requirements if they showed they could meet environmental standards in less costly ways or benefit power production.
Columbia River sport fishers' piece of the spring chinook salmon pie is shrinking as the number of adult fish continues to lag -- behind expectations and far, far behind last year's record run.
Barely one-quarter of the way through 2002, the federal agency charged with recovering gray wolf populations in the West has been forced to kill nearly as many of the marauding animals as it did during all of 2001.
Excerpts from a public letter issued on April 9 by Ed Bangs, the USFWS' Rocky Mountain Wolf Recovery coordinator, explaining his agency's wolf control actions:
"The first control action of 2002 involved 3 uncollared wolves originally from the Gravely pack near Dillon, Montana.
Economists are finding that the cost to produce smolts at Northwest hatcheries stays relatively steady over the years, but the cost of returning adults is inconsistent and can be expensive, depending on ocean conditions and the location of the hatchery, among other factors.
An estimated 75,000 to 90,000 yearling Twisp River spring chinook salmon died April 13-14 when debris borne by heavy rains clogged water intake screens at a remote salmon rearing pond site, according to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.
The National Marine Fisheries Service has provided its Columbia River
Basin salmon recovery partners with a set of numerical targets to help
"size" the task at hand -- building fish populations to the point that
they can be removed from the Endangered Species list, and beyond.
The National Marine Fisheries Service has released an early draft
biological opinion that identifies the Bureau of Reclamation's on-going
irrigation projects, started nearly a century ago, as harmful to
steelhead in the Umatilla River.
An 11th-hour settlement has been reached between bird conservation
groups and fish management entities that would guide fast-arriving
Caspian terns toward Columbia River estuary nesting grounds where the
predatory birds are believed to be less of a threat to migrating
juvenile salmon.
The Northwest Power Planning Council on Wednesday recommended $36.3
million in funding for fish and wildlife projects in the Blue Mountain
and Mountain Snake "provinces" in northeastern Oregon, southeastern
Washington and central Idaho.
A deep plunge into experimental tangle net fishing presented some
logistical nightmares, but the just-ended season was mostly positive for
non-tribal commercial fishers who enjoyed their biggest haul of Columbia
River basin spring chinook salmon since 1991, and found the market was
willing to pay top dollar for the catch.
Federal agencies this week revealed that overall they will spend more in 2003 and 2004 for Columbia River Basin salmon and steelhead recovery activities than they did in 2002.
A group of Yakama tribal fishers hope a proposed portable
fish-processing enterprise will help them play a larger role in the
sales of salmon caught from the Columbia River.
Two Columbia Basin fishing interests often at odds about how to share
fish harvests have united in an effort to wring more dollars from next
year's federal budget.
The money is needed, they say, to ward off hatchery production cutbacks
and provide funding for fish marking that is allowing a more bountiful
harvest of returning hatchery salmon and steelhead through selective
fisheries.
The spring chinook salmon catch is small as of yet, in the first-ever
full fleet, "live capture" commercial fishery on the Columbia River
mainstem.
But the strategy has shown the promise of accomplishing its dual goal --
allowing commercial fishers to catch and keep more fish without
increasing their impact on salmon and steelhead listed under the
Endangered Species Act.
The Department of Interior this week came out against a bill that would
authorize federal funding to rehabilitate an aging private dam and
enhance and restore salmon habitat in Oregon's Wallowa River Basin.
In the 1880s, two canneries took some 12,000 sockeye salmon two years in
a row from Wallowa Lake in Eastern Oregon. By 1905, the run was gone.
Alaska sockeye were dumped in the lake in the 1920s, but the last year
anyone remembers seeing an ocean-going sockeye in the Wallowa River was
1926, the year Wallowa Lake Dam was raised to its final height to
provide water for irrigators downstream.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation this week tossed the Klamath River
basin's hottest potato to two federal fisheries agencies -- issuing its
proposed plan for apportioning available water among irrigators while
still aiming to preserve habitat for imperiled stocks of fish.
Thirteen environmental and fishing groups on Tuesday sought to intervene
in a federal court lawsuit that is challenging the Endangered Species
Act protected status of coho salmon in the Klamath River basin.
More than 200 people, including rancher Stan Hermens, attended public
meetings across Oregon this week to learn about disease transmission,
testing methods and hunter safety following the confirmation of
tuberculosis in a cow elk that died on Hermens' elk farm in Eastern
Oregon last November.
It will cost an estimated $390 million over 10 years to implement
proposed structural improvements and changes in operations at four lower
Snake River federal dams under a chosen strategy to improve the survival
of migrating juvenile salmon listed under the Endangered Species Act.
An Earthwise Knowledge Initiative Publication
