You can read this blog and get a pretty good idea as to what I am saying, but for those of you who are plagued with modern life syndrome, this one's for you. You can thank me later for the concise manner in which I give you the main idea behind this blog. What we do to "save the salmon and steelhead" of the Columbia and Snake river basins amounts to collective insanity and there is a simpler solution that doesn't require us all to backtrack to hunter gatherer days. It doesn't even require us to backtrack, unless you actually like those muddy, canyon-locked thin reservoirs Eastern Washingtonians call lakes.

You may come away from this thinking this writer hates the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Bonneville Power Administration. That would not be true. I disagree with them, almost completely, and I believe that in breaching the four lower Snake River dams neither agency will be negatively affected. This blog is about the insanity of modern man and the hubris of modern man. This blog is about saving WILD salmon and steelhead not about getting excited about hatchery augmented runs; the salmon and steelhead we make in the hatcheries are akin to cattle and we have slaughterhouses for those unfortunate creatures.

I am not anti-commerce, but I am anti-stupid way of doing things and modern society when held collectively is a lazy son-of-a-bitch that demands everything be handed to it without said finger being lifted. I mean, Hell people, the Constitution only requires we count the humans every 10 years, yet we count salmon every year over every dam. Is that not insane in and of itself?

If, ultimately, I am successful with this blog and four lower Snake River dams are breached and the wild salmon and steelhead of the Snake River basin naturally recover as will happen (bank on it), neither the Corps of Engineers or especially the BPA will be out of business.

The Corps will never tire, nor run out of wonderful, natural streams in which some pinhead with a pocket protector decides should be dammed for electric power generation and water storage and the BPA at some point (I hope) will come to realize that ultimately they sell electricity and it really doesn't matter how that electricity is generated provided they can offer a competitive price for the electricity they sell. Hence, when I stand there as they breach those four dams, I don't expect anyone from the BPA to wish me dead, nor will I spend anytime gloating.

Pay attention here kiddies, because I am about to drop a whole lot of information on your brain and you need to absorb it and understand it. I'll break it up into two parts so as you come to understand just how insane our modern, lazy, society has become in the ongoing lip service to the salvation of salmon in the Columbia and Snake River basins.

For part one, you need to understand something, you actually need to go beyond understanding and accept it as gospel, dogma whatever, just know it is the baseline. Every fish in a hatchery, every fish attached to a hatchery doesn't do a thing to get the 13 stocks of endangered salmon and steelhead off the Endangered Species lists they occupy. Therefore, hatchery fish are irrelevant in every argument. Sure hatchery fish have played an incredibly important role in keeping the pinheads in Congress from doing the right thing because hatchery fish placate anglers and the public that pays more attention to the Jersey Shore and the Kardashians than it does anything that is actually important in life.

In order to construct the perfect propaganda, we must spend a lot of time on the ruse and hatchery fish are just that, a ruse. We truly are insane when it comes to all the things we do to protect hatchery fish. The thinking goes, we've spent billions on these things and the anglers are mum when these things come back in decent numbers (never numbers approaching historical wild runs, but as long as Joe Angler thinks he might hook one fish without an adipose fin he shuts his mouth and says we must be doing something right for salmon and steelhead). Public ignorance aside, we are insane.

Real quick, the life of a hatchery fish begins with a fish trap on a river where its parents were released as a smolt, parr, fry or fertilized egg. Said parents swim back, run into the weir and swim up the fish ladder into trap. We then net them, give them some antibiotics, take some measurements and then separate the females and males into separate concrete runways. Later, when we believe the females are ripe, a process that requires we get into the concrete runways and grab fish in an impromptu rodeo of sorts and after we have the fish in our hands we squeeze the females to see if she's ripe. If so, we toss her into a smaller pen of water and eventually she either takes a barbaric whack to the head by a wooden club or a more humane (yet akin to a slaughterhouse) machine that quickly shoots a metal bar into her brain killing her instantly. Now the fun begins. We flip dead female salmon over, cut her tail about 75 percent through and bleed her. Then we take her over and open her up with an instrument not unlike an envelope opener. Her eggs drop out into a collander in a bucket of water and then we take those bright red eggs over to another person holding a male salmon (let's call this fisheries biologist or fish culturist, a fluffer, because that's really what they have been lowered to in this exercise). The person now squeezes the male releasing his sperm onto the eggs from the dead female and then we mix. Then we add some chemicals to help harden the eggs and then we start loading the eggs into coolers for a ride in a truck to some hatchery that is generally not located where we trapped the fish.

So, we've got these eggs at the hatchery and we place them in incubators and soon we need to see which ones are viable. So we shock them, this isn't Frankenstein's monster, but we do take the eggs and pour them from one bucket of water into another and then we wait 24 hours. Then we run the eggs through a machine that sorts the live eggs and the dead eggs. The machine even tells us how many live and dead eggs we get with every tray of eggs. It can be thought of fascinating or you can think of it as I do, INSANE.

Eventually, these eggs hatch and then we get little salmon fry that grow into parr and now the big semi truck comes by the hatchery with the adipose fin clipping assembly line. Yes, we have automated the clipping of adipose fins in our hatchery salmon. We've divided the labor to its lowest common denominator and now only a couple people are required to clip the adipose fin off of literally millions of hatchery salmon and steelhead. I hear they use computers. Some day, I hear tell, they might even cut off the fins with laser beams.

Now we have identifiable hatchery fish for the anglers who won't complain about the near extinct wild salmon and steelhead. So we keep feeding these adipose fin challenged fish and then we drive them to the release point in most cases. Some are longer drives than others. We hook hatchery trucks up to various tubes and give these pet fish the amusement park ride of a lifetime (or so they might think at this point) into some stream we want them to come back to (preferably one where anglers can travel to in great numbers so there is a large portion of the attention paying public placated by the presence of adipose fin challenged fish).

Oh, the insanity isn't done folks, we's just beginning if I may fall into my mid-south vernacular for a moment.

These adipose fin challenged fish now float on down the stream hoping to find the ocean in a certain number of days. Instead, the lucky ones are sucked into a vacuum like device that sucks them from the reservoir we've created into a barge. It will take us two days to barge these fish from Lower Granite Reservoir to below Bonneville Dam and in the process we will have thoroughly screwed with the 40 percent of these smolts' ability to home in on their natal stream later in their lives.

Meanwhile, because it is important you not lose track of the actual fish that matter (THE WILD ONES). The wild salmon and steelhead are also making this journey and some of them are also being sucked up into the Corps of Engineers salmon and steelhead cruise line. Adipose fin intact and challenged fish alike are being eaten by various non-native predators like smallmouth bass and walleye and native predators like northern pikeminnow. Funny, though, the native predator is the only one of those fish with a BPA bounty on its head.

Some fish don't make the cruise and they get to go through the dam. Many take a trip through the turbines and die. Others go over the spillway, a better alternative than the turbine, but some of them die as well. All these fish arrive eventually in the lower Columbia River estuary where they are greeted by bird colonies that did not exist before the 1980s when the Corps started augmenting islands with dredged sand because the Port of Portland, et. al. wanted to continue to compete with naturally better ports in Tacoma and Seattle, Wash., and Vancouver, B.C.

Yes, Virginia we did create the problem of bird predation like salmon and steelhead never had to deal with before.

So, the Corps augmented East Sand Island in the 80s and Caspian terns said collectively, "we like the new digs." But vegetation took over and the Caspian terns moved upstream to another island and the Corps said, "they sure are eating a lot of salmon and steelhead smolts." So, the Corps moved them back to East Sand Island near Astoria, Ore., and Chinook, Wash., for those of you who are geographically challenged near the mouth of the Columbia River (upstream from the Cape of Disappointment, not too awful far from some really good fresh clam chowder at the marina in Ilwaco, Wash.) OK, so you know the place now.

Well, the Corps moved those birds back to East Sand Island and they were joined by cormorants (think fish that always orders the seafood buffet) and various other fish eating birds until East Sand Island becomes the lifetime climax trip of any birder seeking a big year and then the Corps says, we've got to move these birds. Well, let's at least move half of the Caspian terns to California or southern Oregon (I take it the Corps has a small capacity for the understanding of the travel capabilities of animals born with wings). So, now we are moving half the Caspian terns, all the while we each year (and it pains me that I know this minutia) count how many salmon smolts and steelhead smolts these various birds eat. Meanwhile, sea lions are also eating these smolts, but more importantly later we will focus on 75 California sea lions who have gotten in line at the Bonneville Dam all-you-can-eat Salmon/Steelhead buffet. We also encourage people with boats in the lower Columbia to waste near $4 per gallon gas as they drive toward any bird that even bears the slightest resemblance to a bird about to dine on a fish. We have people in boats driving like bats out of hell at birds on the water. If that's not insane, I don't know what is. If you don't agree that is insane, yo, check yourself...into a mental institution...no, seriously, you need help. But we aren't done exploring the bowels of the diseased human mind. Oh no, we've really just begun and quite frankly, I've skipped a lot of stuff. I skipped juvenile salmon acclimation facilities. I've skipped the ins and outs of paying anglers to kill off the native predators while we leave alone the non-native sportfish that eat more smolts than any damn minnow ever dreamed of eating. Editor's note: When writing of the insanity, it is important that I from time to time start new paragraphs. Moving on...

So the adipose challenged and the adipose finned fish finally make it to the sea where oddly enough we know very little about them. A rather convenient (if you ask me) black hole in the knowledge of a fish that we can generally predict its bowel movements in three to seven years. Especially convenient when you consider another item I left out earlier, the fact that we stick various electronics inside these fish. Believe me when I tell you that some day, some percentage of these fish say 5 to 10 percent will have some version of an iPhone or iPad inside them and you will be able to do more than just see how many crossed a dam and view photos from Bonneville on your own iPhone or iPad but you will have apps that let you track specific fish. We will likely place live-streaming cameras on these fish and you can experience 99 percent of them die off before they come back to the Columbia and Snake. Yes, it will be 99 percent or more because we ain't ever gonna engineer a better natural environment for wild salmon and steelhead than the one they require (psst.. Corps, BPA, the answer there is a free flowing river, I know, that question trips you guys up every time doesn't it?). Moving on...

Is this too much information for you? You are free to go back to the non-attentive public that incorrectly and ignorantly thinks a hatchery fish are the same as a wild fish. Go ahead, no one's really paying attention to anything that matters these days in any field. Go back to the herd, life's more fun there anyway. Just don't look in the mirror if you do get any of this stuff.

So, let's assume we know nothing about these fish at sea, totally untrue, but it's a convenient lie to tell ourselves and let's go forward to when they come back to the river. And there are those damn 75 California sea lions enjoying the $5.95 all you can eat buffet at the fish ladder at Bonneville Dam. Well, we have to kill them, don't we? OK, let's kill them, but also harass them, too. That way, the non-serious environmentalists out there won't be on our backs for killing the sea lions eating the salmon and steelhead. Look for Endangered Species Death Match on pay-per-view, Blu-Ray and DVD. Can I stop now? Do you see we are freaking insane? Oh, I see, I haven't given you an alternative.

Remove the four lower Snake River dams and voila (I'm sorry, that's French), our wild stocks of Snake River salmon and steelhead magically recover on their own (I know this doesn't play into the hands of the control freak inside so many humans). Why do I say this, well it is simple. In order for our WILD salmon and steelhead stocks in the Snake River basin to be SUSTAINABLE we need a 2-6 percent returning adults from the smolts that left for the oceans in the years before, which oddly enough is occurring downstream of the lower Snake River dams. (Pause for a moment, reflect on what was just said, now continue absorbing)

Also, as a bonus, when you consider the arguments for the dams staying put, you have to realize that A) the power these dams do create mostly happens when the power grid is full (runoff), B) these dams are not designed to provide flood control and in fact there is so much sediment now backed up behind Lower Granite Dam that the Corps of Engineers will have to spend millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars to dredge until the year 2074 to ensure that downtown Lewiston doesn't become the western United States' example of the Ninth Ward of N'awlins during Katrina, C) the irrigation provided by these (quite frankly ugly reservoirs) can still be provided from a free flowing river after breaching with the simple application of longer irrigation pipe (also only 13 farmers actually use these reservoirs to irrigate, so, for the love of God, if this is your hang up, 13 farmers or a return to a friggin' salmon economy COME ON!?! Wake up!) and one of my favorites D) the dams provide for the Port of Lewiston, which has been so successful that it has lost 50 percent of its business since the early 1990s, but the Corps just OK'd an expansion of it so Butch and the good ole boys (that'd be the Republican Ranching community that have the time to waste in the Idaho Legislature and Governor seat that require federal payments [yours and my tax dollars] each year to keep their archaic operations solvent so they can complain about that damn federal government and all its encroachments) can make good on their promise to the dinosaurs of energy (big oil) that they can use this inland port to unload some incredibly huge megaloads for use at the tar sands in Alberta friggin' Canada. So, let's look at the idea of a megaload, obviously no engineer was smart enough to build these parts in smaller increments that could be assembled later on site, so Idahoans and those mouth breathers over in Montana have to endure long waits and the safety hazards and maintenance hazards of the ever-present presence of loads that are far too large for our river canyon dependent roads.

I'm not even done with the insanity yet, that's the sad part. Anyway, chew on all that for awhile, because it just doesn't sit well with me, but then again, I'm sane. How about you?

Do I sound angry? I hope not, I mean, yes, it is maddening to look at all the crap we are willing to do and juxtapose it with what actually would work and ask the question WHY DON'T WE JUST DO THAT? But, I'm not angry, that will come when wild salmon and steelhead do become extinct from the Snake River Basin in the next 10-20 years without action.

My plainest message to the BPA and the Corps of Engineers and every pinhead who buys into the idea that somehow, someway we can craft a better river system than the one we were greeted with when my great, great, great, great uncle Clark accompanied Lewis in these here parts is simple breach the dams, the world won't end and you guys can get back to a life where you don't constantly have to live a lie where you pay lip service to salmon salvation when you have no intention of actually achieving because you know just as I know that in doing so means some major federal concrete works have to be breached.

I mean, there is a reason the phrase "you can't have your cake and eat it too," is an idiom and there is a reason that the last person of note who said "let them eat cake," was beheaded. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this stuff out, it doesn't even take an army engineer or a federal government electric power marketer to figure this out. We cannot have our WILD salmon and steelhead and demand that our primary source of electric power come from the four hydroelectric dams on the lower Snake River. It is that simple. You can talk about the merits of increased spill until you are blue in the face and I will simply remind you that the better numbers still are less than half of what we need and quite frankly aren't all coming from the only numbers that ultimately matter (unless your name is George W. Bush or some other pinhead who wanted to count hatchery fish with wild fish and call it good) and the only numbers that matter are the WILD fish and they ain't recovering people. Kid yourself all you want, until those dams come down and we give WILD salmon and steelhead their proper habitat back, we might as well kiss them goodbye. Comprende?

Oh, in case you haven't gotten it yet, THE ONLY FISH THAT MATTER ARE THE WILD SALMON AND STEELHEAD, pay no attention to those hatchery fish that are weakening the gene pools of wild fish anywhere where someone thinks supplementation is going to work, not to mention these man-made fish with the adipose fin amputation also compete with the wild fish for food, so chew on that as well.

Oh, you wanted me to say something about Judge Redden's recent remarks. I agree with what he said, wish he didn't say it, not because he doesn't have the right to say it but because of the typical misunderstanding of judges in America and this misunderstanding juxtaposed with the judge's very good comments allows the typical elected official from Eastern Washington to wax unpoetic about how the fix was in about some worthless dams in his neck of the woods. But power to you Judge Redden, at least you are sane. Welcome to the club, I think that makes five or six of us.


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Oh wait, they are back in the vernacular. Hey Moe, did you see the one where the "salmon advocates" are calling for more spill as a "solution?" Finger and thumb in the eye. "Nyuck, yunk." Ed Bowles tells the Idaho Statesman and anyone else who will listen, "I'm tired and I just can't take it anymore."

and I quote the whole article by Rocky Barker at the Idaho Statesman from this Sunday's paper  because I would hate to be accused of cherry picking...

" Increasing the amount of water spilled over eight Snake and Columbia river dams to keep juvenile fish away from hydroelectric turbines might be enough to recover most of Idaho’s endangered salmon populations without breaching dams, new studies suggest.

A state, tribal and federal science team that has been working since 1996 is urging federal fish and wildlife officials and dam managers to change their management to test the theory, which is based on a dramatic increase in data collected over the past decade.

“The fish are talking to us and we’re getting better at listening to what they’re telling us,” said Ed Bowles, chief of fisheries for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

The research suggests that a 15 percent to 20 percent increase in the amount of water that now spills over the dams — for a total flow of just more than half the rivers’ water — would more than double the number of salmon that survive to return to spawn. That’s enough to support sustainable populations of wild stocks of chinook and steelhead within 48 years.

In previous survival studies going back to 1996 — including a review by Idaho’s Department of Fish and Game — the only management option that could reach those survival numbers was breaching the four federal dams on the Snake River in Washington state.

The new study won’t end the debate. Opinions differ on whether the cost of extra spill is worth the benefits and whether removing the dams wouldn’t be cheaper in the long run.

Since the system of dams was built on the Columbia and Snake rivers from the 1930s through the 1960s, populations of salmon and steelhead have plummeted. Some had their access to spawning grounds blocked; others were killed traveling downstream, sucked into deep reservoirs and spit through the turbines. Some fish die outright at the dams; others are left too weak to make the trip to the ocean and back.

For the past 20 years, environmental and industry groups, Indian tribes, Northwest states, power companies, and the federal agencies that oversee dams, power and fish have been in court arguing over whether — and how — to save the iconic fish that define the Northwest and have given sustenance to its residents for millennia.

THE PROMISE OF ‘SPILL’

Charles Petrosky, an Idaho Fish and Game biologist who’s been involved in all of the studies, said he’s not ready to simply say that increasing spill would be as successful, biologically, as dam removal.

“It may get us into the ballpark,” Petrosky said. “I don’t think it changes the past (conclusions), but it gives us something in between that has a lot of promise, and we ought to explore it.”

The findings were released April 12 at the annual meeting of the Comparative Survival Study group in Portland. The group was set up in 1996 to estimate the effects of the Columbia and Snake dams on salmon through their life cycle.

“Spill” is the term given to river water that flows over the dam’s spillways rather than through its power-generating turbines. What makes an increased-spill plan more appealing than breaching dams is that it helps more than the four stocks of endangered salmon that live upriver of the dams. It also would help migrating salmon that spawn in the lower parts of the Columbia River system and its tributaries.

There are nonbiological benefits as well that could play just as big a role in any final management decision:

- Saving dams protects a source of cheap, nonpolluting electricity that will take on more and more importance in future years, as the world confronts the effects of global warming.

- Keeping dams preserves the Port of Lewiston, and the commerce created by the inland port.

- The dams’ slackwaters create boating and other recreational opportunities that would remain.

- If the scientists are right, existing river flows would provide enough spill without Idaho having to send more of the irrigation water it stores in reservoirs like Lucky Peak down the system to aid migrating salmon.

- Lastly, it is an option that could be accomplished by a federal judge’s court order without the arduous requirement of Congress authorizing the destruction of billions of dollars of dam infrastructure.

The politically unpalatable breaching option has created huge social chasms that often overshadow the larger discussion over what is the most effective and economical solution to save salmon.

COSTS OF MORE SPILL

Even so, there are costs to a plan that requires more aggressive spill.

Sending water away from the dams’ turbines reduces the amount of electric power that can be generated and sold, reducing the revenue that the Bonneville Power Administration gets for marketing hydropower. BPA has supported limited spilling as a part of the court-supervised “biological opinion” for operating Snake and Columbia dams, but has resisted expanded plans. Bonneville also rejects plans that put all the burden of recovery on the dams.

“The current bi-op is based on collaboration and science and (it) defines the performance the hydrosystem needs to achieve,” said BPA spokesman Michael Milstein. “That’s what we’re focused on.”

Terry Flores is executive director of Northwest RiverPartners, an alliance of utilities, farmers and barging interests that has supported the existing federal dam plan — a plan that advocates neither greater spill nor dam removal. She said she has not seen the Comparative Survival report, but is skeptical that it says anything new.

“It sounds like the same soundbite we’ve heard for years: More spill is better,” Flores said.

The current federal management plan calls for “adaptive management” — adapting river operations as new science emerges. Ritchie Graves, the National Marine Fisheries Service branch chief who oversees management of the endangered species in the Snake and Columbia, said its scientists see the data differently than the scientists whose research supported breaching and, now, more spill.

But he said the hypothesis is something that can be tested, and his agency, also known as NOAA Fisheries, is considering it.

“We’re approaching this cautiously,” Graves said. “We have to have more conversations with them.”

UNRAVELING SPILL’S BENEFITS

The current federal plan, often simply referred to as the bi-op, had the support of the states of Idaho, Montana and Washington, and most of the region’s Indian tribes. The Nez Perce Tribe and the state of Oregon opposed it. It was struck down in 2011 as insufficient for salmon recovery by U.S. District Judge James Redden. "

Salmon returns have improved since 2000, due in part to cooler ocean conditions near shore, which reduce predator numbers and create upwelling of currents that carry additional food. Those factors are outside of human control. But improved conditions in the rivers, due to court-ordered spill and fish-passage devices installed at many federal dams, also have contributed.

Biologists are predicting a good 2012 salmon season, which began this month.

Bowles, the Oregon chief of fisheries, said the new data show that spill benefits fish in ways biologists previously didn’t understand.

Not only does it divert the juvenile salmon away from the powerhouses, it also improves their survival in the Pacific after they leave the Columbia. It speeds their trip through the rivers and estuaries, meaning more survive to get to the ocean.

The larger salmon returns of the past decade and better tagging and monitoring of salmon have dramatically increased the amount of information scientists have to work with, Bowles said.

These most recent survival findings support Oregon’s official stance, which has called for an aggressive approach to salmon management that doesn’t include breaching.

The Nez Perce and the group Save our Wild Salmon, a coalition of sporting businesses, fishing groups and environmentalists, have long advocated removing the four dams to recover the fish.

Nicole Cordan, the coalition’s policy and legal director, said the findings are promising for the salmon, but they don’t take dam removal off the table.

That’s partly because added spill isn’t enough to recover Idaho’s Snake River sockeye, which nearly went extinct.

Increased spill will cost money, likely making it and other measures necessary for salmon recovery more expensive in the long run than simply removing the four dams, she said.

“We’ve always thought the economics and the science pointed to breaching to be the easier option,” she said.

Okay, sorry for all that, but sometimes, you've just got to let it all out so you can properly eviscerate what is wrong about it. Maybe I should use all caps.

THE IDEA OF INCREASING SPILL IS MERELY THE IDEA THAT WE AS IMPERFECT HUMANS CAN MANIPULATE A STAGNATE WATERWAY THAT WE CREATED BACK INTO A SORT OF FREE FLOWING RIVER AT A HIGHER ELEVATION BECAUSE IN ALL OF OUR HUBRIS WE'LL BE DAMNED IF WE EVER CONSIDER GOING BACK TO A FREE FLOWING RIVER.

I'm going to close on that, sorry for the less verbose response than usual, but my message (if read) of utter disgust (you're no longer on the team) has been made to the necessary people. Have a nice day.


Read more here: http://www.idahostatesman.com/2012/04/22/2087353/saving-salmon-without-removing.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy
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I was reading a story about President Obama wanting to place the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration under the auspices of the Department of the Interior here. Forgive me if I seem like Rain Man in seemingly responding to a question asked 20 minutes ago (I've been busy), but in truth the move makes sense and doesn't matter all in the same.

The problem isn't so much the integrity of the science coming out of NOAA changing for the better or worse with a change from the Department of Commerce to the Department of the Interior. The problem with NOAA's science of late has been this silly notion that we must collaborate regardless of whether the collaborators have completely opposing viewpoints and end goals.

Yes, yes, tell all the young ones to collaborate throughout life, but do tell them that when they come face to face with someone diametrically opposed to their viewpoint and goals that conflict will occur and that they shouldn't always collaborate to solve the conflict. People win and lose everyday in this world, so break the news to little one today before they watch too much soccer and think ties are the norm.

Imagine if the world would have "collaborated" with Hitler. I realize that this may seem like I am about to compare someone to Hitler, but I am not (just missed my shot at being a Fox News contributor with that backtrack). The proverbial hen doesn't collaborate with the fox over entrance into the hen house. Thus, it never came as a surprise to me that when NOAA is "collaborating" with the Bonneville Power Administration and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that the "science" NOAA would produce for the Biop would be thrown out of any rational thinking court room.

The goal of the Bonneville Power Administration is to sell power to rate payers. The goal of the Army Corps of Engineers is to manipulate rivers for various reasons including commerce. Those probably aren't the over worded stated missions of those two organizations that some committee over thought, but essentially those are the goals of those two agencies. NOAA essentially "enriches life through science," or something vague like that with some piece about the protection of natural resources. Anyway, the point is, you take two organizations whose existence depends on hydroelectric dams (whether that is really the truth, it is the reality they operate under) and you force the enriching science folks at NOAA to "collaborate" with them, naturally the salmon and the science are going to get the short shrift and be watered down.

If you move NOAA over to Interior, does that mean they don't have to collaborate with the foxes manipulating the hen's (salmon) home? If so, then we have made some progress. Then we might get back to actual science pointing out that the survival of Snake River basin salmon is only possible with the breaching of the four lower Snake River dams, just as the scientists from the US Fish and Wildlife Service said and just as some super majority of the fisheries scientists in the Pacific Northwest have repeatedly said over and over and over again while the BPA spends billions of your money on programs to treat the minor symptoms of salmon and steelhead extinction while holding the source of the problem harmless. And while the Corps of Engineers sells the public or at least convinces themselves that hundreds of millions of your money should be spent to continue to maintain bad dams that don't control floods, kill millions of fish and will cause flooding of their own without the creation of higher levees and dredging until 2074 or whatever year it was to "ensure" the town of Lewiston doesn't look like the Ninth Ward a few days after Katrina.

The salmon and steelhead aren't going to be saved by some joint effort where we force opposite forces onto the same team supposedly playing for the salvation of wild salmon and steelhead. It will never happen that way. So long as we all live, the BPA is always going to be in love with hydroelectric power, even though wind power in the Pacific Northwest already more than doubles the output of those four lousy dams, and the Corps of Engineers has absolutely no clue what to do with a free flowing natural river, unless they are allowed to dam it up. Therefore any "solution" that an agency committed to getting salmon and steelhead off the Endangered Species List the right way (there are two ways of doing it, allow the BPA and Corps to kill them all off, or give back natural rivers to salmon and steelhead and allow them to recover themselves) would mean that someone loses and the people that need to lose this fight if Snake River salmon are to be around after I am gone are the BPA and the Corps. You can throw in the Bureau of Reclamation in there as well in the losers bracket. Why are a bunch of engineers and electricity marketers controlling the fate of Snake River basin wild salmon and steelhead? Seriously, the Endangered Species Act wasn't enacted so that we could ask a bunch of engineers and power marketers if it would be OK if we save what is left of our wild salmon and steelhead. Why are they even allowed seats at the grown up table and why are some of the grown ups forced to choke down the crap they are passing around the table? And I'm not even talking about all the hush money in this instance (though I always wonder how some can look in the mirror).

It really doesn't matter what cabinet secretary NOAA reports to so long as this silly notion that diametrically opposed missions of federal agencies are placed together on the same team under the false premise that this group will somehow come up with the answer. Someone has to lose, and if you are keeping score at home, salmon, steelhead and indeed all wild fish and wildlife are losing and losing badly. When they finally do lose, you will be the biggest loser of all and I am quite sure the majority of the population has no appreciation of that fact. I am sure many of you reading that either scoffed or if you agreed with that you still have no real clue what our continued onslaught on our natural world will mean for the human race down the road.

And because this seems to be a popular place for the marketing of miracle cures, salmon and steelhead don't need engineering, they need their rivers back. They need their habitat back. Man can make power out of many other things and if man really is serious about saving the wild fish and wildlife that remain, man will turn to those alternative sources of energy today and not waste anymore time. The longer we wait, the less likely we will save the wild salmon and steelhead of the Snake River basin and that is unacceptable.
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Well, actually we are quite fortunate here in Idaho to still have great habitat for our wild salmon and steelhead, the shame of it is, the great habitat we have can be gone tomorrow if we leave it up to the knuckleheads we generally leave things up to in this state. If you doubt me, ask the wolves or the bighorn sheep or salmon for that matter, we don't exactly put in place leaders anywhere in this state lately who actually stand up for the things that make this state special, but if you want to destroy something forever or for some really long time, we have a wealth of "leaders" who are willing to help you.

There is a reason why Idaho still has great spawning and rearing habitat for salmon and steelhead and in general it is due to wilderness designation, scenic river designation and roadless areas. I know, I just pissed off 70 percent of the state who  think wilderness is a federal encroachment on their rits (sorry, rights), but we wouldn't still have great areas like the Middle Fork of the Salmon River if we didn't lock it away in a wilderness and scenic river designation. Quite frankly, though, we need more wilderness and scenic river designations and roadless areas.

While the older I get, the less and less I believe any amount of protest really does anything (especially with so many distractions we have today from the propaganda news for the right and for the left to the absolutely sad list of trending stories on any search engine's aggregated news), I still think you have to stand up and be counted. So, go here, and comment, yell from the mountain tops, camp out on the state capitol lawn or whatever to stop this from happening.

I promise you, this isn't good for salmon or steelhead. I also promise you that this will likely fall on deaf ears, because it is Idaho and it is Idaho County and both are known for declaring emergencies because of wolves accounting for 1 percent of all the livestock deaths in the state. I would hate to see what they would do if they saw lightning strike near some cattle. So, the idea that getting the bulldozer out in the middle of the Salmon River to get some gravel is bad for salmon and steelhead and indeed for all things that the Salmon River is, will be foreign to those who ultimately have the last word. And the reason is simple, it's Idaho, and the electorate has a way of scraping the bottom of the barrel for its leaders.

But do it anyway, because at some point we have to say enough is enough and stop stupidity and greed before it ruins something we all cherish, and we don't all cherish gravel. Though there seems to be a gravel pit about every five miles in this state.

It's a simple message you need to convey to those who make the decision...The Salmon River is not open for gravel mining.
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A recent study of Hood River steelhead using tissue samples from every fish that returned to the river between 1991 and 2010 showed more of what we already knew. Hatchery fish will not be the answer in saving wild steelhead. You can bet the banks, the same can be said of wild salmon in the Columbia and Snake river basins.

You can read about the study here or a shorter version is here or another shortened version is here. I want to focus on a few things that were said in the longer Oregonlive.com article, because they are telling, but first, the basics should be reviewed.

The study was done by Mark Christie, an Oregon State genetic researcher and Michael Blouin, an OSU professor, Melanie Marine of OSU and Rod French of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. The study found that genetic adaptation of hatchery steelhead hurts wild spawning success in just one generation. It doesn't take numerous generations to start destroying the gene pool with fish adapted for crowded hatchery runs rather than wild, free flowing river environs. This is immensely important to understand. We cannot rely on hatchery fish to be a savior of wild salmonids. Hatcheries are no Noah's Ark. They ain't the second coming and this study confirms that when we get to their seconds, we can expect to see a 71 percent decline (I'll say it again, a 71 percent decline) in productivity after spawning in the wild. That is hatchery fish that had greater success in returning to the river with five or more siblings versus other hatchery fish that had less success in being their brother's keeper. This is important, this study suggests that those hatchery fish that are most successful at returning to the river are the least successful in productively spawning. You mix them with the tiny amount of wild fish we have left and you weaken the gene pool and the entire population can crash and you almost have Jim Lichatowich's great book title, except it is Rivers without salmon and not Salmon Without Rivers (which you should buy and read, great book).

Now to a couple of points I want to make that might not be obvious to the casual reader. A lot of Pacific Northwest Tribes have embraced supplementation (the use of hatchery broodstock to be allowed to spawn in the wild when they return) and they do this because as with all promises made to the tribes by the federal government, it is another promise broken as wild salmon are about 10 percent of historic numbers (even in the "good" years). I understand the want of using hatchery supplementation to rebuild declining or extirpated stocks of wild fish. I really do, I had this dream as well. But supplementation from hatchery fish is just that; a dream. It's not real and the more we do it, especially in places where we still have wild fish returning every year, we threaten to destroy those stocks as well.

And so, I am bothered by a couple of comments in the first story I directed you to above.

"It's important to remember that hatchery supplementation is a response to declining or depressed salmon populations, not the cause," said Peter Galbreath, a fishery scientist with the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission. Supplementation is necessary "to rebuild populations at desired levels while we await, probably naively, rectification of the source problems," Galbreath added.

He is right about that, supplementation is only a response to the fact that the Bonneville Power Administration and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers do nothing for salmon recovery and everything for salmon extinction. Oh sure, they spend millions and millions of taxpayer and ratepayer dollars applying a bandage on everything but the problem, rather than what should be done, which would be to run a Roto-Rooter through at least four lower Snake River dams and allow the Snake to run free again.

What bothers me the most about that statement, and truly it isn't the statement from the article that peeves me the most, is that is born of desperation. It's "please, we can be happy with crumbs if that is all we can have." I would rather the statement not bury the lead. He should have began with and perhaps ended with some version of rectifying the source problems, which are dams and habitat destruction. Those are the real problems and you can't fix a problem until you start calling it out at every opportunity. And when the opportunities don't present themselves, you make the opportunity and point it out again and again and again until those lower Snake River dams are breached. That's how you win. You don't win when you concede that you are waiting and probably (not probably) "naively" for the rectification of the source problems (dam breaching, restoration of habitat). It does irk me a bit when advocates for salmon feel they have to concede the only points that matter.

It irked me even more though when I read this quote...

"In my opinion, the question of whether genetic change occurs in hatcheries has been answered," Blouin said. "If we could quit arguing about that and find out why, then we're all on the same team again."

And, admittedly I may be reading more into this than Blouin meant, but the comment seems to be wrongheaded. What same team are you talking about. There are people who want wild salmon and there are people who want to make millions and millions of salmon using someone else's money so they can say "we tried, see how hard we tried, just so you would shut up about some fish." The BPA and the Corps of Engineers aren't on the wild salmon team, they never were and never will be. They are on the team that says rivers are to be reshaped to our needs and the critters be damned (pun intended). They are on the team that is more than happy to throw half a billion dollars at the "problem" so long as that money doesn't ever affect the franchise, so to speak. And the franchise will always be the dams to them. Don't fall for the "effort" they put into salmon recovery. They've been throwing YOUR money at this problem for what now, 20 years? Something like $10 billion down the drain and more of YOUR money to be spent and no, absolutely no, discernible improvement in our salmon runs. You have to come to the conclusion that they are either highly incompetent (likely considering who I am referring to) or not interested in doing what they already know would have to be done to save our wild salmon (even more likely).

This statement by Blouin is also troubling me because it seems to point to some future effort to make our hatchery fish more like wild fish, rather than simply fix the problem of dams and habitat destruction. What is this, some fish version of the bionic man about to be hatched (we can build them stronger)? He seems to be heading down some path where if they can figure out a few things genetic wise in the hatchery (not unlike the Nez Perce hatcheries and their supplementation programs) where they will come out one day in the future and revamp all the hatcheries (some hundreds of millions of your money they will spend to rebuild all the hatcheries to make some better product). I used the word product there for a reason. That is what those uninterested in real salmon recovery think of these fish they make. They are a product used to buy off enough people, be they sport fishermen, tribal fisheries, what have you to get you to forget that their dams are killing off the really special wild salmon and steelhead.

I don't need to know why these genetic changes are occurring in the hatcheries. I knew they were already and I already know how we save wild salmon and steelhead and it won't be by making better hatchery fish, or more hatchery fish, or by court-ordered spill in perpetuity, or by paying bounties to kill off salmon eating fish, or by moving colonies of birds to California, or by killing, harassing and moving sea lions, or by anything short of breaching some dams.

Someone might read this and think I am unwilling to collaborate or compromise, nothing could be further from the truth. My salmon have to traverse eight dams to and from the ocean, and I'm only asking that we get rid of half the dams. That's compromise in my book.



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Livingston Stone was kind of a big deal in the U.S. Fish Commission in the 19th Century. I don't revere much about the man, but he did have a good idea in 1892 when he realized salmon stocks were disappearing and his belief in the idea that artificial propagation would make fishing regulations unnecessary by creating a panacea of fish began to wane. He promoted the idea of a national park for salmon. His idea was simple save a river and its habitat for salmon before it was too late for salmon to recover.

Of course, this idea fell on deaf ears, unlike his ideas for hatcheries and his practice of planting non-native fish all across the U.S. I have worked to help descendants of Livingston Stone's rainbow trout from his hatchery on the McCloud River in California to have better habitat on a tiny stream in Missouri where descendants of his fish still carry on today. To put it mildly, his influence still persists today, if only his idea of national salmon parks would have caught the same fire as his hatcheries push.

Idaho's many salmon and steelhead streams still hold the potential for Stone's 1892 dream. The habitat for salmon and steelhead in the Middle Fork of the Salmon River and its tributaries and many other streams that have been protected by wilderness designations or by the rugged terrain in which they travel through still hold the promise as salmon and steelhead refugia or as Stone would say national salmon parks, much like national parks such as Yellowstone and Yosemite.

But just like any national park, our salmon park would need a highway for its main attraction and Idaho's salmon and steelhead have one overriding obstacle to their own recovery and that is primarily their migratory habitat. And the greatest threat to our salmon and steelhead recovery remains the four lower Snake River dams that would have to be breached for our salmon and steelhead to recover.

Very little would need to be done to designate such parks after the four lower Snake River dams are breached. I would argue that the thus far unsuccessful effort for a Secesh/Needles Wilderness designation would definitely be one way we could further strengthen our salmon parks. This proposal is hardly known in the mainstream, but it would further protect a lot of tributary habitat and some mainstem habitat along the South Fork of the Salmon River, which too could be its own national salmon park, should the four lower Snake River dams be breached.

Imagine salmon runs in Idaho as they were when we first arrived to settle this frontier. Imagine salmon and steelhead runs that rival runs in Alaskan streams. All of this is possible if we restore the migratory habitat and do a few other things to protect the great rearing and spawning habitat we already, or should I say, still have in Idaho today.
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I want to caution everyone about reports of better return numbers due to the Nez Perce supplementation program for Snake River fall Chinook that you can read about here. Now I want you to read this here from the summer newsletter by the Native Fish Society because it digs out a lot of useful quotes and points you to various studies that look into supplementation programs and the damage they cause to wild fish.

I know very few people who haven't seen or heard of a story about some animal that was taken in by humans to be cared for then released to the wild only to die or at least heard a story where they said they couldn't release the animal back into the wild because it would die. Stop me if I am telling tales out of school here.

It would be fantastic if we could simply allow hatchery fish to go off and spawn with wild fish and watch as our salmon stocks rebounded to numbers not seen since Lewis and my old uncle Clark came floating down the Clearwater. Truly if we could have our salmon and our dams, I wouldn't have to write this stuff and our interest in Pacific salmon would rarely go beyond, "wow, that fish swam this far," and "damn, that's tasty!" We wouldn't have to take a daily census of the fish as they traverse each dam either. Truly, the world would be a better place, if only a supplementation program could deliver on its promise and if you read that first article up there, it certainly looks promising.

But it isn't. Every supplementation program in place is weakening the wild genetics and replacing truly special fish, fish that evolved especially for the stretch of water they are born and later die in, and we are replacing them with pets. Pets don't fare as well as the street savvy wild fish, especially when they come into contact with orca or any other danger for that matter.

What you see in these supplementation program studies are fairly consistent and alarming findings. But, you say, the article clearly points out that Snake River fall Chinook, both wild and hatchery are coming back in larger numbers. Yes, that is true, but that is also to be expected. Stay with me on this because I want the Nez Perce to have figured this thing out as much as anyone, but the problem is at least two-fold as I see it.

It's too early to call this a success as the first article seems to be leaning toward doing. Studies generally show the amount of eggs that return with each successive supplemented generation are much lower than the eggs from wild returners. Something like 40 percent less, which is alarming. There are a few things that are rarely focused on in this salmon debate that are critical, they are fecundity, sex ratios and most importantly the fact that we are trying to save WILD FISH, not hatchery fish, not hatchery/wild fish offspring, but WILD FISH. Imagine for a second, instead of releasing wolves into Yellowstone and the wilderness of Idaho, we just released a bunch of Cocker Spaniels and called it good. OK, perhaps a blog being generated in the state of Idaho shouldn't ever use the wolf reintroduction as an analogy.

Let's say you have a wild female coming back with 5,000 eggs. If she spawns with other wild fish, her offspring will likely have similar fecundity rates. If she spawns with hatchery fish allowed to stay in the stream to spawn, studies have shown a couple of things, the returning offspring will have fewer eggs and there are likely to be fewer offspring returning. Now, you are probably disagreeing with me as that story clearly states there are more returning fish. Well, yes, when you allow more fish to spawn, you will generally get back more and more fish, but those numbers you see, if those were all wild fish spawning and not three parts hatchery and one part wild, the returning numbers would blow you away.

Of course there are more fish returning now, but they are weaker and the females will have less eggs, and I don't know the reason why, this is just something studies have found. Tame fish spawning with wild fish produce less wild and therefore less strong offspring. When you have this situation there are a myriad of other factors that can eventually lead to a complete collapse of the population. But I would argue once you start mixing the genetics of hatchery and wild fish, you've already killed off the wild fish (yes, they say they have been able to keep 90 percent of the genetics alive from the 16 wild sockeye of Redfish Lake that returned in the 1990s in the offspring of that program but no fish born in a plastic bag is wild and mice are about 99 percent the genetic twin of humans, so take that with a grain of salt). Remember hybridization is one of the enemies of salmon recovery and supplementation is human-championed hybridization.

I don't know how to explain it to you why our fattened hatchery fish are weaker than our wild fish, though I am sure you can think of many relative examples that sort of explain it to you. And I don't really have a good way of explaining how or why the genetics of the weaker version seem to come to influence greatly the offspring of a hatchery/wild fish. Except to say there are some learned traits and some instinctual traits and somehow, someway mixing hatchery fish with wild, evolved for that water, fish isn't passing on all the evolved traits and instead are passing on some traits of the hatchery fish that serve no purpose to the offspring in a wild situation.

While we are clearly doing supplementation programs, may I ask everyone involved that they leave alone all stocks of Pacific salmon and steelhead that come back to the Middle Fork of the Salmon River and its tributaries. Please allow all remaining wild stocks of Pacific salmon and steelhead to remain that way as you determine whether or not your supplementation program is working or not in what I consider to be far too large a laboratory already.
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I had mentioned in the previous note about sea lions and salmon something about mitigating for salmon recovery. Yes, that's an odd way of looking at it. You shouldn't have to mitigate for returning to the natural condition. Mitigation is, after all, the terminology of the engineer, the terminology of the extractive industrialist who is about to wreak havoc on a special place.

Have you ever read the plans for various projects and noticed the cavalier attitude toward mitigation. If something is there and it is worth money, we will move heaven and earth to get at it. I was reading about a gold mine located near a steam with salmon and steelhead present. The report was pretty quick to say how the mining company would deal with this inconvenience of a stream with salmon and steelhead being located near the gold they wanted to dig out of ground owned by the American people. It simply said relocate the stream. Here's an activity that will crush scores of tons of rock to get at one ounce of gold because that is economically feasible and will make the owners rich. Think about that for a minute, we willingly crush literally millions of tons of rock to get at an ounce of gold per 50 or 70 tons or whatever the claim can do and that makes sense to us. It makes so much sense that gold mines are going back into production all over the west. At this mine, salmon and steelhead are inconveniently located in the stream. They've inconveniently been located in that stream for tens of thousands of years at the minimum, but we'll just mitigate and relocate the stream.

Maybe those interested in salmon recovery should (even though you shouldn't have to mitigate to return something to its natural state) think about mitigation practices for salmon recovery.

I see that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission slapped the Bonneville Power Administration over their decision to order wind power producers to shutdown this spring during runoff. I also see that wind power generation in the Pacific Northwest has grown from 500 megawatts in 2006 to 6,000 megawatts today. If that is integrated with the hydropower generated by other dams (not the lower 4 Snake River dams) and gas plants it is more than twice the power generated by the lower Snake River dams. Well, it seems someone has already done the mitigating for me on the power side.

Dam supporters, if this were a chess board, you just lost your queen.

I have also noted that shipping on the lower Snake River has taken a drastic turn for the worse over the past 20 years. It's down almost 50 percent since the early 1990s. About all you've got to cling to these days are those megaloads. Perpetuating the extinction of Snake River salmon so Canada can suck its rocks dry of oil, that's not a strong or popular position to be in.

What about irrigation? Exactly, what about irrigation? There's hardly any irrigation going on from these dams and their reservoirs and the irrigation that is happening can be replaced with a longer pipe stretched into a free flowing lower Snake River when the light finally switches on in the heads of everyone that "hey, we've replaced the power of these dams, we aren't using the shipping lanes like we did in the past and irrigation is a moot point." Maybe, just maybe, in the deep, dark reaches of the minds of normal people they will finally see that we are on the precipice of salmon recovery and all we need now is the critical mass to breach the dams that stand in the way of Snake River salmon recovery.

The critical mass comes from regular people all over the Pacific Northwest. When regular people begin to reject the perpetuated lies of the Bonneville Power Administration, et. al. and understand 86 percent of the fisheries biologist community isn't somehow in cahoots with Al Gore and wolf reintroduction, maybe, just maybe, we can breach the dams and the salmon can recover on their own.
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As I have said before, the "fixes" that are allowed to go forward in the ongoing semi-serious effort to save the salmon of the Columbia and Snake River basins by the federal government and three state governments are akin to the patient in cardiac arrest with doctors and nurses surrounding him placing bandages on small cuts while the heart remains in arrest.

If we applied the logic we are applying to the relatively new problem of the 75 or so California sea lions that swim up the Columbia River to feed on salmon that get bunched up at the fish ladder awaiting their first turn at traversing our speed bumps, we would be passing laws that allow us to kill people legally in the name of salmon recovery. Why? Because we are the primary reason for salmon decline, but sea lions ate something like 5,000 returning adult salmon or some round about number like that and by golly we are going to fix every problem we run into other than the actual problem and these cute sea lions are on the radar screen.

To take a cynical approach to this, it's like we want to be the only species on the planet allowed to exterminate salmon. It reminds me of how conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh used to pick NFL games by determining which team's mascot would have the most environmental support.

This salmon versus sea lions is exactly that, and my question is (since we already have determined the only good northern pikeminnow is a dead one and now we want that to be the same for any sea lion found swimming up the Columbia River) when do we turn on killer whales? When do we turn on ourselves? When do we place the Wanted Dead poster on aquaculture? Because you see, I know we will never turn it on the dams. We would never consider doing something that would actually make a difference for salmon recovery, well, at least not our precious giant federal dams that we've located on the most important migratory habitat for our salmon. Sure, we'll knock down these other dams, but nothing on the mainstem of the Snake River or Columbia for that matter.

We are moving colonies of birds because they eat salmon and the only reason we have to move them is because we created the perfect place for them to live by our incessant need to "improve nature." We harass, move and kill sea lions and we have bounties on northern pikeminnow and we do all of this in the name of saving the salmon. All the while we know what the primary culprits in the ongoing salmon slaughter are; dams. And we will literally move heaven and earth to keep our dams and pretend we mean to recover salmon.

Heaven help the next nonhuman we identify as a killer of salmon. The second we do, your days are numbered.

This is literally like the doctor who focuses on a few paper cuts while the patient is lying there on the gurney impaled by a flag pole. "Eh, the flag looks nice, but get me a small bandage stat because this man has a paper cut!"

This whole sea lion vs. salmon is just another convenient distraction to true salmon recovery and you have noted that those who fake they are working toward salmon recovery have jumped on this with glee. Anything to distract you from the real issue (dams killing salmon) and you can bet the federal agencies, the states of Washington, Oregon and Idaho are going to be right there getting you to rationalize something that truly proves we have gone completely insane.

There are two sane approaches we can have here, one is a thoughtful, concerted effort to mitigate for salmon recovery (in other words we figure out better ways to generate power and provide cheap transport) and remove the dams or the other sane approach is we abandon salmon recovery, we admit we want our dams and the salmon be damned. This approach we have gets more and more foolish with every passing moment.

I have always said it wouldn't surprise me if someone at NOAA or BPA or elsewhere suggested we place leashes on all salmon and walk them to and from the ocean as our latest effort to save them. That suggestion doesn't surprise me in light of all the crazy things we have done to date.

Boil this issue down, dams are killing salmon (that's the main problem for the past 35-70 years). Can we live without the dams? Can we live without the salmon? I can live without the dams, I cannot live without the salmon. You have a choice to make, I want that choice made sooner rather than later. Do we secure food for the species or for our machines? It's not a hard choice when you frame it correctly.
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It looks like those fish eating double-breasted cormorants are again the main culprit in the juvenile salmon killing field that is the Columbia River estuary around East Sand Island. Estimates for smolt consumption in 2011 were placed at about 27 million smolts, which was said to be 15-20 percent of the smolt population. Extrapolating from that we have 135-180 million hatchery and wild salmon smolts that survived to the estuary.

Caspian terns who are scheduled to be relocated from the dredge material augmented island to locations in southern Oregon and northern California ate about 5 million salmon and steelhead smolts this year compared some 22 million eaten by double-breasted cormorants.

The research was done by Dan Roby of the U.S. Geologic Survey’s Oregon Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit and Oregon State University and Ken Collis of Real Time Research, Inc. The research that has been done since the 1990s is funded by the US Army Corps of Engineers and the Bonneville Power Administration.

While it is quite natural for terns and cormorants and other birds to eat salmon and steelhead smolts, the presence of these birds in the numbers they are today present on East Sand Island is totally the responsibility of dredging activity in the lower Columbia River and deposition of dredging materials that augmented an island that was not formerly the nesting ground of these terns and cormorants. The tern colony first arrived in the 1980s, after we started depositing dredging material on East Sand Island. The birds left when vegetation grew up within the first year and they relocated on Rice Island farther upstream. The Corps and wildlife manager decided to move the tern colony back to East Sand Island because they believed the predation was too great at Rice Island on salmon and steelhead smolts. Cormorants started nesting on the island in 1989 and have grown in numbers ever since.

Clearly, this is one of the many ways mankind has manipulated nature with devastating unintended consequences and this needs to be corrected immediately. Trouble is, once several populations of wild birds find a great source of food and good nesting habitat it will be difficult to
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