At Rivrguy's suggestion here's a thread on the currently hot issue of spending bundles of money for no fish.

Early in my career I spent a lot of time on some smaller streams that had all sorts of barriers. Most were somewhat intermittent for adult salmon but a bigger problem for juveniles and impossible for fish like sculpins. I found out, when I asked, that while the Hydraulics Code said "protect fish life" it meant salmon; sculpins were worthless.

And, WDFW does have (or should have) data on what happens when barriers are fixed. The culvert I mentioned on 101 had a smolt trap just upstream; just looking at numbers out versus known spawners above (the creek's entire anadromous zone was surveyed) would tell a lot. And having eliminated the exotics; that can be evaluated too.

Even more informative was a creek near PA. On Old Olympic Highway, which is north of 101, there was a fish ladder at a road crossing that was an intermittent barrier to adult coho. The creek originated in, and was Salmond accessible, into ONP. Anyway, they not only removed the ladder but also the dam that the roadbed made. That meant that all the accumulated sediment had to move down. There already were steelhead surveys up close to the Park and a smolt trap at the mouth. Knowledge should be power.

3/25/2024

I live in Central Park, retired, so I have time to spend "just watching" to see if there was any movement of fish.

There is a project just East of Montesano, still on going, where a fairly good size creek flows South to the Chehalis River. On the creek below the Hiway, there was a "massive culvert" placed in the creek and a new bridge over the culvert. This culvert and bridge is on a road with only a few house's. So what I did, during peak Coho and Chum times.....I'd park on top of the bridge, IPhone camera ready, drink coffee and just watch, tried to time my watching during incoming tide in the Chehalis. NEVER saw a fish....timing was late October - early December, when water color allowed me to see.

I remember thinking that with all those taxpayer funds being spent, why not a "battery powered sonar" to act as the fish movement counter????? Its only about 3-4 miles from Region 6.

If they looked, and got numbers, the next question would be management. The fish can't go upstream if they don't actually get there.

Back in the day, it seemed every stream got planted. Not today.
I’m no bio, so say culverts are replaced and the habit is deemed viable, what is the likelihood that say planting hatchery coho and chums could reseed some of these streams?
SF

We bought a small piece of heaven here in the Green River Valley with Habitat restoration and preservation of the remaining wild Coho, Chum, Pink, and Cutthroat in this creek as a prime motivator for the location, our home, and retirement . We posted big $ bonds held by king county’s epa bank. We followed all requirements set forth by king county’s epa, CCA, CSA, and WDFW .

We restored and protected over 700 feet of creek with habitat planting , creek woody debris, gravel , pooling and riffle work. Monitored for 10 years before my bond was satisfied. Coho rebounded, Chums filled the creek, with Cutty and Rainbow trout everywhere.

Then the king co. DNR, EPA, and WDFW responded to a mudslide upstream of our place over a year ago and had to re route the creek around their upstream property. They purchased the property years ago and managed it as a ponding area upstream in the creek. They moved the creek from its original Stream bed to actually flow into the pond, and then relying on the creek to keep the pond full with excess water flowing out of the creek and back into the stream bed. No permits needed, as they declared a possible roadway blockage if the creek flooded, so they moved it, and left it as it was.

However, they forgot that the pond nearly drys out every summer, and combined with beavers moving into the pond they enabled, and blocked the outflow to the point that the entire run of the creek dried out killing the entire run or Wild Coho, Chum, Pink, and all local Cutthroat and Rainbow trout.

They have been trying figure out a new fix, but need the local indigenous tribe to buy in , which they are not, and the other state epa-ish entities now responsible for the health of this creek which now have no money or people to do anything to fix the mess. So the creek Is dead, the fish, and all supporting wildlife are dead, and we lost everything we put into this habitat restoration and the wild fish it produced

Coho averaged nearly 200 wild returns, with Chum at 220, and pinks everywhere on odd years. What a wasted effort...

3/25/2024



Lots of wasted effort by lots of volunteers on many projects over the years.

When I retired in 1997, I did brood stocking for winter run Steelhead on the Satsop River.....My money, my time, my effort, lots of wild steelhead "tubed up", some big fish.....

Project seemed to be doing good, returns were showing, OPPS, Cowlitz went to xhit, guess who showed up with boat loads of "pay to kill fishers", program ended.

Right now, on the Wynoochee River, 70 Native/Wild have been removed from the trap, hauled about the Dam, no way to get out.......so between TCL and WDFW, they are killing wild steelhead every year......grrrrrrr

It really seems that actual recovery is not a goal of the Co-Managers. There must be way bigger fish to fry, so to speak.

Tribes not wanting recovery? I think the big fish frying is bailout $$ for the loss. The almighty dollar always screws things up.

The tribes want fish. But, a fish is a fish and hatchery fish certainly feed more people than a wild run so depressed it can't be fished. A few decades back one tribal manger noted (in regards to a hatchery managed coho run) "Wild fish are nice but the people gotta eat." Even Boldt recognized that the treaty right was for dead fish in the boat; at some point the state will need to pay for it.

And, money is the big thing. At some point I suspect there will be a huge payout for the destruction of the runs.

Makes one wonder how far the billions we're spending on culvert replacements that are being set up to fail at producing more fish, plus what it cost to fight the lawsuit, might have gone toward that payout.

Now, we'll spend that money, get marginal results (if any), and end up with a multi-billion dollar payout on top of it.

Curtailing open ocean harvest, even modestly, would instantly provide more fish for the Tribes. That's the only thing that will get results at this stage of the game. It would also leave more fish to seed the habitat we're trying to recover, at which point our current "investment" might make a difference. Short of that, the citizens of WA can only look forward to being sued into oblivion.

Unfortunately, I agree. Success at recovery requires too many changes by too much money. Open open fisheries of all kinds, uncontrolled population growth, development, too much disconnect with the land (food comes from grocery stores).

I'll ask the question again. If the streams where culverts were replaced have good habitat, is there a reason they can't be planted to re-seed them?
The creek below my place has terrible habitat. They plant it every year with chum fry. They don't successfully spawn, but if I recall correct they got over 1K adults back last year as well as some coho which I believe are strays.
If it had good habitat, I think those chums and coho could reproduce.
Everything used to get planted back in the day. Why not today? Is it a lack of funding or just a lack of desire?
SF

If you thought uncontrolled population growth was an issue to deal with during all the purported “save our salmon” recovery $$ and effort of the last 30 years, just add the new 5 to 10 million hungry mouths that are streaming across the borders as we type...

In response to Stonefish, you need to quit killing them in the ocean to get them to come back. WDF used to plant out coho fry to backfill for over harvest of the wild stocks. It added some fish to the fishery.

Fry planting was stopped for a number of reasons. Hatchery'wild interactions being one. Money probably being another.

At the end of the day, the hatchery supported salmon runs are much easier to manage.

Thanks for the reply.
I guess my point is, if there are no wild fish filling the void in the habitat above where the culvert was replaced, why not plant it provided it is suitable habitat? Hatchery fish can't interact with non existent wild fish. I know that is a simplistic approach, but it might yield some results for the money being thrown at replacing the culverts.
Money isn't the problem in my opinion. This state has plenty of it and pisses away a lot of it. It just a matter of how they spend it and fish just seem to be low in priority. Maybe that will change if they continue to get thumped by the tribes in lawsuits.
SF

Stonefish, to follow upon C'man's post, stocking coho fry in unseeded or under seeded creeks is cheap and does add to overall production. However, that practice is not as productive as creeks adequately seeded by natural wild coho. I don't know but think the practice was largely discontinued because WDFW wants to keep hatchery and natural production separate. And the production component of fry stocking is almost impossible to accurately monitor and evaluate.

Stocking chum fry is mainly a feel good exercise. If the habitat is of good enough quality, a natural chum run can be created. South sound chum salmon streams were nearly wiped out back during intensive over-harvest in Area 9. Management changed and small scale hatchery operations were developed on several of the affected creeks. It was wildly successful, and these S. sound streams are now among the most productive producers of wild chum salmon in all of Puget Sound. Habitat quality matters. Along with intelligent harvest management.

Have you seen any of that "intelligent harvest management" recently????

And hatchery fish will interact with the wild fish in the fishery.

In my view, selective harvest of hatchery fish should occur only when the vast majority of the encounters are hatchery fish. As the fraction of hatchery fish goes down, wild fish encounters and mortality rise. It seems criminal to me to have a "selective" fishery when the majority of the encounters are wild fish. But that's just me.

Sg,
Thanks for the reply.
SF

Read an interesting news article in the Seattle Times. It was about the future of SRKWs. This was a report on a scientific paper that modeled the future. The conclusion was essentially extinction unless we make major, and painful, changes.

The paper covered lots of issues but concluded that we really don't have the will to save them. As an example, it has been shown that the reduction in marine noise in the Salish Sea has had a beneficial effect. At the same time, we are planning to bring in significantly more ships to support international trade and energy needs.

We haven't actually accomplished anything that gets them more food. And so on. As a society, we talk a good line but don't produce.

Our problem is our own government! Us! Years ago, when we knew about losing salmon habitat (dams, roads, etc.) we were promised to always have salmon by building hatcheries. Now to save salmon (so called wild ones) we can't harvest the fish that we have been promised. But trying to protect and isolate the wild ones, we quit letting hatchery strain fish (which are likely the same genetics as almost every other salmon in Puget Sound) we have further ruined the habitat for natural spawners by limiting nutrification. Furthermore, if I decided to kill an unmarked king salmon I stand the chance of being arrested, perhaps jailed, and maybe even the loss of my fishing privileges and seizure of my boat. Meanwhile, an Alaska troller from our own state can kill our protected salmon in Alaska, sell it, and ship it back to our state for someone to buy for dinner!

( Hard to keep the orcas fed without increasing hatchery production) Impossible to increase wild fish with extremely limited habitat. It aint gonna work. We have been failing miserably for forty years, even though we have the answers.

If we were even partially serious about saving the SRKWs we can look back at the adult salmon data we have from the 60s on for both WA and much of BC and compare the total numbers and biomass to the whale numbers. It would not surprise me to see the decline in whales follow the decline in adult salmon. But, we know the numbers needed and we know it is all 5 species . We just don't want to do it.

Up in AK it's even worse. You can be, as a sportie, significantly fined for wasting meat of fish or game. But if you are a trawler you can simply dump tons of the same species scot free.

04/04/2024




Everyone points to Alaska as many of our problems......trawlers off OUR coast are doing the very same, probably not the numbers of trawlers but still a problem.

That's true, problem is everywhere. But the Alaskan's are also trawling up Killer Whales. Where's Paul Watson when you need him.

was wondering when someone was going to bring that up...

everyone is too worried about the one thats landlocked tho...

https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-s...ear-alaska-2023

It would disrupt too big of fishery/political donation cow to mess with the trawlers.

I think it was my first yeasr of guiding in S.E Alaska when I learned that the Yukon River was closed to the native's subsistence fishing due to a lack of returning chinook. Incidently, one of the other guides at Whalers Cove, was Ed Jones, a recently retired fish bio from Alaska. Ed said that the huge trawl fishery for cod and pollock had a very high rate of chinook bi catch, and that was the biggest factor in reducing the Yukon run. What really got me, is that many of the Alaska natives (and Alaska is a big place) actually lived off the land, more or less. In the small village of Angoon, near our lodge, the residents went fishing and berry picking and hunting on their time off rather that playing softball. The young men in the village all wanted to be fishermen, and the young women seemed to want to get out of town. Doubly interesting that the frozen bait herring that we used, dozens of cases of them, were from Puget Sound Herring Sales!

The Yukon is closed still to subsistence. Bycatch is still allowed and supported while the natives and other subsistence folks do without.

The expediency that habitats and floodplains were destroyed during early colonization is quite staggering. The Army Corps spent decades channelizing, diking, dredging, and removing large wood from all of our rivers and streams. Timber companies logged every last old growth off the landscape, and used barrier culverts to access them. This all happened with little to no permitting scrutiny or oversight. Agriculturalists filled and plowed fertile floodplains and estuaries, and installed irrigation ditches robbing watersheds of valuable water. Now we are expected to rebuild salmon runs within the confines of the damaged landscape we have been given.

Fast forward to today: Restoration activities receive more government scrutiny than any development project ever would. Developers damage waterways and ask for forgiveness, receiving a slap on the wrist if anyone even notices. And we continue to lose habitats at a pace substantially more quickly than we are able to complete even the smallest of restoration projects. Restoration practitioners operate in a world where every single funder is so risk averse and afraid of being sued they can barely put projects in the ground. Basin management plans, comprehensive plans, and legislative rulemaking has every inch of habitat restoration under a magnifying glass before it is ever even close to shovel ready. The permitting and planning minefield restoration practitioners navigate results in bloated restoration projects costing millions of dollars and taking decades to implement at a scale so small they barely even make a dent in the thousands of river miles destroyed Puget Sound Wide.

Until a day that we see large scale, decades long RESTORATION work that can be compared in scale to the decades long campaign perpetrated by the federal government to destroy our rivers in favor of development and agriculture, we will never see habitat restoration. We need unbridled, fast, meaningful restoration occurring at a large scale, and we just simply are not doing that.

whats interesting, is me and one of my best friends (younger than me), have been talking about this for the last couple years, he has a place up there on the Kenai, and has his entire life, and has a few friends up there, including one on the AK board of fisheries or whatever its called...

we have been talking about bycatch for the last year or so, as well as the coastal situation and the Columbia where we fish a lot...

people look at him crazy when he states these exact things, like he is some consipiracy theorist, then here comes someone that verifies it, or one of you guys do...

pretty amazing, and aggrivating as well...

i cant find the article off hand, but have a couple others on it, but the Yukon, in one it showed that zero Chum were harvested by sportsman/tribe, yet 1.2 million were harvested by prosessors...

they also report a certain amount of bycatch, but not many seem to grasp that 70-80 percent of "bycatch" of salmon, actually get smooshed through the nets because they are so small and the pressure pushing on them, making it effectively like a cheese grater...

also, if a crab is missing a leg, its not counted in bycatch, as its not a "whole" crab...

the elephant in the room, is none other than Trident Seafoods, whome should be disbaned immediately, but we know that wont happen...

pay attention to the Columbia, its about to close in 5 days, because there isnt really any fish around for the most part, but the netters are coming in a week or so later...

A growing problem I have seen relates to the folks who are supposed to be studying, monitoring, and managing our resources. Mention the Chinook situation in AK and NOAA will tell you that it is all climate change; the bycatch has nothing to do with it.

Decades ago, the late Jeff Cederholm wrote and article "Who speaks for the fish?". His conclusion was that while he tried, it seemed the F&W agencies didn't. Should add that Jeff worked for DNR and my F&W coworkers felt that he should shut up and make DNR less rapacious with their tree harvest. As time has gone on and I have corresponded with colleagues I find that the political masters in an agency (and probably NGO or University) control what is said. Many of my coworkers still have the scars from the muzzles.

As a truly serious question, how can we solve (any) problems when we are prevented from examining and considering all the information?

If you could view all the information, you could come up with a solution, and if you come up with a solution, then the problem no longer exists, and if there isn't a problem, there's no money to be handed out...

The problem no longer exists once the solution is implemented. It took us the better part of 200 years to beat our resources down to where they are now; it will take more than a couple weeks to fix it.

Just a note from an old timer: Me

When I started with WDF in 1971 there was a division titled "Stream Improvement". They channelized streams and smaller rivers, taking the natural bends out of them, closing off river oxbows, and armoring banks. Downed trees were pulled out of streams using heavy equipment. I remember a lot of these things because I was urged to ticket loggers who left parts of trees in the streams. I studied the law and hardly ever took enforcement action on those few occasions. There's a lot more habitat stories that I still have in my memory, but...Two of the most reckless were conducted by WDF -channeling a stream in September? I'll shut up now (for awhile anyway). These are interesting discussions.

As I worked for a timber company and I am old also when I started they had just ended the practice. The yarder crews were required to pick up any natural woody debris out of streams. DOE tried to get salmon carcasses out of the streams even wanted WDF staff doing stream counts to throw them on the bank. Sometimes you cannot fix stupid.

DOE also does things called wasteland allocation. Essentially, how much of pollutant (and this includes nutrients) can be "safely" put in a stream. This number would divided up amongst all the wastewater discharge permit holders to ensure that the water quality number would not be exceeded. To do that, they did a study. In this instance, the river in question was managed for hatchery coho and chinook and had damn few pink and chum. So, the nutrient input (N and P) was low. I pointed out that the then emerging knowledge of salmon nutrient delivery might cause WDF to increase escapement goals. Note: I knew they wouldn't, but they "might". DOE said that the old goals and practices, which were background levels, needed to remain the same so that business and government could make the treatment investments and not have a moving target to hit. Even then, agencies worked in hardened silos.

Hey Tug remember Harry Senn? One of his first jobs was going around blowing beaver dams to insure adult salmon passage. Thing was Harry noticed a lot of stranded juveniles so he went to his boss with the info along with others and that was stopped. His favorite story was blowing a small hole in a large beaver dam and boom the entire center fell over resulting wall of water closing a county road to a state park. His thoughts were "not my finest moment".

Interesting how program minutes change. As you note, at one time the Habitat Arm would clean out streams of excess gravel, logs, etc. A few years later they would go apoplectic if Hatcheries wanted to remove gravel from intakes, traps, and racks.