Saving Seafood

California faces another bleak salmon-fishing season, a holdover from the drought

March 6, 2017 — California salmon anglers are looking at another bleak fishing season, despite the remarkably wet winter – a lingering impact from the state’s five-year drought.

This week, state and federal fisheries regulators released their estimates for the numbers of adult fall-run Chinook salmon swimming off California’s coast. The news was even more grim than the drought-weakened numbers of fish last year.

An estimated 54,200 adult fall-run Chinook salmon reared in the Klamath River are swimming off the Pacific Coast – among the lowest number on record and down from 142,000 in 2016. Of the adult fish reared in the Sacramento River and its tributaries, biologists estimate there are 230,700 in the Pacific Ocean – 70,000 fewer than last year.

The reason for the declines? The adult fish set to return to Central Valley rivers to spawn were hatched two to four years ago, during the peak of California’s record-breaking drought when river and ocean conditions were abysmal.

Salmon from the Sacramento and Klamath river systems account for the vast majority of salmon caught by anglers in California’s rivers and along the coast. They’re considered critical to the state’s commercial and recreational salmon industries, which account for an estimated $1.4 billion in annual economic activity.

Will Klamath River Salmon Thrive Again After Dams Are Gone?

November 23, 2016 — Year after year, volunteers return to tributaries of the Klamath River, just like the fish they’re trying to help do the same thing.

Jimmy Peterson, a fisheries project coordinator for the Mid-Klamath Watershed Council, places rocks and stones to make fish passages in Fort Goff Creek, 60 miles up from the river’s mouth on California’s North Coast.

“This creek has extremely awesome habitat up top here,” Peterson says. “Extremely awesome.”

Then he translates: “The water stays really cold and there’s plenty of nice spawning gravel that go up fairly far into the watershed. There’s not a lot of human activity up there either, so it’s fairly untouched.”

Scientists estimate that a century ago, hundreds of thousands of coho may have run up the Klamath’s streams and tributaries. Now it’s a few thousand. Federal and private grants fund the council’s work, helping coho access “extremely awesome” habitat because coho are threatened with extinction.

Dams aren’t the only reason salmon, trout and other fish need help on the Klamath. But they are a big one. The promise of dam removal is free passage for fish up to cooler spots and native headwaters. And the Klamath River, near California’s northern border, may become the next big western river to see that happen. Federal energy regulators are considering a plan that would open hundreds of miles of the Klamath to the potential of the largest river restoration in U.S. history.

Read the full story at KQED

To Protect Native Culture, Bring Back the Salmon

October 25, 2016 — The people who have lived along the Klamath River for millennia are now facing crisis levels of violence, disease and depression. Diabetes and heart ailments run rampant in their communities, and suicide rates have skyrocketed.

To save his people, Leaf Hillman, Director of the Karuk Tribe’s Department of Natural Resources, believes there is one thing to do: Bring back the salmon.

“We’re salmon people,” says Hillman, a tribe member in his early fifties who lives in the riverside town of Orleans. “Our very identity is based on salmon.”

His tribe, working with the neighboring Yurok and Hupa tribes, has been at the front lines of the political battle to save and restore the Klamath’s dwindling Chinook runs, both by demanding better management of water flowing out of the upstream reservoirs and by calling for removal of four dams that make hundreds of miles of salmon habitat inaccessible. In protests and marches the Klamath basin tribes have often targeted PacifiCorp, which owns the Klamath’s dams. They have crashed company meetings and even dumped bucketfuls of toxic river algae – which thrives in the slow-moving, sun-warmed reservoir water – on the front steps of PacifiCorp’s Portland, Oregon headquarters. They’ve done the same several times at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Sacramento office.

The tribes, working together as the Klamath Justice Coalition, have also negotiated over dam removal with state and federal agencies, and soon their efforts are going to pay off. The giant concrete barriers, built between World War I and the 1960s, are now slated to be removed – which will certainly go down in the books as one of the greatest environmental and cultural victories in the West.

Salmon, primarily Chinook but also coho, were the core of many California Indians’ nutrition, wealth and culture. For young Karuk boys, catching and killing a Chinook was an important rite of passage, and the villages along the river subsisted on salmon almost all year. Of several seasonal runs of Chinook, the spring run was the most plentiful and important on the Klamath. Using nets and spears, fishermen caught tens of thousands of the big fish, which often weighed more than 40 pounds. Tribes on other river systems along the north coast of California and in the Central Valley were similarly dependent on Chinook salmon.

Read the full story at KCET

Disastrous season forecast for commercial and recreational salmon fishers

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (March 17, 2016) — On Sunday, March 13, the Pacific Fishery Management Council adopted three public review alternatives for the 2016 salmon season off the West Coast of the United States. The Council will select a final alternative at their next meeting in Vancouver, Washington on April 9-14.

“The mix of salmon runs this year is unusual,” said outgoing Executive Director Donald McIsaac. “In the north, the return of fall Chinook to the Columbia River is forecast to be exceptionally high again, but expectations for wild coho runs to the Washington Coast and Puget Sound areas can only be described as disastrous. In the south, the Sacramento River fall Chinook are healthy, but Klamath River fall Chinook are so poor that the Council’s policy calls for a low ‘de minimis’ catch in ocean fisheries.”

“This will be a challenging year for salmon fisheries. Several key stocks are less abundant than usual due to environmental conditions like the California drought and El Niño, which have affected ocean abundance for some stocks. However, there are alternatives that provide opportunities for both commercial and recreational salmon fishing coastwide,” said Council Vice-Chair Herb Pollard.

Read the full story at the South Beach Bulletin

In the Dry West, Waiting for Congress

November 6, 2015 — KLAMATH FALLS, Ore. — Drought in the West is an ugly thing. Rivers trickle away to nothing, fires rage, crops fail, ranchers go broke, tribal people watch fish die. As Westerners fight over the little water left, tempers crack, lawsuits fly and bitterness coats whole communities like fine dust.

As the climate warms, the West gets meaner.

The Klamath River begins in southern Oregon and meets the Pacific Ocean among the redwoods in Northern California, draining nearly 16,000 square miles. Until recently, who got water and how much had been deeply contentious issues. In particular, the irrigators and the Indian tribes were angry at one another, and the users in the river’s upper basin were angry with users in the lower basin.

But in recent years, something changed. Hostility gave way to compromise. Just about everybody who wants some of that precious river flow has made nice, given and taken, sat down and compromised.

Three major agreements have been wrapped up in Senate Bill 133, introduced by Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, and several colleagues. The bill is supported by tribes that want to protect the fish; ranchers who want to feed their cattle; farmers who grow alfalfa and potatoes; fly fishermen and duck hunters; ecologists; a power company; and many local politicians of various ideological stripes.