Long cut off from natal spawning grounds, chinook salmon and steelhead haven’t accessed Grant County’s upper Malheur River and its tributaries for decades. With an eye to the return of anadromous fish, the Burns Paiute Tribe is focused on restoring the river’s native, resident fish populations in salmon-friendly water.

Chinook salmon and steelhead were once abundant in eastern Oregon’s Malheur River and an important food source for the Paiute tribes. The run began to decline after the construction of the Warm Springs Dam in 1919 and the Agency Valley Dam near Beulah in 1935. Although these two water storage facilities, currently operated by the Bureau of Reclamation, are located many river miles from the mouth of the Malheur, they effectively blocked upstream migrating adult fish from historically important spawning and rearing grounds.

The river now supports primarily endangered bull trout, threatened by hybridization with brook trout, and red band trout along with sculpin and dace, Erica Maltz, fisheries program manager for the Burns Paiute Tribe.

Minus anadromous fish, the Burns Paiute Tribe is working to improve habitat for resident fish where salmon and steelhead once spawned and juveniles reared. Since 1997 the tribe has managed resident bull trout with Bonneville Power Administration funding. Maltz said her program is one of 70 resident fish programs funded by BPA in the Northwest. She said the tribe first used the support to collect data on the river, mostly on public land.

“Before 1997 no one had done extensive fisheries work in the Malheur except stocking,” Maltz said.

While the state manages the fishery for recreational angling and sets the fishing season, the tribe went about determining fish species and densities by electrofishing the upper reaches of the river and its tributaries, Maltz said. Besides bull trout and red band trout she said they found sculpin and dace.

The baseline data on the Malheur National Forest was collected and in 2010 the tribe completed a salmon recovery plan identifying non-native brook trout as a major threat to native species.

“In the final recovery plan brook trout were listed as a primary limiting factor,” Maltz said.

Brook trout prey on native fish and compete with them for food, Maltz said, but the most significant impact is their tendency to spawn with bull trout. The hybrids can then breed with other hybrids, bull trout and brook trout.

“They can swamp the genetics,” Maltz said of the brook trout, “and slowly over time the native bull trout will dwindle out.”

Not a lot is known how brook trout affect red band trout, the other main resident species, Maltz said, but because brook trout are so prolific and adaptable they at the very least outcompete them.

“The brook trout are crazy good at living,” Maltz said. “They are like the cockroaches of the river.”

For almost a decade the tribe has worked with other agencies to remove brook trout from the Malheur River system through electroshocking and gill netting, but Maltz said they can’t get ahead of the exploding population. In recent years she said stakeholders have been working on a plan to use rotenone to remove the brook trout. She said a three-year, multi-agency planning effort has come to the conclusion that a more permanent solution is needed.

“We are working toward rotenone to try and present a discrete solution to the problem,” Maltz said.

She said using a piscicide is complicated. Mussels and native fish would have to be collected and held for a day or two while rotenone is applied to the stream. To limit effects of rotenone downstream from the target area, Maltz said a neutralizer would be applied to the stream.

“I’m not certain this will be what happens, but at the biologist level it is what we think is the best solution and we have policy support from tribal council and the Forest Service,” Maltz said.

A lot of the reaches identified for treatment are immediately upstream from property the tribe bought with Bonneville mitigation funding where riparian habitat restoration is on-going, another issue identified in the salmon recovery plan.

“Legacy land use has created channelization through the effects of splash dams from early era logging,” Maltz said.

She said splash dams and the removal of riparian vegetation for better access left the streams lacking complexity. The 8,000 acres of tribal-owned land along the Malheur River is being managed for conservation.

Maltz said, “We actively manage both properties with weed removal and riparian planting and fencing to create more wildlife habitat, while keeping a focus on in-stream restoration of native fish populations, to the extent that we can.”

The end game for the tribe is the return of salmon, blocked by the dams at the head of Hells Canyon. Maltz said the Paiutes are in discussion with Idaho Power to create some kind of fish passage.

“The tribes have historically asked for annual trap and haul at Hells Canyon,” Maltz said. “We have also discussed the potential to collect downstream migrating juveniles in each tributary, but trap and haul may be the most feasible method of fish passage available currently.”