Bend News

Oregon coho salmon are once again on the ESA threatened list because hatchery fish do not count. Hatchery condors count, as well as peregrine falcons, several species of turtles, all on a very long list of hatchery brooded and raised animals. In the selective shop-a-judge environmental lawsuit game, gaining ESA rule of vast habitat areas is supposed to help the critters.

Bald Eagles came back after it became a very serious Federal offense to shoot them, and Alaska quit paying a bounty. Peregrines are back because exotic rock doves (pigeons) and sky scrapers and bridges provide great prey and habitat, and peregrine hatcheries provided the brood stock. Coho will never come back because the day there is a "harvestable" number, sports fishermen get to kill them. If the "surplus" is great enough, there will be a commercial season. And the enviros like it that way because they get to play Lucy, holding the ball and then pulling it back, at their whim. Coho on the brink makes for a great way for NGO's to control all activity on great expanses of private land, which is their aim. And, if land values are lessened, it makes it more affordable for them to buy those lands to add to their millions of acres now held.

There is an issue with critical mass in fish as in other critters. Coho are below critcal mass in many areas, and thus their habitat is impacted. Too many fish have been caught for too many years. Anywhere in coho country you can find pictures or anecdotes of the pitchfork harvest of those fish to fertilize the garden for grandma, to fill the smoke house, to feed the chickens and hogs. Protein in the creek and readily available. Add to that more than a century of over fishing and you get populations on the brink.

In 1877, in his report to the US Bureau of Fish and Fisheries, Livingston Stone reported he was directed by Commissioner Spencer T. Baird to build a salmon hatching station on the Columbia River because the salmon packers were seeing a great reduction in the number of fish being delivered to their plants. In his prospecting for a site, Stone noted: "There were over a thousand drift nets in the Columbia, each 1200 feet long, running all summer; there were drift nets and two traps on the Clackamas, and in September a trap reaching nearly across the mouth of the same river, and how could we expect to get many parent salmon to take eggs from at the terminus of a gauntlet like that? The fact was that nearly every salmon that entered the mouth of the Columbia was trapped, netted, seined, speared, or otherwise destroyed before it reached our fishery."

All this at the time that "Owing to Indian troubles, which were then very serioous, it was unsafe, and in fact wholly out of the question, to go to the Clearwater or Salmon river, or to the Yakima or any of the tributaries of the Upper Columbia".

Stone did send Mr. Hubbard to the Umatilla River, where he built a weir to obstuct salmon in that river to assess their numbers. That was in September, and he found none.

There was not one mention of habitat as being the problem for salmon dropping in numbers or not even being present.

All this took place 60 years before the construction of Bonneville dam, with its fish ladders added only after Astoria Finn gillnetters threatened to burn Oregon's capitol if the dam totally blocked the river to salmon. Oregon was out of salmon, or losing runs, only 20 years after Statehood. Bonneville dam made it possible to count all the fish going to the Upper Columbia, and its tributaries. There were few left. And this before the Federal dam building that followed WWII.

Salmon are the prime habitat maintenance vehicles of the streams in which they spawn and where their young begin life. A hen salmon's tail builds a gravel redd, which is a process of washing sediment out of gravel and that gravel piling and covering the eggs. The shape of the redd is wing-like, and it accelerates water velocity over the redd, lessening the chance of fines settling on the redd, and the depression upstream from the redd collects other fines, thus keeping them out of the redd. Salmon nests are a sediment response, clean gravel and ensure clear water washes gently over the eggs. The sediment flows downstream. If the salmon have been missing in the stream for a 100 years, you would expect the bottom to cobbled hard, with sediment being the grout making paving stones out of the gravels, only because those gravels have not been disturbed by salmon for a century. In British Columbia, successful reintroduction of sockeye to a previously dammed stream, was not possible because the bottom was too hard for the sockeye to make redds. The fish had returned but spawning was impossible. The BC Fisheries people brought in track hoes with bucket rakes, and loosened the gravels, and massive spawning took place, and those gravels are now loose all the time because fish are using them annually.

So we are at the "chicken or egg" place in salmon concerns, in my mind. Is there little suitable habitat because of terrestrial land use or is it because there have been too few fish to maintain the stream bottom for over a century or more? How bad is the nutritional budget of a stream without dead salmon in it for a century? Is a salmon's highest use, at this time, in the form of a spawned out carcass on the bottom of the stream or hung up in drift on the bank after a freshet, or should it be on the white table cloth restaurant plate? Or giving a thrill to some retired guy who fishes for them every day, all season?

If biology is what will return salmon numbers, then we ought to not catch them for several generations of fish. If we have no control of ocean conditions, which cycle surely as the sun rises and sets, then there will times of salmon scarcity, and times of abundance. It is not the habitat reserved by man, by fiat, by interpretation of the ESA, that will bring them back. Only by not killing them for sport or dollars might they again live in meaningful numbers to maintain and feed their stream habitats, and be there to bring ocean micro-nutrients back to the streams, valleys and mountains where they spawn and their young are born. If this is not the goal, then their "protectors" are just using the ESA for misguided attempts of an Edenic Dream on Earth. Gaia worship. If the coho are helped, it will be serendipidy, unless fishing is ceased and hatchery fish are all used to fertilize streams, and not given to the local food bank.