The Osprey Spring/Summer 2024

THE OSPREY

The International Journal of Salmon and Steelhead Conservation

Cory Goldsworthy

Jonathan Moore and Kara Pitman

By Joseph Bogaard

By Will Atlas

Chair Pete Soverel

Editor Jim Yuskavitch

Editorial Committee

Pete Soverel • Kathleen Bergeron

Greg Knox • Brian Braidwood

Rich Simms • Ryan Smith Guy Fleischer

Scientific Advisors

Rick Williams • Jack Stanford

Jim Lichatowich • Bill McMillan

Bill Bakke • Michael Price

Design & Layout Jim Yuskavitch

The Osprey is published by: Wild Salmon Rivers 16430 72nd Avenue, West Edmonds, WA 98026

Letters To The Editor

The Osprey welcomes letters to the editor and article proposals. The Osprey P.O. Box 13121 Portland, OR 97213 jyusk@bendcable.com

General business and change of address: https://www.ospreysteelhead.org/contact

The Osprey is a joint publication of not-for-profit organizations concerned with the conservation and sustainable management of wild Pacific salmon and steelhead and their habitat throughout their native and introduced ranges. This unique partnership includes The Conservation Angler, Fly Fishers International, Steelhead Society of British Columbia, SkeenaWild Conservation Trust, Wild Salmon Center, and Wild Steelhead Coalition. Financial support is provided by partner organizations, individuals, clubs and corporations. The Osprey is publishes three issues per year: Winter, Spring/Summer and Fall. All materials are copyrighted and require permission prior to reprinting or other use.

Author! Author!

by Jim Yuskavitch

Long-time readers of The Osprey know that the arrival of the spring/summer issue in their mailbox will soon be followed by a reminder that we need your continued generous support to keep us in the business of advocating for wild salmon, steeelhead and their habitat. Your contributions, along with funding from our partner organizations, is critical.

But there is another group of vital contributors to The Osprey, “hiding in plain sight” as the saying goes, who have really never gotten the recognition they deserve. These people are The Osprey’s writers and photographers, and their efforts and expertise to create the content that gives our modest publication its true value.

It wasn’t always this way. Some readers may recall that The Osprey began as a photocopied newsletter, stapled in a corner and distributed to a small group of Seattle-area steelheaders — the Federation of Fly Fishers Steelhead Committee — with articles written by group members along with reprints from various scientific publications.

Taking the next step to beef up and expand The Osprey’s content and name recognition was a challenge. Unknown outside a small circle of avid steelheaders, my first attempts could be frustrating, with responses from new potential authors ranging from jokes about “the osprey nest down the street” to the scientist who just laughed at me when I asked if he might be willing to write a short article about his work.

But over time, more fisheries professionals — scientists, managers, wild fish advocates, and environmental attorneys — were willing to give us the benefit of the doubt and write articles or provide photography, which served to increase The Osprey’s profile and credibility.

With The Osprey’s current reputation as a serous and unique wild fish periodical, finding first-rate people to write for us is much easier now despite the fact that we don’t have a budget to provide authors with a stipend. On the contrary, through the content they provide, their cumulative knowl-

edge imparted to our readers is worth tens of thousands of dollars in in-kind contributions. The truth, though, is that the value of their collective contribution is incalculable.

As The Osprey’s reputation has grown within scientific circles because of those authors, there has been an unexpected development. More and more fisheries science graduate students are writing for The Osprey. Despite the fact that we are not a peer-reviewed journal, many students feel that publishing in The Osprey is good for their future careers. I know more than few working professional fisheries scientists whose first professionally-written paper was published in The Osprey

That’s incredibly gratifying to me, making The Osprey not just about the future of wild fish, but also about future wild fish advocates.

How The Osprey Helps Wild Fish

The Osprey has been bringing the latest science, policy, opinion and news stories to its readers supporting wild Pacific salmon and steelhead conservation and management for 37 years. But we are much more than a publication that you subscribe to because of your own interest in wild fish conservation. The funds we receive from our subscribers allows us to send The Osprey to wild fish conservation decision-makers and influencers including scientists, fisheries managers, politicians and wild fish advocates.

Sending The Osprey to decision makers is key to our wild fish conservation advocacy. Your support makes that possible.

So when you subscribe/donate to The Osprey, you not only receive a subscription yourself, but you also help us put The Osprey into the hands of the people we need bring to our side to save our wild fish.

Please go to the subscription/donation form on page 23 or on-line at www.ospreysteelhead.org/donation and donate whatever you are able. Thank you.

Jim Yuskavitch Editor, The Osprey

Photo Courtesy Library of Congress

Restoring Angling Opportunity with Wild Fish Conservation Focused Regulations

By Pete Soverel

Over the past forty years or so, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has approved Endangered Species Act (ESA) petitions to list almost every wild steelhead population in Washington State. Of course, these listings do not apply to the scores, probably hundreds, of stocks that have already been exterminated. NOAA approved recovery plans, hatchery management plans, critical habitat designations, restored migration pathways, fishery management plans that are mostly predicated on simply closing fisheries — especially recreational fisheries. The net result, with few exceptions, is that no stocks have recovered or even marginally increased abundance, life history diversity, spatial distribution or any other measures of stock health. Plainly, the ESA recovery process is not working while angling opportunity has been drastically reduced, indeed virtually eliminated, without any tangible benefit to stock recovery.

Historically, the early returning component of the population (NovemberFebruary) represented about 60%-70% of the total return. Following decades of harmful hatchery practices and unsustainable harvest regimes, this population segment now teeters on the cusp of functional extirpation. Astonishingly, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) has continued, almost unabated, harmful hatchery practices and unlimited sports angling on this most at-risk population segment. Note for example, the Skagit River is open to unlimited angling, including hatchery harvest from November through January even though there are no hatchery smolt releases. Intense Tribal commercial fisheries continue to harvest this at-risk population segment. Meanwhile, WDFW closes angling on the most populous February-April run segment. So how has this paradigm worked out? Well, not so hot. Major limiting factors are not addressed, especially massive

hatchery releases, which are known to cause significant harm to wild stocks. Angling licenses have not increased with population growth, resulting in funding levels that are not keeping pace with WDFW’s rising operational costs. Let’s face it, the only folks who really care about the fish are tribal and sports anglers.

In my view, angling closures are particularly ill-advised as they sever the connection between the folks most in-

Better management alternatives to restore angling access include limited entry, and gear and method restrictions. These concepts have long been utilized in the hunting community.

terested in healthy populations from the object of their affections. Over the past thirty years or so, the number of steelhead anglers has declined by about 50% while concentrating anglers on those rivers which remain open. Consider, for example, the Suiattle River which has been closed to winter steelhead angling since 1976. How many times has WDFW patrolled that wild river during the winter closure over the past 48 years? Probably never. During this period, the only people fishing the Suiattle are local poachers. They fish in solitude while law-abiding anglers are deprived of a near-wilderness fishery two hours from Seattle. Meanwhile, anglers fish cheek to jowl on the Bogachiel and Hoh rivers.

There are better management alternatives to restore angler access with

limited entry and control angler related mortality with gear and method restrictions. For example, Bob Hooton, noted British Columbia steelhead biologist and regional fisheries manager, estimates that one gear angler with bait causes the same angler related steelhead mortality as sixty four fly anglers. Translated, that simply means enacting fly-fishing-only regulations immediately reduces angling mortality by 6.5 orders of magnitude.

These concepts have long been utilized in the hunting community — less efficient methods allow for more people to hunt for longer periods. For instance: no “robo” or live decoys, baiting; steel shot requirements; magazine capacity limitations; sneak boat bans; elimination of lead shot, punt guns, sunk blinds, shooting from boats under power regs for duck hunters; baiting prohibitions for bear, duck, goose hunting; prohibition on the use of dogs for bear and cougar hunting; special/extended seasons for primitive weapons (archery/muzzle loaders); special seasons for “master hunters;” extended falconry seasons; limited entry hunts; trophy tag lotteries; motor vehicle closed areas; prohibitions against “spot-lighting” and so on.

These restrictions are in general use throughout the U.S. and are widely accepted by the hunting public. These same concepts should be applied to angling:

a Ban the use of bait. Bait is many times more effective than other lures for steelhead and causes much higher mortality per encounter: a double whammy. (Reference: Facts and Issues Associated with Restricting Terminal Gear Types in the Management of Sustainable Steelhead Sport Fisheries in British Columbia, by R. S. Hooton, April 2001).

Gear Effectiveness—Flies: 1; per encounter mortality 1.5%; Artificial lure effectiveness: 6; per encounter mortality 4% (i.e. angler induced mortality

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The Osprey

equals 24 times fly only); Bait: catch per unit effort is 2.7 times that of artificial lure with per encounter mortality 10% equals about 100 times the mortality of fly only. Additionally, we know that preservatives used to cure salmon eggs are lethal to juvenile salmon, cutthroat and steelhead.

aReduce daily angling effort through limited entry

a Combine gear restrictions by limiting angler effort to dramatically reduce angler induced mortality.

Restrictions on gear type are not class warfare as often claimed by critics. Rather, they are management tools to preserve angling opportunity while limiting mortality. The tool kit:

aNo fishing from boats, which significantly reduces encounter rates while simultaneously providing extensive in-river sanctuaries. I am quite sure we would also see a dramatic increase in civilized behavior.

a Catch-and-release. The mortality associated with catch and release steelhead angling is low as noted above.

aDaily limit on released fish. For example, the Canadian province of Quebec requires anglers to cease angling after landing two Atlantic salmon in a day.

aFly fishing-only, which is by far the least efficient angling method. The inherent inefficiency of fly fishing can be further reduced by requiring the use of floating fly lines, banning weighted flies and so on.

aLimited entry, such as practiced for Atlantic salmon in eastern Canada, or Dean River steelhead and; Limiting the daily number of guides licensed on particular waters

In incontrovertibly, gear and method restrictions offer many options for insuring continued angling opportunity while limiting non-harvest mortality. These tools are not some sort of class warfare, but are a suite of management options to preserve opportunity while limiting lethal impacts.

Additionally, there is a natural relationship between fish populations and angling effort. As river-specific fish populations decline, there is a corresponding decline in angling effort with the related mortality decline. It is a natural phenomenon. If there are fewer fish, there will be fewer fishermen who will catch an even smaller percentage

Wild Salmon and Steelhead Lose One of Their Greatest Champions, Jim Lichatowich

Jim Lichatowich, famed fisheries biologist and wild salmon advocate, a friend, sage and advisor to me for almost 40 years, passed on April 27, 2024.

In 1987 I had just been designated as the Chair of the Federation of Fly Fishers Steelhead Committee, which published The Osprey in those days. I also was a member of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife advisory committee on steelhead. Shortly thereafter, Jim Lichatowich et.al. published the shocking and ground-breaking paper, Pacific Salmon at the Crossroads: Stocks at Risk from California, Oregon, Idaho, and Washington, detailing the dire state of wild salmon and steelhead across their native range in the lower 48 states. The agency biologists at the advisory meeting pooh poohed this seminal report, calling them “paper biologists,” “Chicken Little arm wavers,” and “What do they know …”

For me, this was a clarion call to wild steelhead conservation based upon protecting the best remaining populations. Tom Pero and I decided to found an organization to pursue those goals. The first person we approached was Jim Lichatowich, who had recently left the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and moved to Sequim, Washington. Over the course of that visit, Jim urged us to create a center to serve as a repository for salmon and steelhead scientific papers, documents, reports and so on and to commit to protecting the remaining best salmon and steelhead stocks around the Pacific Rim. We did, founding The Wild Salmon Center in 1992 with those goals as our guiding star. From then until his recent passing, Jim has been a valued advisor first to the Wild Salmon Center, then The Conservation Angler and for the past decade a senior scientific advisor to The Osprey. Throughout, he championed faithfulness to critical analysis of data, commitment to conservation of wild fish, the dangers posed by hatcheries and a dedication to adaptive management.

If fish managers would emulate Jim’s commitment to wild, naturally produced salmon and steelhead, we and the fish would be much better off. Rest easy, Jim — we’ll carry the water you drew for us.

— Pete Soverel

Jim Lichatowich (left) with co-authors Jack Williams and Willa Nehlsen in 1991, just after their seminal paper, Pacific Salmon at the Crossroads, was published. Photo by Jim Yuskavitch

Consider how this might work in practice on, say, the Sauk/Skagit rivers where wild steelhead are a listed under the ESA. The 2024 return is projected about 6,000 — well below the healthy escapement goal but also not at risk of near-term extirpation. Most western states limit non-resident big game tags to not more than 10% of the available tags with similar restrictions on the number of licensed guides per big game unit. We should adopt similar restrictions for our rivers, which could work out something like this:

aSkagit/Sauk Rivers: December 1-February 15 (77 days) fly fishing only. Projected early returning population: 600 fish. Set an angler encounter limit of 25% (150 steelhead). Fly fishing mortality rate: 1.5%. Angler encounter rate: 25% (i.e. one steelhead hooked for every four fishers). These limits provide for 600 rod days (i.e. 8 rods per day for this season segment). No more than one non-resident angler per day/no guiding:

Lake Superior Wild Steelhead Managing for self-sustaining populations

By Cory Goldsworthy

In case you haven’t heard, there is a long-standing debate amongst this great nation’s steelhead anglers — are Great Lakes steelhead “real” steelhead? Although not native, juvenile steelhead in Lake Superior tributaries still undergo smoltification — the physiological change that prepared their West Coast ancestors for adult life in saltwater — putting a scientifically defensible end to the debate. If more evidence was needed, the potamodromous adults migrate from the freshwaters of Lake Superior to the freshwater tributaries the same way the anadromous sea run adults migrate from saltwater to freshwater to spawn. West Coast steelhead were first introduced in Lake Superior in 1883 from the McCloud River system in northern California, and subsequent stocking events from other sources occurred through 1920. These fish naturalized to the freshwater environment, established spawning populations, and have provided a very popular sport fishery ever since. This fishery also provides a relatively small but very passionate and dedicated following of

anglers that have driven the focus of steelhead management for the past 30plus years.

The management history of steelhead in Minnesota tributaries to Lake Superior is long, complex, and at times cumbersome; however, it is important to understand the management actions of the past, what we learned from them, and how they guide our management strategies into the future. Encapsulated in this history is a decades-long shift in philosophy from an almost harvest-only mindset to a robust catch-and-release

The Minnesota waters of Lake Superior supported an abundant harvest-oriented steelhead fishery, but it began to decline in the 1970s and 1980s.

ethic amongst many anglers, with a stark divide occurring between folks swinging egg patterns in a river or trolling stickbaits and spoons on the “Big Lake”.

I grew up steelhead fishing Lake Superior tributaries in the western Upper Peninsula (U.P.) of Michigan, an almost Alaskan-esque place, where the inhabitants are affectionately known as Yoopers and the winters are long and snowy thanks to prevailing west winds picking up moisture from the Big Lake and dropping it on the rugged landscape. All the snow and consistent groundwater make the U.P. tributaries ideal spring steelhead fisheries. Steelhead fishing was a rite of passage from the long winter into the few snow-free months we got to enjoy, and no better feeling could be had than warm sun on your face, the smell of cedar trees in the melting woods, and the sounds of the river. My father worked in an iron ore mine and when he had a long weekend off in the spring he would grab the tent, my brother and I, some cans of beans and head to the Big Huron River at Big Eric’s Bridge. If we caught steelhead, we cooked them over the fire wrapped in tinfoil with butter and onions. If we didn’t catch any it was just beans and perhaps a stray hot dog or two. He would ferry my brother and I across the river on his back until we were old enough to cross on our own. It was a great place to be as a kid and a great way to learn many life lessons, like which end of the knife is the sharp end when cutting a hot dog stick as well as the more difficult lesson of (cue your dad’s voice), “Patience…” - which was always followed by a slight pause for effect and finished with “is a virtue” when I would become visibly frustrated getting hung up on a rock for the hundredth time forcing me to replace sinkers or, worse yet, attempt to tie in an entirely new rig with frozen fingers. Growing up steelhead fishing in my formative years has given me firsthand knowledge and experience as to

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why steelheaders are the most passionate of anglers I now get to work with, reinforcing what a brilliant graduate advisor once told me, “In fisheries management you are dealing with people’s passions, livelihood, or both, and you need to understand and respect that if you want to be successful.”

Lake Superior is 31,700 square miles of cold, deep, unproductive water and is far from ideal Pacific salmonid habitat. Minnesota manages approximately 7% of Lake Superior and the tributaries that feed it are located on what is universally known in Minnesota as “The North Shore” which stretches 150 miles and is geologically different from neighboring states and provinces. Glacial activity created waterfall barriers along the North Shore resulting in only 54 miles of below-barrier spawning and rearing habitat across 16 of the best tributaries. Approximately 56 miles of additional habitat is accessed for spawning and rearing in the Knife River system, where a catch-and-sort fish trap allows Minnesota Department of Natural Resources staff to collect data and pass fish above the first barrier. The bedrock and clay substrates limit groundwater contributions to tributaries that rely primarily on snowmelt and rain runoff to maintain adequate flow and also makes the tributaries notoriously “flashy” systems. Because of this flashiness and the lack of adequate below-barrier spawning and rearing habitat, Minnesota’s steelhead population is smaller than that of Ontario, Wisconsin, or Michigan. On average the adult spawning run at the Knife River, Minnesota, fish trap is 440 fish while the Bois Brule River, Wisconsin, fish trap sees 6,190 steelhead on average. Below-barrier habitat is quite inhospitable for trout for the majority of the year –— the lack of good groundwater can cause water temperatures in the summer to exceed 75 degrees and in the winter ice can freeze completely to the bottom of the streambed. In fact, initial results of a recent genetic study have indicated little to no natural reproduction has occurred below-barriers for fall spawning species like brook trout in Minnesota tributaries to Lake Superior. Numerous major storm events have occurred over the past 10 years that did substantial damage to habitat and negatively impacted numerous yearclasses of juvenile steelhead. Today’s steelhead population in Minnesota is likely reduced by as much as 80% from

record-highs in 2016, which highlights just how little control fishery managers have over the bigger drivers of population abundance like climate change, predation (in our case by a rehabilitated lake trout population), and changing or degraded habitat conditions. The few levers management agencies can pull that can influence populations are regulations, stocking, and habitat protection and rehabilitation — all of which have been, and continue to be, implemented as part of a long-term strategy for steelhead management.

1960 and 1990, tributary fishing pressure increased 5-8 times and effort to catch one fish increased from 12 to about 65 angler-hours. A series of meetings were held in the winter of 1991/1992, and public input from these meetings was then used to develop the 1992 North Shore Steelhead Plan. Management strategies included more restrictive fishing regulations, revised stocking strategies, beaver management, construction of additional migratory fish traps, delineation of long-term stream-monitoring stations, a shore-

Minnesota waters of Lake Superior supported an abundant harvest-oriented steelhead fishery from the 1940s through the 1960s but populations declined in the 1970s and 1980s, corresponding to changes in the Lake Superior fish community — particularly the beginning stages of lake trout rehabilitation from invasive sea lamprey predation, habitat degradation, increased fishing pressure, and under-regulated harvest. In response, the Minnesota DNR initiated a number of programs including alteration of natural barriers to allow fish passage, installation of habitat structures to provide additional spawning and rearing habitat, and stocking programs. Adult and juvenile fish traps were also constructed to monitor spawning runs and progress towards rehabilitation. Initial efforts to rehabilitate steelhead were only partially successful and numbers continued to decline. Between

survey

Minnesota manages about 7% of 31,700-square-mile Lake Superior, including tributary streams along the 150-mile-long North Shore. Photo by Prosthetic Head, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 Inernational License.

Minnesota fish biologists

a North Shore tributary stream for steelhead. Photo Couresy MNDNR

wide genetics study, an economics study, and a variety of other projects. The importance of long-term planning for steelhead rehabilitation was incorporated into future efforts such as the 2003 Rainbow Trout management plan for the Minnesota waters of Lake Superior and the 2006 and 2016 Fisheries management plan for the Minnesota waters of Lake Superior.

The first regulation for unclipped (wild produced) steelhead in tributaries below barriers was implemented in 1953 as a shore-wide bag limit of 10. The regulations were changed in 1966 to allow a bag limit of 5, only 3 greater than 16 inches, and a minimum length limit of 10 inches. These regulations were in place from the mid-1960s through the early 1990s and more restrictive regulations were adopted as steelhead populations continued to decline. The Minnesota DNR responded with a regulation change to a bag of 1 over 28 inches in 1992 and subsequently to a catch-and-release only regulation in 1997, which still exists today.

Experimental stocking of hatcherystrain rainbow trout yearlings began in Minnesota in the 1970s to supplement efforts to rehabilitate wild steelhead. In 1973, the Kamloops strain was stocked to provide a put-grow-and-take fishery and reduce pressure and harvest on naturalized steelhead populations. All Kamloops were given an adipose fin clip to differentiate them from wild steelhead and were stocked near the population center of Duluth. These harvestable fish were not stocked further “up the shore” for fear of genetic introgression with wild steelhead. Through time, concern of introgression increased as anglers would routinely see both strains spawning on the same redds. A study using steelheaders to collect genetic samples documented introgression in 2017 and in response the Minnesota DNR transitioned to a genetically screened wild Lake Superior strain for stocking its put-grow-andtake steelhead fishery while maintaining a catch-and-release only regulation on all wild (adipose fin intact) steelhead.

Steelhead fry have also been stocked upstream of the first natural fish barriers on tributaries to supplement the limited below-barrier fish production. Fry are stocked soon after hatching meaning they cannot be marked to differentiate them from wild produced steelhead. In an attempt to evaluate

Catch-and-release only regulation has likely been the greatest conservation tool for Minnesota wild steelhead.

contribution the above-barrier fry stocking program had to adult populations, the program was discontinued in 2017 with the goal of determining which rivers could maintain adult runs naturally and which rivers needed supplemental stocking. This management evaluation continues today and future discussions will include whether those rivers that cannot maintain adult runs naturally need to be stocked and which rivers MNDNR could manage for other species including brook trout, Lake Superior’s only other native “trout” (charr) besides lake trout.

A multi-phase yearling stocking program was implemented in 1990 to evaluate the returns of stocked smolts to the French and Knife rivers. Phase 1 examined the cost and feasibility of rearing to smolt size (≥ 5 inches). Approximately 20,000 adipose clipped yearlings were stocked annually from 1990 through 1993 in the French River. In phase 2, approximately 40,000 adipose-clipped yearlings were produced annually from 1997 through 2002. The adult returns from Phases 1 and 2 pro-

vided additional harvest opportunities for rainbow trout in Minnesota waters. Phase 3 evaluated how stocking location influenced juvenile steelhead survival. Approximately 40,000 steelhead yearlings were given a non-harvestable fin clip and were stocked annually into the Knife River from 2003 through 2007. In 2007, MNDNR met with constituents to reevaluate the yearling stocking program and a decision was made to discontinue all steelhead yearling stocking. The main reasons for this decision were poor returns, high program costs, and genetic concerns.

These management actions highlight almost thirty years of stakeholder guided management planning that helped rehabilitate steelhead populations to record numbers in 2016 when over 1,000 spawning adults were passed above the Knife River trap. In the eight years since then, we have witnessed a cycle of droughts and floods that have impacted juvenile survival in the rivers and have seen native lake trout numbers continue to increase — one of the greatest restoration stories of all time in fisheries management, but one that also comes at a cost to the non-native smolts that have survived the harsh conditions of the tributaries only to find having to avoid a high density of predators in the open water environment. In mid-May 2024, a three-to-five-inch rainfall caused another blowout of the rivers which seems to have become the norm these days rather than the exception, adding to the unpredictability “climate chaos” has thrown our way and a

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A Minnesota DNR fish biologist handles a wild steelhead captured in the Knife River fish trap on Lake Superior’s North Shore. Photo Couresy MNDNR

reminder that the things we cannot control may have a bigger impact on populations than the things we can. A management agency can have the perfect trifecta of implementation of regulations, stocking, and habitat work but the five-month drought or four-inch rainfall can negate any positive impact these management actions might have had. The catch-and-release only regulation on wild steelhead has likely been the single greatest conservation tool for Minnesota steelhead; however, populations are again trending downwards due to forces beyond management control, highlighting the fact that we cannot rely solely on regulation if we want to maintain consistently fishable populations in the future and that an “all-ofthe-above” management approach will likely be needed including an even greater reliance on the genetically screened wild Lake Superior strain Minnesota DNR has developed.

Over the coming winter of 2024-2025, Minnesota DNR will again meet with stakeholders and revise the 2016 Fisheries Management Plan for the Minnesota waters of Lake Superior making this the fourth edition of the plan and marking over 30 years of steelhead management guided by stakeholder input. Discussions around steelhead management will no doubt consist of those things that are out of our control and how, if possible, we can mitigate against the negative impacts to steelhead numbers. Being an active reader of The Osprey, it amazes me how similar and how different steelhead management and conservation is between the West Coast and the Great Lakes, but the passion steelheaders have for this incredible fish is ubiquitous.

Cory Goldsworthy is Lake Superior Fisheries Supervisor for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. Learn more about their work at: https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/areas/fishe ries/lakesuperior/index.html

The 2016 Fisheries management plan for the Minnesota waters of Lake Superior is available at: https://files.dnr.state.mn.us/publications/fisheries/special_reports/181.pdf

More information about Minnesota steelhead is also available at: https://minnesotasteelheader.com/projects/

Letters to the Editor

A Brief Critique of the Winter 2024 Issue of The Osprey

Dear Editor:

Just finished reading the current issue. Outstanding!

Bert Bowler

Idaho

A Terrific Resource for Anadromous Salmonids

Dear Editor:

Congratulations on producing a terrific summary and resource on the management of anadromous Salmonids in the Pacific Northwest. After reading John McMillan's very interesting article on the TCA Blog, I was thinking how valuable it would be to gather up his summary along with the various material linked all in one place. I was even thinking about pestering you about this. So, you guys were way ahead of me, and this issue is a terrific source.

I hope that you will consider more issues that focus on specific topics like this one, as I feel this will help make The Osprey an even more powerful influence for conservation of our fisheries. And, how about something about the rewilding of the Willamette?

Dave Thomas Oregon

For the Future of Wild Fish, and Future Anglers

Dear Editor:

Thank you for doing all your work. I hope my granddaughters will be able to expereience the thrills that my sons and I have had.

Daniel Higman Wyoming

The Osprey South of the Border

After a long day chasing bonefish, tarpon, snook and permit in Acension Bay, Mexico, The Osprey provides for some informative and entertaining après angling reading. Photo by Guy Fleischer

Salmon at the Melting Edge of Climate Change

The intersection of gold mining, glaciers, and salmon futures

Anew study, that we helped lead, reveals an emerging conflict for salmon at the melting and dripping edge of climate change, but also illuminates the broader looming spectre for salmon habitat stewardship in an era of rapid climate change. In the icecovered transboundary region shared by northern British Columbia, Canada, and Alaska, glacier retreat is creating thousands of kilometers of new rivers that salmon are finding (Pitman et al. 2021). These emerging rivers represent future habitats for salmon even as climate change poses broad challenges for salmon in many parts of their range. However, mining companies are also looking to these areas for the next gold mine. We map these emerging land use conflicts in a paper recently published in Science (Moore et al. 2023). The paper was a collaboration among researchers from Simon Fraser University, Gitanyow First Nation Hereditary Chiefs, University of Montana Flathead Lake Biological Station, and Taku River Tlingit First Nation.

Using spatial analyses, we identified 114 subwatersheds within the transboundary region, an expansive area including the northwestern quarter of British Columbia and the region commonly known as the “Alaskan panhandle”, where mining claims overlap with previously identified future salmon habitat. Of these 114 subwatersheds, 25 had more than 50 per cent of the predicted future salmon habitat within a 5km radius of a mining claim, and 17 subwatersheds had more than 90%. The amount of future salmon habitat that overlaps with mining claims varied greatly across the region. For example, in the Taku River watershed, all (99%) of the future salmon habitat currently lies near or beneath mining claims, while 12% overlaps in southeast Alaska — a region centered around Juneau, Alaska. In addition, more than half of the future salmon habitat in Canada has either medium or high mineral potential, an indicator of future potential mining pressure. Thus, the retreat of

By Jonathan Moore and Kara Pitman

glaciers is a nexus for mining pressure and salmon futures.

If these mines go ahead to development and extraction, future salmon habitats are at risk of environmental degradation. A recent large synthesis of mining impacts on salmonid-bearing ecosystems documented cases of severe and long-lasting consequences to aquatic ecosystems (Sergeant et al. 2022). Climate change in these rugged landscapes may make mining particularly challenging and environmentally risky given landslides, avalanches, and changing precipitation patterns. In the

More than half of future salmon habitat in Canada has either medium or high mineral potential, an indicator of future potential mining pressure on salmon.

no-analogue climate future, cuttingedge mining approaches and technologies may be unproven and vulnerable.

This conflict is being enabled in part by antiquated environmental policies that are currently under reform. Current mining policy in British Columbia, Canada enables companies and individuals to stake claims within minimal oversight and no consultation with Indigenous rights-holders. However, this policy was recently assessed by the British Columbia Supreme Court as being unconstitutional due to lack of consultation with Indigenous rightsholders. There is now less than a year for the British Columbia government to revise this mining policy, representing an important opportunity for policy reform.

A Landscape Of Change And Transformation

A raven’s-eye view of this transboundary region, looking down on the steep coastline and craggy mountain ranges of Alaska and British Columbia, reveals a world of ice, rocks, and forests, of salmon and people. Glaciers stretch their icy fingers down valleys toward the ocean. Their retreat since the Little Ice Age, around 300 years ago, has left behind scars on the shoulders of broad river valleys. Beads of turquoise cirque lakes are strung together by icy rivers. Fishing camps and small communities look tiny, nestled in the lowlands of this vast landscape.

It is also a region of ongoing landscape transformation. Local Indigenous stories of glaciers portray them as sentient parts of the landscape, capable of vengeance if mistreated, surging down valleys to obliterate villages or trigger outburst floods (Crukshank 2007). With human-caused climate change, glaciers are now shrinking fast. Recent research estimates that 60-100% of British Columbia’s glaciers will be gone by 2100, depending on humanity’s action (or inaction) on greenhouse gas emissions (Clarke et al. 2015).

In the decades after the glaciers retreat, willows and alders colonize and grow in the braided outwash plains. New forests appear and mature over time, providing new habitats for moose and other wildlife. And, in some of these complicated floodplains downstream of glaciers, young river-type sockeye and coho salmon swim in offchannel habitats, testimonial that salmon are capitalizing on these nascent habitats.

Classic research by Dr. Milner discovered that pink salmon abundance rapidly grew to over 10,000 adults in the span of less than four decades after creation of a new stream in Glacier Bay, Alaska (Milner et al. 2008). Yet, following glacier retreat, downstream ecosystems may change and evolve in complicated ways and it may take years or decades or more for waters to warm

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enough and sediments to stabilize enough for salmon to thrive (Pitman et al. 2020). Our collaborative team is continuing to work on this topic using a combination of high tech and cuttingedge remote sensing and climate modeling as well as blunt-force field research in remote rivers (Sergeant et al. 2024), hauling seine nets and collecting data to see which habitats are being used by salmon, and which are not. . . yet.

Some locations in this region are also abuzz with mining activities in a modern-day gold rush. Helicopters circle remote mining camps or zoom up valleys as they explore for new mineral deposits. A few abandoned mines continue to leach acid-mine drainage and other contaminants into otherwise pristine rivers, with plumes of toxic orange water mixing into grey-blue meltwater from glaciers that are at least 15,000 years old. New mines are carved into the landscape, holes are being drilled, rock is being moved and blasted, crushed rock is bathed in cyanide to extract gold. The edges of glaciers appear to be a particularly hot spot for mining as the retreating ice reveals undiscovered land, providing a new frontier for mining exploration. While it is tempting to argue that this mining activity is a necessary harm that is a part of a transition to new green energy technology, this argument doesn’t seem to hold water in the transboundary region as the primary target mineral is gold. Previous researchers assessed that 92% of global gold is being used for purposes not important for society such as sitting in vaults and lockboxes (Lezak et al. 2022).

As this region transforms with climate change, there are important decisions to be made. Indeed, mining could quickly erode future opportunities for salmon. Thus, should emerging lakes and rivers be stewarded as climate frontiers for salmon? Or should these places be kept open for mining developments for gold to support local economies even if this poses environmental risks?

A Two-Headed Monster For Salmon Futures

This study also showcases broad emerging challenges for salmon systems across their entire life-cycle and range—climate change and habitat

degradation are acting as dual pressures that are squeezing salmon and their ecosystems.

Air temperatures are rising across the lifecycle of salmon, consequently affecting water temperatures in both ocean and rivers. Rising ocean temperatures are leading to a constriction on suitable habitats for salmon (Langan et al. 2024). River temperatures, even in some places in southeast Alaska and northern British Columbia, are becoming too warm from droughts and heat waves that are taking a toll on migrating adult salmon in some years and locations.

There are likely many examples of how human extractive activities are probably exacerbating climate impacts and eroding the capacity and resilience of salmon and their ecosystems. For example, there may be mass mortality of salmon when rivers become too warm for migrating adult salmon, likely driven by the impacts of climate warming and, in some cases, poor forestry practices that remove riparian shading. The low snowpacks and droughts from climate change may be

exacerbated by withdrawals of water by agriculture or other sectors that further decrease low summer flows and limit stream-rearing salmon. In this study, we raise the concern that mining impacts could degrade habitats that are important options for future salmon. As climate change is asking unprecedented amounts on the resilience of salmon, human extractive activities are exacerbating those pressures and eroding the integrity of the habitats that provide that very resilience.

The good news is that salmon can have high resilience and that in some cases there is likely enormous scope for local habitat stewardship to increase the resilience of salmon ecosystems. Thus, there is an urgent need to take a

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The steep coastline and craggy mountain ranges along the Alaska and British Columbia border reveals a world of ice, snow, rock, forest, salmon and people. Photo by Jonathan Moore.

Wild salmon are colonizing some of the nascent habitats being formed by melting glaciers in the Boundary Region between British Columbia and Alaska. Photo by Jonathan Moore

hard look at environmental policies and regulations and ask whether they are fostering, or eroding, climate resilience (Moore and Schindler 2022).

Environmental Policies And Regulations For Salmon Futures

With these emerging challenges ahead for salmon and their ecosystems, our study highlighted the need for policy change and policy action, both globally and locally. We offer three considerations for the path forward if society values salmon futures.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions. While the earth is locked into some degree of climate warming, there is enormous scope for humanity to control the climate trajectory of the world. Reduction of greenhouse gas emissions would slow and then bend the curve and decrease the pace and magnitude of oncoming change. This reduction of greenhouse gas emissions would thus give species such as salmon a better opportunity to adapt to changes.

Effectively steward of current and future salmon habitats. More than ever, there is a need for continued stewardship and protection of large intact salmon regions that are robust to the local symptoms of climate change. Effective stewardship may entail questioning the risks and projected benefits of proposed high consequence megaprojects in key salmon regions, such as Pebble Mine in the Bristol Bay region of Alaska. Some large restoration projects, such as the dam removal on the Elwha River in Washington state, have proven to be a massive salmon success story. In British Columbia, Indigenous communities and leadership are leading powerful examples of proactive management of salmon ecosystems. Taku River Tlingit and Gitanyow First Nations have expanded Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas for their watersheds in northern British Columbia that limit industrial extractive materials with goals to protect both current and future salmon habitats as well as foster ongoing human-salmon relationships.

Strengthen environmental protections of salmon habitats and ecosystems. In most cases, policies that integrate climate change effects would likely entail habitat protections that are more stringent. While these expanded regulations

and protections may have some cost for industries, it is important for society and policy makers to recognize the full suite of impacts from extractive activities in environmental decision-making. For example, do riparian protections need to be expanded to limit the warming that forestry has on salmon rivers? Should there be greater restrictions against excessive water withdrawals from salmon rivers given oncoming losses to snowpack and changes in precipitation patterns? Should environmental laws not just offer protection to current salmon habitats, but also future salmon habitats?

These policy actions and reforms would help steward salmon and their ecosystems into an uncertain future. Climate change is going to pose many challenges and some opportunities for salmon and their ecosystems. Some of these changes are playing out as predicted, while others are totally surprising. The human-salmon relationship has existed for millennium and will need to continue to evolve with societal and climate change. As time marches on, there will be innumerable decisionpoints for people that will control the trajectory of salmon and our relationships with them. As we learn how climate change and other human activities are transforming and pressuring salmon ecosystems, there is an opportunity to incorporate this knowledge into forward-looking decision-making for climate resilience.

Dr. Jonathan Moore is an aquatic ecologist and is a Professor at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. At SFU, he leads the Salmon Watersheds Lab (www.jonwmoore.org). This research team aims to illuminate how salmon ecosystems are changing through collaborative field work, big data analyses, and remote sensing. They work with diverse collaborators and partners to catalyze positive change for salmon and people.

Dr. Kara Pitman is a Spatial Analyst at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. Kara's work currently focuses on the impacts of climate change in landscapes with glaciers and salmon. She uses cutting-edge spatial analyses and remote sensing techniques to synthesize large datasets and forecast oncoming changes to inform proactive planning and conservation.

aClarke, G., Jarosch, A., Anslow, F. et al. Projected deglaciation of western Canada in the twenty-first century. Nature Geosci 8, 372–377 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2407

a Cruikshank, Julie. Do glaciers listen?: Local knowledge, colonial encounters, and social imagination. UBC Press, 2007.

a Langan, Joseph A., et al. “Opening the black box: New insights into the role of temperature in the marine distributions of Pacific salmon.” Fish and Fisheries (2024).

a Lezak, Stephen, et al. “The case against gold mining.” Environmental Research Letters (2022).

a Milner, Alexander M., et al. “Colonization and development of an Alaskan stream community over 28 years.” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 6.8 (2008): 413-419.

a Moore, Jonathan W., et al. “Mining stakes claim on salmon futures as glaciers retreat.” Science 382.6673 (2023): 887-889.

a Moore, Jonathan W., and Daniel E. Schindler. “Getting ahead of climate change for ecological adaptation and resilience.” Science 376.6600 (2022): 1421-1426.

a Pitman, Kara J., et al. “Glacier retreat creating new Pacific salmon habitat in western North America.” Nature Communications 12.1 (2021): 6816.

a Pitman, Kara J., et al. “Glacier retreat and Pacific salmon.” BioScience 70.3 (2020): 220-236.

aSergeant, Christopher J., et al. “Risks of mining to salmonid-bearing watersheds.” Science advances 8.26 (2022): eabn0929.

a Sergeant, Christopher J., et al. “An interdisciplinary synthesis of floodplain ecosystem dynamics in a rapidly deglaciating watershed.” Science of The Total Environment 912 (2024): 169245.

A New Way Forward for the Columbia and Snake Rivers and Their Endangered Native Fish

For far too long, the Northwest has fallen abysmally short of its legal and moral responsibilities to protect and recover native fish populations in the Columbia-Snake River Basin. Our region and nation has failed to responsibly steward these magnificent lands, waters and wildlife, and, in doing so, uphold promises made by the United States to Tribes more than 150 years ago.

The Columbia Basin was once a place of nearly unimaginable biodiversity. Over the past century or more, however, the river and its watershed have been transformed. Due to big dams, agriculture and other “developments”, much of the mighty river’s natural productivity and resilience has been lost. Not so long ago, returns of wild adult salmon and steelhead could exceed 20 million fish annually. Today we see just 1-3 percent of these historic levels. Many populations are extinct, and most that remain are at grave risk of disappearing. Great numbers of fish that once migrated to the headwaters of the Columbia and Snake rivers were decimated by the construction of impassable dams like Grand Coulee and Chief Joseph on the Columbia, and the Hells Canyon Complex on the Snake, severing not just salmon from thousands of miles of their ancestral habitat, but also their ancient reciprocal relationship with many Indigenous communities.

More recently, the natural wealth of the Columbia Basin has been the subject of much conflict, litigation, lawmaking, policy development, spending, and more. Over the past five decades, Congress passed laws like the Clean Water Act (1972) and Endangered Species Act (1973) that have helped the fish and their rivers. Northwest Power Act (1980) was envisioned by many to address in an integrated fashion the two regional issues: energy resource planning, including the operation of hydroelectric dams, and the steep decline of wild salmon and steelhead populations. Notwithstanding the Power Act’s language requiring Bonneville Power Administration and other agencies to

By Joseph Bogaard

provide “equitable treatment” for fish and wildlife with the other purposes for which the federal system of dams and reservoirs is operated, wild fish populations continued their downward spiral.

Scores of legal cases have challenged as inadequate the federal government’s long-standing policies and programs. Most often, plaintiffs — Tribes, Northwest states and/or non-governmental organizations — won in court, though in reality the fish and their rivers have continued to lose. Over the past two

The Columbia Basin Restoration Initiative is a comprehensive salmon recovery strategy and a historic opportunity to advance salmon restoration and Tribal priorities.

decades, for example, federal dam agencies lost six consecutive cases under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) for their illegal operations of the federal dams and reservoirs on the lower Snake and lower Columbia rivers. These legal challenges have helped the fish by buying critical time for them as we work to change our ways and develop a more responsible, truly sustainable, long-term plan for the basin. Despite spending billions of public dollars on various, often ineffectual salmon recovery schemes, the federal government has failed to recover even one of the thirteen ESA-listed populations facing extinction today.

Nearly thirty years ago in 1995, Judge Malcolm Marsh chided the federal government for its failed salmon recovery policies, charging they were “too heavily geared towards a status quo when the situation literally cries out for a

major overhaul.” But the overhaul the judge called for was unlikely to come from the courts. That would require the active, creative and committed leadership of policymakers at the state and federal levels willing to make some big changes. For a very long time, these policymakers were nowhere to be seen.

In the last few years, however, the politics of the status quo have begun to fracture, and some elected officials are leaning in. While new conversations have begun and policies are shifting, much work remains and further and bigger shifts are still urgently needed. Many factors have played a role to break this long-standing policy log-jam, but the leadership of the Columbia Basin Tribes — regional sovereigns and co-managers of salmon — are key among them. Public support has steadily grown over time to recover endangered salmon and orca, uphold our nation’s promises to Tribes, and invest in a clean and affordable energy system that doesn’t drive species to extinction. Key policymakers are working to address more holistically these connected challenges and opportunities of tribal treaties and justice, salmon recovery, orca survival, energy production, agriculture and more.

In Fall of 2021, the Biden Administration began working with regional sovereigns — the Nez Perce Tribe, Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation of Oregon, Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, and states of Oregon and Washington (“Six Sovereigns”) — and NGOs and other stakeholders to develop a comprehensive approach to restore Columbia Basin salmon and other native fish populations, honor Federal commitments to Tribal Nations, deliver affordable and reliable clean power, and meet the resilience needs of regional stakeholders. This collaborative work involving the Administration, regional sovereigns and stakeholders was made possible in part by a pause in longrunning litigation.

Late last year, the Six Sovereigns produced a consensus document — the Columbia Basin Restoration Initiative. The CBRI has both grown out of these recent discussions and also helped to informed them. It details a comprehensive salmon recovery strategy for the Columbia Basin. This powerful new alliance and its holistic vision for salmon recovery reflects an historic development and opportunity for advancing salmon recovery and centering Tribal priorities and expertise not seen before.

Last September, the Biden Administration planted another historic stake in the ground when it announced a Presidential Memorandum that established, for the first time, restoring salmon abundance in the Columbia Basin as a federal priority — and directed all agencies to ensure their programs and funding support it.

The Memorandum declared that “[i]t is time for a sustained national effort to restore healthy and abundant native fish populations in the [Columbia River] Basin,” and that “it is the policy of [the] Administration to work with the Congress and with Tribal Nations, States, local governments, and stakeholders to pursue effective, creative, and durable solutions, informed by Indigenous Knowledge, to restore healthy and abundant salmon, steelhead, and other native fish populations in the Basin; to secure a clean and resilient energy future for the region; to support local agriculture and its role in food security domestically and globally; and to invest in the communities that depend on the services provided by the Basin’s Federal dams to enhance resilience to changes to the operation of the hydrosystem, including those necessary to address changing hydrological conditions due to climate change.” The Mem-

orandum is both a visionary statement and a very tall order — and one that will require continued work by the people of the Northwest and the nation to realize. Also last fall, Upper Columbia Basin Tribes (Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, Coeur d’Alene Tribe, and Spokane Tribe of Indians) unveiled a 20-year agreement with the Administration to advance Tribally-led efforts to reintroduce salmonids in blocked areas in the Upper Columbia River Basin above Chief Joseph and Grand Coulee dams.

Then in December, the Administration announced the Columbia Basin Restoration Agreement — creating a path for removing the lower Snake River dams and replacing their services (energy, irrigation, transportation). The Agreement includes federal dollars to advance this and other salmon recovery priorities in the Basin that are supported by many tribes and the states of Oregon and Washington.

This Agreement includes Commitments and Actions for the federal government to support the recovery of healthy and abundant salmon populations in the Columbia Basin, provide significant federal funding, assist region-wide efforts to address climate change, and set the region on a path to breach the four lower Snake River dams. The Commitments also form the basis of a multi-year stay of the longrunning litigation providing a period of greater certainty for the region as the Agreement’s actions are being implemented.

This is a significant turning point in the decades-long fight to protect and restore salmon populations in the Columbia River Basin. The Biden Administration’s commitments respond directly to the groundbreaking proposal from the “Six Sovereigns”.

The Columbia Basin Restoration Initiative (CBRI) is a visionary and com-

prehensive roadmap to rebuild imperiled fish populations, honor Tribal treaty rights, and restore healthy ecosystems while supporting a robust Pacific Northwest economy. With continued engagement from the Administration, Northwest Congressional Delegation, and regional stakeholders — including NGOs and the public — we can turn the CBRI into reality.

The Agreement’s Commitments and Actions in support of the CBRI include:

Investing In Ecosystems And Economies:

a This package includes more than half a billion dollars in previously unannounced federal investments for the Northwest. Much of this funding will be either distributed directly to the Six Sovereigns or spent in close coordination with them and other regional sovereigns.

a Funding includes hundreds of millions of dollars for habitat restoration/protection and hatchery improvements for salmon, steelhead, and other native fish and shellfish. It also includes commitments to fund clean energy projects and improve infrastructure such as culverts and fish passage at dams.

a OMB and federal agencies have pledged to continue working with regional sovereigns to help secure additional, necessary funding in the future.

Taking Action To Enable Dam Breaching:

a The actions and commitments include — for the first time — direct federal support for work to replace the lower Snake River dams’ services and prepare for a decision to breach them. Federal agencies, in partnership with ongoing efforts spearheaded by Wash-

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Bonneville Dam, at River Mile 146.1, is the lowest on the Columbia River system. Photo by Jim Yuskavitch

ington state, will provide funding and expertise to plan for the replacement of the energy, transportation, recreation, and irrigation services provided by the dams.

a In addition, Department of Interior will analyze the impacts the dams have had on tribal treaty and other rights that depend on healthy and harvestable salmon, providing a comprehensive acknowledgment from the federal government of the dams’ profound negative effects on every aspect of these Tribes’ way of life.

aBy fall 2024, the agencies will determine whether and how to revise the Trump-era environmental compliance documents that include operation of the lower Snake River dams and finalize any new decision and supporting documents (BiOp, EIS, and ROD) by spring 2026.

Advancing Climate Goals:

aThe package also includes actions to quickly deploy clean, extinction-free power generation, keep energy prices affordable, and support the resiliency of stakeholders across the region. The federal government will provide technical assistance, funding, and other support to enable the four Lower Columbia River Treaty Tribes to develop at least 1-3 GW of new clean energy resources, as replacement energy for the lower Snake River dams.

aThe Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will conduct a Regional Energy Needs Planning Process to identify how to decarbonize the Northwest’s grid while accounting for breaching the lower Snake River dams.

aUS Department of Energy and BPA will accelerate clean energy transition efforts in the Northwest to enable replacement of the dams’ energy services and meet the region’s broader decarbonization goals.

Continuing Partnerships:

a In response to the Six Sovereigns’ CBRI, the United States government has pledged to continue the close collaboration established between federal, state, and tribal governments on shared priorities.

a This includes an acknowledgment from the federal government that, consistent with the science, urgent action is needed to rebuild healthy and abun-

dant salmon and that achieving this goal needs to include breaching the four lower Snake River dams as an essential action.

aIt also means that senior administration officials will continue to work in partnership with the Six Sovereigns and lead these efforts on behalf of the federal government.

Establishing Interim Dam Operations For The Lower Columbia And Snake

River Dams And Reservoirs:

aThe Commitments include a set of interim hydropower system operations that will remain in place for as long as 10 years provided that the federal government continues to work with the Six Sovereigns and conservation plaintiffs in the coming years while planning to replace the services of the lower Snake River dams so that they can be breached.

a These plans include increases in spring spill and adding some fall and winter spill, which will benefit some salmon species, such as spring/summer Chinook.

a However, they also include reductions in late summer spill, which will harm some salmon species such as fall Chinook but allow BPA to generate more power during lucrative periods when the hydrosystem typically struggles to meet demand.

a These operational changes include significant compromises made with the expectation that the region will continue to move down the path towards dam breaching and are designed to stay in place until that time.

The actions and commitments outlined above represent an historic first step toward a comprehensive regional strategy that includes breaching the lower Snake River dams to protect and restore abundant salmon and steelhead populations. With the leadership of the Six Sovereigns, commitments from the Biden Administration, and support from the Northwest Congressional Delegation, our region can achieve the comprehensive solution that salmon, Tribes, and regional economies need.

Finally and importantly, the hard and sustained work by many NGOs, their

supporters and active and engaged members of the public played a critical role to support the leadership of the Tribes and to deliver support and pressure on the Administration, regional states and members of Congress. Looking ahead, securing the funding and successfully implementing the federal government’s Commitments and Actions and the Columbia Basin Restoration Initiative will absolutely depend upon the continued public education, organizing and relentless pressure by fish, river and orca advocates.

Joseph Bogaard is Executive Director of Save Our wild Salmon Coalition. Learn more about their work at: https://www.wildsalmon.org

Learn More

Columbia Basin Restoration Initiative (2024)

Presidential Memo Columbia Basin Salmon Recovery (Sept. 2023) Columbia Basin Restoration Agreement (Dec. 2023)

Read QR code with smart phone or click on adjacent link.

Celilo Falls before it was inudated by the construction of The Dalles Dam, transforming it into “Lake Celilo.”

Photo by Benjamin A. Gifford, 1902.

Salmon Vision AI Computer-Vision Deep Learning Tools to Power Adaptation and Resilience in Salmon Fisheries

By Will Atlas

Around the Pacific Rim, accelerating climate changes are leading to unpredictable and unprecedented conditions in the marine feeding grounds that support wild salmon, forcing fishing communities and resource managers to grapple with increasing unpredictability in salmon returns. In the face of a no-analog climate, pre-season forecasts based on historical relationships between spawner abundance and the number of returning offspring are increasingly unreliable indicators of the upcoming return of adult fish, making it more important than ever that managers have timely information on the number of adult salmon returning to rivers, to guide adaptive in-season management of fisheries. Unfortunately, across most of our region spawning salmon and steelhead populations are monitored only after the fishery has concluded and spawner count data has been reviewed and approved by resource managers.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming our society at an accelerating rate, prompting valid concerns about the motivations and long-term consequences of large corporate technology companies, government surveillance programs, and the potential for automation to eliminate countless jobs from the manufacturing line to the executive suite. Yet, AI itself is merely a suite of tools with potential to be developed and directed towards the many urgent challenges our society faces in 2024 and beyond. Increasingly, AI is being used in ecology and conservation, to inform analysis of large datasets, and to produce data outputs on timelines and geographic scales that were formerly unimaginable. Yet, despite the promise of AI for conservation and natural resource management, these tools have yet to be effectively harness for widespread use by fishery managers, Tribes and First Nations, and conservation practitioners tasked with stewardship of salmon and steelhead around our re-

gion. Computer-vision deep learning is a type of artificial intelligence that performs object detection, tracking and classification.

Best known for its application in facial detection algorithms used by state surveillance agencies around the world, computer-vision can support a variety of more benevolent functions, including automated counting and species classification for wild salmon population monitoring. Returns of spawning adults

Increasingly, AI is being used in ecology and conservation to produce data outputs on timelines and geographic scales that were formerly unimaginable.

to many salmon and steelhead populations are monitored using in-river weirs — channel spanning fences — that are used to count migrating salmon as well as sonar units. However, these programs have traditionally been challenged by the high costs and large commitment of staff time required to annually review sonar files and videos, meaning that final counts have typically not been available until long after the fish had already spawned, died, or kelted, and in some cases years’ worth of data continue to sit unanalyzed because of staffing or budgetary constraints. In the face of these costly and personnel intensive data review processes, the proliferation of weir and sonar monitoring has been limited, despite their potential ability to provide precise counts of returning adult fish, creating an urgent need for AI tools that can support timely automated

analysis of video and sonar outputs. Even more urgently, hundreds of salmon populations across the remote British Columbia coast remain unmonitored, despite being the target of ongoing harvest in fisheries. In the absence of data, managers interested in promoting status quo harvest regimes lack accountability for meeting escapement goals that are consistent with conservation of sustainable populations, giving them carte blanche to keep fisheries open even during times of critically low returns. To meet this challenge we needed to build monitoring systems for remote watersheds that could be run autonomously for weeks or months at a time, in roadless offgrid watersheds that make up most of the BC Coast. Beginning in 2020, our research team comprised of staff from the Wild Salmon Center, the Pacific Salmon Foundation, and Simon Fraser University computing sciences, set out to build and test computer-vision models for automated salmon identification and counting. Working with the Gitanyow Fishery Authority, Skeena Fishery Commission, the Heiltsuk Integrated Resource Management Department, Kitasoo Xai’xais Stewardship Authority, and the Haida Fishery program, five Indigenous Nations and organizations on the North and Central Coast of BC operating sonar or video weirs, we annotated more than 650,000 frames of video and sonar data to train and evaluate computer-vision models for automated salmon counting and ID. Initial results were incredibly promising, with relatively strong performance by the models in automated species detection, particularly for species that were well represented in the training datasets. Equally important, the analysis of an entire four-month season’s worth of data could be performed by the computer in just a few days or run time, compared with months of tedious manual review for technicians working on these projects. For partner First Na-

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tions with limited staff and large workloads, the ability to deliver results so quickly is a breakthrough that can free up staff to do more interesting and important work.

These results, along with trained computer-vision models and training data were published in the scientific journal Frontiers in Marine Ecology, but our team and our partners knew that simply publishing a research paper wasn’t enough. If we wanted to transform how salmon populations are monitored and managed and shift the paradigm towards precautionary in-season management decisions guided by accurate count data, we needed to put these tools directly in the hands of people on the ground. Our computer-vision models are written in the code language PYTHON, requiring significant training and computer science expertise to run the model, much less train and test a new model for improved performance. So, building on the success of our first collaborative project we launched the second phase of the work, broadening our collaborative network to include nine First Nation-led monitoring projects around the province of BC. Our goal was simple, build a web app that puts computer-vision models at the fingertips of salmon managers without a computer science background, allowing them to upload their data to the cloud, run computer-vision analyses using pre-trained models, and to review and correct their results and produce new training data with the click of a mouse.

We’re calling this effort SalmonVision, and our vision is singular; in-season spawner escapement data generated by people living in the watershed, informing transparent real-time decision making in fishery management. Heading into the 2024 salmon

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monitoring season, we have continued to make improvements to the offgrid monitoring systems we designed for video and sonar monitoring in the first phase of the project, and we have trained an updated version of our computer-vision models to run locally at the project site. These initial computer-vision results as well as motion detected videos are automatically uploaded to a cloud server, making them accessible for review and corrections by partner Nations and organizations. Data from these efforts is already informing management plans, ensuring that fisheries managers are using timely information when authorizing a fishery in order to minimize the risk of overfishing and provide harvest opportunities when run sizes exceed preseason expectations. In 2024, we partnered with ecological technology company Aeria, who has been working for several years on automated counting and species detection from dronebased surveys of spawning salmon. With their expertise and existing computer-vision tools, our web app will be launching in beta version with three modules in late-August 2024 — video, sonar, aerial — for testing with our partners. In 2025, we will look to begin working with new collaborators and clients to roll out fee-for-service access for private companies, agencies, and public utilities, while continuing to provide free access for First Nations, Tribes, and local eNGO partners. With a commitment to our not-for-profit approach, revenue from fee-for-service clients will cover staff time for the SalmonVision team, support further research and development to improve and

expand the suite of computer-vision tools offered on the app, and provide direct funding and support to communities and organizations seeking to build their own video or sonar monitoring programs.

As the growth of artificial intelligence accelerates in our society, it has never been more important to prioritize codeveloped tools that provide high certainty of social and ecological benefits. By co-developing these tools with First Nations partners and ensuring ongoing access to the tools and benefits of the technology, SalmonVision AI is a suite of tools that catalyzes major transformations in how salmon populations are monitored and managed, with the ultimate goal of ensuring the long-term resilience of salmon populations and the communities that have always depended on them for food, culture, and livelihoods.

Dr. Will Atlas is Senior Watershed Scientist with the Wild Salmon Center. He is also the lead scientist on the Salmon Vision AI project. Learn more about their work at: https://wildsalmoncenter.org

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A fish weir where Salmon Vision AI technology is being tested. Photo by Olivia Leigh Nowak

With Dam Removal Comes Renewal on the Klamath River

By Mark Rockwell

The third most productive salmon and steelhead river in the lower 48 states is soon to be free of barriers to migrating fish. We are now in the last few months of a 20-plus-year process to free the Klamath River from its four lower dams As was discussed in my article in the Fall 2023 issue of The Osprey, work began to remove four dams — Copco 1 and 2, Iron Gate and J.C.Boyle — from the river in late 2023, and that process has been steadily moving forward for the last eight months. Once spawning was finished, eggs were hatched, and fry became smolts bound for the ocean, the river was free of anadromous fish and open for work to begin. The first dam, Copco 2, was removed by the end of October. [Editor’s Note: See sidebar for a Timelapse video link of that process.]

Though this took about two months to complete, it has left the river in a more natural state than it’s been in for nearly 100 years. This dam was the smallest, and upstream of the primary barriers of Copco 1 and Iron Gate, both of which did not have fish passage. Hence, working on it during the spawning period was not problematic as water quality concerns were managed successfully for downstream activity. From this, two months were spent preparing for the removal of the three remaining and larger dams on the

river. All three remaining dams hold back a lot of water in the lakes behind the reservoirs — Iron Gate, Copco 1 in California and J.C. Boyle in Oregon. The first job was to draw down the lakes and let the water flow downstream, which started in January 2024. Prior to opening the gates, so to speak, a safe and controlled process had to be created for water releases to avoid negative impacts to the fishery. The goal was to release water and silt at a rate that would not be too injurious to the watershed or fishery.

Dam removal is just the first step in the Klamath watershed restoration. Millions of native seeds are being planted on barren land that were once lakes.

J.C. Boyle had a useable exhaust tube that just had to be blasted open, and Iron Gate Dam also had a useable flow tunnel installed during initial construction. Copco 1, however, did not have a useable vent for water release. Crews staged at the base of Copco 1 Dam drilled a 10-foot diameter outlet tunnel through the concrete structure, that ran about 30 feet into the concrete dam base. Kiewit, the contractor, left a 10-foot plug of concrete in the hole to hold back the lake water until it was time for drawdown.

On January 11, 2024, drawdown of Iron Gate started, slowly emptying the lake into the river. Later in January, drawdown at Copco 1 began with the blasting out of the concrete plug that was left in

the 10-foot tube at the base of the dam. [Editor’s Note: See sidebar for video link.]

Essentially, all this water and silt moved downstream and into and through Iron Gate Reservoir. Shortly after Copco 1 began drawdown, the same process was started at J.C. Boyle, the highest in the river of the dams to be removed. By February 15th, the initial phase of drawdown was complete. In essence, this was the first time in more than 100 years that water in the upper Klamath watershed in Oregon freely moved downstream to the Pacific Ocean. It was monumental in our minds.

At this point, with mostly mud showing in the lakes, it was time for seeding to begin in the watershed restoration process. The dams total over 350 vertical feet and their associated reservoirs covered an area of approximately 1,300 acres, which, after removal, will be revegetated and restored to provide critical riparian habitat for wildlife in the Klamath basin. Dam removal is only the first step in watershed-wide restoration. Millions of collected and cultivated seeds are being spread on the barren mud and lands that were once lakes. Trees are being planted by our restoration partners, Restoration Environmental Solutions (RES) and Yurok and Karuk Tribal members, all along the footprint of the Klamath project. Joshua Chenoweth, senior riparian ecologist with the Yurok Tribe, is leading the effort to replant newly revealed reservoir footprints, and coordinating Tribal work.

As a way of understanding the changes since drawdown, the photographs on the next page give a glimpse of how it looked right after drawdown, and the changes that have happened since this planting effort has begun.

We are in the early stages of revisitation and stabilizing the ground under the lakes. There has been a lot of silt movement from the lakes, resulting in turbidity and lowered oxygenation of the water, but that was temporary, last-

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Test blast at Copco 1 dam. Photo by Shane Anderson, www.swiftwaterfilms.com

ing less then 24 hours. Water quality monitoring has been done on a regular and consistent basis to ensure upper limits of tolerance for wildlife is not exceeded. With the silt loose and easily moveable, NOAA Fisheries and the Bureau of Reclamation planned flushing flows from Link and Keno reservoirs upstream during March and April with the goal of doubling baseline flows and moving silt while it’s lose and mobile. See this link for more information: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/featurestory/klamath-river-reshapes-itselfflushing-flows-move-reservoir-sediment -downriver

As all this continues now, the dams themselves are being demolished. Starting in late March 2024, a test blast was done on Copco 1 dam to observe and measure how well it started the breaking up of the top of the concrete reservoir. This was the beginning of the demolition of the concrete dams in all 3 locations — Copco 1, J.C. Boyle, and Iron Gate. By mid April 2024, all the remaining dams were in process of being dismantled. The process is sim-

ply doing small blasts to break up the top of the concrete barrier, bring in drilling and other equipment to break the pieces into movable parts, lift them into trucks and carry them to the dump site.

By May, all dams had at least the top layer of concrete removed. From there, the process will be repeated until the dams are gone. They simply move to the next layer and blast, breakup and carry away the debris. This will go on for the remainder of the summer until all the hard dam pieces are removed. J.C. Boyle, the dam in Oregon, was a bit different in that it was about 75% earthen and 25% concrete, so it will move along faster.

Iron Gate Dam, the most downstream of the four to be removed, began to be dismantled in May 2024. It is the largest of the dams, and has towered above the river since it was completed in 1962. It stands 173 feet tall and 740 feet wide.

Iron Gate is where the old hatchery once stood, which has now been replaced by an updated hatchery on a tributary, Fall Creek, just up-river a half mile. This hatchery has a smaller capacity but because it is an off-river replacement in Fall Creek, and operates in a stream with colder and cleaner water, will produce about the same number of surviving salmon smolts reaching the ocean as the old hatchery. Of note, since hatcheries are always a concern and threat to wild fish, this hatchery has a seven year life, and if in-river spawning takes hold as hoped, will close operation in 2031 or so. The hope is the Klamath will once again become a fully wild spawning river in the future. There is no plan for a hatchery beyond 2031.

Going into the summer, we will see continued deconstruction work being done at all three reservoir locations. In addition to this construction work, the Yurok Tribe and RES will be continuing their efforts to plant natural seeds of indigenous plants of the Klamath region, as well as trees that will one day shade the water and provide refuge locations for insects and bugs needed by the fishery recovery. RES has a 7-year con-

tract to monitor and maintain the riparian landscape of the dam footprint to ensure that what is done today will last and become self-sustaining over time. The schedule is to have all 3 dams out of the river, and it be free flowing by the end of October 2024. The river will be open for fish returning to spawn in the fall, and we’ll see and monitor their arrival to observe and monitor their success. Likely, it will take several years for the river to fully stabilize and be able to support a million or more wild, in-river spawning salmon and steelhead. The good news is that the Klamath River will once again have a chance to return to its historical greatness.

For those of us who have spent generations working on this project, we have learned that it’s critically important to work together, keep your eye on the end result, and never give up. Everyone should be proud of this accomplishment — not for ourselves, but for the fishery, the watershed, the Tribes, and all the critters who need the river more than we do. It’s for them that this is happening. Let’s be thankful!

Dr. Mark Rockwell, D.C. is President of the Northern California Council, Fly Fishers International. Fly Fishers International is one of The Osprey’s supporting partners. See more of their work at: https://www.flyfishersinternational.org

Klamath Dams Multi-Media

Timelapse Video Copco 2 Removal

Read QR code with smart phone or click on above link.

Blasting Concrete, Copco 1

Read QR code with smart phone or click on above link.

Above, Copco Lake after Copco 1 and 2 dams were removed. Below, a recent view of Copco Lake showing new plant growth. Photos by Shane Anderson, www.swiftwaterfilms.com

FISH WATCH — WILD FISH NEWS, ISSUES AND INITIATIVES

Lawsuit Charges Agencies’ Lower Columbia

River Hatchery Programs Harm Wild Salmon Recovery

On April 17, Wild Fish Conservancy and The Conservation Angler filed suit against federal, state, and local governments under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) to protect threatened wild fish and their ecosystems from hatchery programs in the Columbia River below Bonneville dam. These parties continue to fund and operate hatcheries under the Mitchell Act and Select Area Fishery Enhancement (SAFE) programs while exceeding limits under the ESA designed to prevent extinction of imperiled wild salmon and steelhead.

The complaint details how hatchery management under these programs is negatively impacting threatened and endangered Chinook, coho, and chum salmon, as well as steelhead, and Southern Resident killer whales whose survival depends on the protection and long-term recovery of wild salmon populations. These harms includ genetic and ecological interactions, harvest impacts, facility effects, fish removal activities, and others.

Congress enacted the Mitchell Act in 1938, in an attempt to counteract the adverse effects of habitat degradation, dam building, and overharvest in the Columbia River Basin. The SAFE program was developed in 1993 to provide salmon and steelhead for dwindling in-river fisheries. As wild populations continue to decline across the Pacific coast, production under the Mitchell Act and SAFE program is used as justification by fisheries managers to avoid curtailing unsustainable harvest levels in ocean fisheries from Oregon to Alaska. Today, NMFS, both the funder and the regulatory agency of these programs, recognizes hatcheries and harvest as two of the leading threats to wild salmon and steelhead.

In 2016, Wild Fish Conservancy sued the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) over these same hatchery programs to force them to comply with the ESA when funding and authorizing Mitchell Act hatcheries. As a result of that successful litigation, NMFS developed a Biological Opinion on Mitchell Act hatcheries that set limits and standards to prevent the extinction of already at-risk wild salmon and steelhead.

The complaint details NMFS’s consistent failure to comply with critical terms and conditions of their biological opinions for both the Mitchell Act and SAFE hatchery programs in tributaries throughout the lower Columbia River in Washington and Oregon. These hatchery seriously exceeding federally mandated limits for the number of hatchery fish reaching wild spawning grounds and breeding with wild salmon. The agency’s present approach of utilizing weirs, which have shown to be ineffective at limiting straying hatchery fish, and obstruct migrating of wild salmon. The complaint also details that local and state agencies who operate these facilities in Oregon and Washington are also failing to comply with requirements set to protect ESA-listed species under the Mitchell Act and SAFE program Biological Opinions.

In recent years, Mitchell Act funding has ranged between $15,000,000 and $22,000,000 annually, supporting roughly

one-third of all hatchery production in the Columbia River. A 2023 study evaluated the impact of the federal government’s total $9 billion-dollar investment in hatchery production and restoration spending in the Columbia River over the past forty years. Despite the massive scale of this expense, the study results showed no evidence of increased abundance of wild salmon or steelhead in the Columbia River Basin.

Federal agencies are obligated under the ESA to “insure that any action authorized, funded, or carried out by such agency… is not likely to jeopardize the continued existence of any endangered or threatened species or result in the destruction or adverse modification of habitat that has been designated as critical for such species. NMFS has already sent the parties that receive funds through the Mitchell Act a notice that they are re-initiating consultation on Biological Opinion. During that time NMFS should not be distributing funds to the hatchery operators until they can come up with a plan to adequately protect wild fish. The Conservation Angler and Wild Fish Conservancy have consistently advocated for precautionary, science-based fisheries management, government accountability, and hatchery reform.

A copy of the complaint may be found at: https://wildfishconservancy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/001.0.complaint-5.pdf

The Conservation Angler is one of The Osprey’s supporting partner organizations. Learn more about their work at: www.theconservationangler.org.

Wild Rainbow Trout Protection Petition Denied Approval is Big Win for Wild Steelhead in Washington State

Resident rainbow trout —both adults and juveniles — are a critical life history component of wild steelhead populations and protecting them represents an opportunity to better protect and help recover wild steelhead.

Male resident rainbow trout are known to sometimes fertilize eggs at steelhead redds, making them an important part of steelhead life history. Photo by

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Jim Yuskavitch

In June of last year, the Wild Steelhead Coalition submitted a petition to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife proposing that the agency adopt the following rules to protect wild rainbow trout including:

a Statewide year-round Catch-and-Release (all size wild trout) in rivers and streams for all watersheds with wild steelhead

aStatewide year-round Selective Gear Rules (all size wild trout) in rivers and streams in all watersheds with wild steelhead

aClosed Waters: Selected sections of rivers designated as Wild Steelhead Gene Banks

a Closed Waters: Watersheds with wild steelhead runs under escapement

On October 27, 2023 the WDFW commission considered the petition and rejected it . But that turned out to be a clear win for wild rainbow trout and steelhead. Instead of granting our petition, WDFW asked the Commission to direct the Department to develop a state-wide native trout policy. By developing such a policy, the Department can work stream-by-stream, or watershed-by-watershed, to set regulations and protections that address the specific needs and challenges of specific river systems. The regulation petition process is a blunt instrument, and a native resident trout policy is more likely to provide better protections that can be surgically targeted — a big win.

The process to develop the native trout policy is still being developed but hopefully will:

aProvide adequate protection of this increasingly critical steelhead life history and life stage and adequate resources are made available to ensure it is accomplished in a timely manner.

aUse a public engagement approach that allows for local input into rainbow trout fisheries. We hope that this engagement includes opportunities for providing up-front input into the development process, and meaningful opportunities to engage in subsequent revisions.

aDevelop regulations and other protections that are not only well-designed 'on paper' but are clear, understandable, and designed to maximize angler compliance.

aPreserve sustainable opportunities to participate in fisheries for wild rainbow trout prioritizing fishing opportunity over harvest opportunity.

aBe prepared to move quickly from policy to regulatory protections once the process is complete

For more information go to: https://www.wildsteelheadcoalition.org/news/petition-proposal-to-protect-resident-rainbow-trout

To learn more about the relationship between resident rainbow trout and steelhead see: “Anadromy vs Residency” by John McMillan, The Osprey, Summer 2012 (https://www.ospreysteelhead.org/archives)

The Wild Steelhead Coalition is one of The Osprey’s partner organizations. Learn more about their work at: https://www.wildsteelheadcoalition.org

Culling Cormorants to Save Salmon on Lower Columbia River Backfires Big Time

During 2015 and 2016, the US Army Corps of Engineers conducted on a major cull of double-crested cormorants on East Sand Island, at the mouth of the Columbia River, claiming that the birds were excessively preying on federally Endangered Species Act-listed juvenile salmon and steelhead. The intense culling that followed resulted in the nesting colony abandoning the island and establishing a new one upstream on the Astoria-Megler Bridge, where the birds are damaging the bridge’s infrastructure and eating more juvenile salmon than they did at their previous location. Last year, an analysis led by the Oregon Department of Transportation, has determined that the nesting colony be re-established on the island.

East Sand Island , 62 acres in size, is located near the mouth of the Columbia River and managed by the US Army Corps of Engineers.

The US Army Corps of Engineers program to reduce juvenile salmon mortality by killing double-crested cormorants resulted in the opposite effect. Photo by MONGO

The double-crested cormorant nesting colony on East Sand Island, first recorded in 1989, was once the largest doublecrested cormorant colony west of the Rocky Mountains, with more than 30,000 birds making up approximately 40% of the double-crested cormorant population in the Western United States. In 2015, the US Army Corps of Engineers — supported by US Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service — initiated a three year program to kill approximately 11,000 cormorants on East Sand Island and eliminate much of their nesting habitat by bulldozing it into the estuary. The Corps argued that this action was necessary to protect federally listed salmon, even as they failed repeatedly to respond to multiple losses in federal court requiring them to address the primary cause of salmon decline on the Columbia, the federal hydropower system. The culling was overwhelmingly opposed by the public, wildlife and animal welfare groups, wildlife experts, the Corps own lead cormorant researcher on East Sand Island, and even biologists within USFWS who produced a report, which was suppressed by the agency, showing that killing cormorants would not help recover listed salmon. The killing proceeded

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during 2015 and 2016, with thousands of cormorants shot out of the sky over the water and killed on their nests. In 2016, the entire colony collapsed with nearly 17,000 cormorants abandoning their nests in a single day, eventually establishing a new colony on the 4.1-mile long Astoria-Megler Bridge, which crosses the river between Oregon and Washington State at Astoria, Oregon.

The report released by ODOT recognizes that western US cormorant populations have seen significant declines since 2015 and that cormorants are now consuming more salmon than prior to the initiation of management activities in 2015. Cormorants displaced from East Sand Island are causing significant damage to the Astoria-Megler Bridge, and large numbers of the birds are being struck by vehicles on the bridge. The report recommends both hazing the cormorants off the bridge and trying to attract them back to East Sand Island. The report also notes that the Astoria-Megler Bridge now represents the largest double crested cormorant colony in the Western United States.

For additional information go to: https://www.birdconservationoregon.org/alerts

To learn more about the Astoria-Megler Bridge DoubleCrested Cormorant Value Engineering Study, go to: https://www.nwcouncil.org/fs/18524/2023_11_3.pdf#page=11

Invasive Pink Salmon Threaten

Native Atlantic Salmon and Aquatic Biodiversity in Northern Europe

Native to the northern Pacific Ocean, pink salmon (Oncorhyncus gorbuscha) were introduced on the Kola Peninsula, Russia in the 1960s. Pink salmon have since spread to rivers along the entire coast of Norway, with the densest numbers in the northern region of the country. Pink salmon are also increasing in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Greenland, the Faroe Islands, Ireland and the United Kingdom. They have also been recently documented, in small numbers, in some rivers in France and Germany and on the east coast of Canada.

The impacts of invasive pink salmon on Atlantic salmon, and European ecosystem biodiversity, is only recently attracting scientific research. Scientists at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA) believe the growing

population is tied to increasing North Atlantic sea temperatures.

Some rivers in Norway are now seeing spawning runs of thousand of pink salmon. Increasing populations of the nonnative fish pose a number of potential threats including introduction of diseases to Atlantic salmon and other aquatic organisms; displacement of native fish from rearing and spawning habitat through sheer force of numbers and; displacement of juvenile salmon that serve as hosts for the larval stages of river mussels — a vital ecological component of freshwater river systems. In addition, while decomposing salmon transferring nutrients from ocean to land is generally beneficial, the addition of unnaturally high levels of nutrients from large numbers of spawned-out pink salmon into a non-native aquatic ecosystem may result in unknown and detrimental impacts.

Currently, scientists from NINA are conducting genetic research on pink salmon to learn more about them, including if distinct populations are forming.

For more information visit the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research at: https://www.nina.no/english/Biodiversity/Alien-Species/Pinksalmon

Chum Salmon Confirmed Spawning in Arctic Ocean Watershed

Researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks have confirmed that salmon are spawning in an Arctic Ocean watershed, suggesting that at least some salmon species could be expanding to new territory as climate change reshapes their habitat.

The researchers found about 100 chum salmon in the Anaktuvuk and Itkillik rivers on Alaska’s North Slope. Both rivers flow into the Colville River, which empties into the Arctic Ocean. All the fish that researchers caught in mid-September 2023 were either actively spawning or had finished spawning at sites where groundwater appeared to be flowing to the surface. Similar conditions have supported chum salmon reproduction throughout their typical range.

The discovery of these fish aligns with a hypothesis that salmon are being pushed north as their traditional habitat changes. Many established salmon populations, such as those in California, are declining due to climate change. In the Arctic, climate change might be an ally to salmon.

Salmon are well known for ending their lives after spawning in the same river where they hatched, but outliers to that pattern exist. Sometimes they shift to new habitat as it becomes more hospitable.

Straying is part of the biological story of salmon. It’s a fundamental part of their biology and evolution. In the Arctic, it playing out in real time.

It’s still unknown whether attempts by salmon to reproduce in the region have been successful. Researchers left temperature sensors in some of the chum salmon redds to determine whether the rivers completely freeze during the winter, destroying any developing embryos. A return trip is planned in fall 2024 to look for smolts or a new wave of spawning adults. Salmon bones and tissue will also undergo analyses to help determine whether the fish lived their entire lives in Arctic waters.

Learn more at: https://www.uaf.edu/news/confirmedsalmon-are-spawning-in-arctic-rivers.php

Norway’s Tana River has been seeing thousands of spawning pink salmon in recent years. Photo by BishkekRocks, CC BYSA 3.0 Deed

7 rods @ $15/d x 77 = $8,085

1 nr @ $45/d x 77 = $3,465

Total WDFW income for program management: $11,550.

aSkagit/Sauk: projected run February 15 – April 15 (59 days): 5,700 wild steelhead.

Let’s be extra conservative: allowable angling encounters (20%) is 1,140; angling mortality would be 1.5% x 1,140, or 17 steelhead (12% of NOAA allowable mortality rate of 142 steelhead). Fly fisher encounter rate would be 25%, which translates to 4,560 total angler/days or 77 rods/day which could be allocated as such:

a 8 daily Skagit/Sauk non-resident daily licenses at $45 per day per person ($21,240/year)

a 8 licensed guides (two rods per guide) per day — i.e. a total of 16 rods per day. Guide to pay $50/per angler per day ($47,200/year) plus 16 anglers at $15 per day ($14,160 = $61,360)

The balance of daily licenses reserved for Washington residents — 53 resident daily licenses at $15 per person, per day, per year pp/day equals 46,905. aGrand total: $129,505/yr

Similar programs could be implemented on many western Washington Rivers such as the Nooksack, Skykomish, Snohomish, Green,

Puyallup, Nisqually, Dungeness and Elwha, especially if WDFW would designate rivers as wild steelhead management zones such as the Skagit and discontinuing harmful hatchery releases. Each of the programs would expand angling opportunity, reconnect anglers with the fish they love, and generate significant income to WDFW to create fiscal resources that could be allocated to address various impediments to wild steelhead recovery.

It is especially irksome that WDFW approves fishing plans for the tribes during March-April while denying angling opportunity to non-tribal citizens. Adoption of a model along the lines outlined above would eliminate this inequity, restore angling opportunity while limiting mortality below the NOAA mortality threshold. The current WDFW regulatory approach does nothing to recover listed stocks. Other than closing rivers, WDFW has no dedicated research program to identify population bottlenecks, does not have an actual plan to recover any listed stocks and continues planting hundreds of thousands of hatchery smolts into the closed systems annually, knowing full well that such planting is harmful to wild stocks and are a major impediment to recovery.

In reality, the regulatory approaches I suggest are not an elitist fly fishers ploy. They are sound regulations that conserve the resource, preserve angling opportunity and protect the local

economy. The issue for steelhead anglers is: would you prefer to continue sitting around admiring your $50,000 jetboat while your level wind gathers dust in the basement and your frozen salmon eggs go bad or go fishing with a fly rod?

Pete Soverel is Chair of The Osprey Management and Editorial Committee and founder and President of The Conservation Angler, one of The Osprey’s supporting partner organizations. Learn more about their work at: www.theconservationangler.org

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