One of the problems with most wild steelhead brood stock programs most monitoring is not adequate to evaluate the success of such programs. The best info likely come from dam counts.

During the early years of the Snider Creek wild brood stock program WDFW was still conducting intense creel surveys which allowed the comparison of the contribution to the catch between the Snider Creek fish and the normal hatchery early winters. In that comparison the standard early winter hatchery fish preformed superior to the Snider Creek fish.

A goal of any wild winter brood stock program should be to select brood stock that is representative (run timing, spawn timing, age structure, etc.) of the donor wild population. Both the spawners and resulting smolts should be representative of the wild population. That can be much more difficult that it might appear and successful meeting that performance standard up to the smolt release can be pretty expensive.

The place that such programs might be most reasonably used is a true conservation program to supplement a wild population that is approaching that knife edge of extinction. That said with what is being learned about the interplay between the anadromous and resident life histories in anadromous streams I am becoming more convinced in that situation insuring that robust resident populations are maintained in the river might be a better strategy. That of course would require selective gear rules with total CnR of the trout any time the system is open for any fishing.

Curt