[1] NO SURPRISES FROM FEDS IN ESA FISH STATUS UPDATES

The federal fisheries agency formerly known as "NMFS" has released its preliminary conclusions about the possibility of upgrading the status of ESA-listed fish stocks on the West Coast.

The agency, which unofficially has changed its name to NOAA Fisheries, gave the technical document to state and tribal agencies, which co-manage the fisheries resources. The agencies are to check the document for accuracy and make sure it contains the most recent data.

The agency folks will probably not get all warm and fuzzy over the findings, which don't yet let any officially imperiled fish runs off the ESA hook.

In spite of the recent upsurge in many wild salmon and steelhead runs up and down the coast, the feds, working through a biological review team (BRT) of about 15 individuals, generally voted to maintain the status quo after quantifying risk in four major areas: abundance; growth rate/productivity, spatial structure and diversity.

Listed as "in danger of extinction" are the spring chinook Evolutionarily Significant Units (ESUs) in the upper Columbia; Sacramento River winter-run, upper Columbia, central and southern California steelhead; central California and lower Columbia coho; and Snake River sockeye.

Nineteen other ESUs were voted in the category of "likely to become endangered in the foreseeable future," including the Snake River spring/summer and fall chinook; Puget Sound chinook; lower Columbia and upper Willamette chinook; and steelhead stocks from the Snake, mid- and lower Columbia and Willamette rivers. Oregon coastal and northern California/southern Oregon coho stocks were also in this category, along with most steelhead runs.

The report noted that the preliminary update has improved the status of Snake River fall chinook and a "substantial minority" of the biological review team voted to improve the status of upper Columbia chinook and steelhead from "in danger of extinction" to "likely to become endangered."

The team noted the increases in many other stocks and said the reasons "are not well understood"--although the increases may be due mostly to improvements in ocean conditions "rather than more permanent alleviations in the factors that led to widespread declines in abundance over the past century." The group said that fish populations will have to maintain viable levels over a longer period of time before the team will concede that they "are not at significant continuing risk."

Some critics say the federal biological review team has shortchanged ocean effects. The critics believe such effects were a major factor in the declines that led to the ESA listings in the first place. They blame the dry, warm climate regime in the North Pacific since 1976 for creating relatively unproductive pastures for grazing salmon, a condition that has turned around abruptly in the past few years.

The critics have filed a lawsuit in Washington, DC, District Court that challenges the government's definition of an ESU (Common Sense Salmon Recovery v. NMFS) because it excludes hatchery stocks in places like Puget Sound. Lead plaintiffs' attorney Jim Johnson of Olympia, WA, said NOAA Fisheries has failed to acknowledge poor ocean conditions as a major factor in fish declines. "It's demoralizing to see hundreds of thousand of dollars spent on these updates and the most significant factor is left out," Johnson said.

Johnson also said he is astounded to see that the agency "continues to disregard the direction of the court," particularly in the Oregon case Alsea Valley v. NMFS. In that case, federal Judge Michael Hogan ruled that an ESA designation was illegal because it failed to offer hatchery fish (which were listed in the coho ESU along with the wild stock) the same protection as wild stocks in the Oregon coastal coho ESU. The ruling was stayed by the 9th Circuit Court, where it is being appealed by environmental groups.

NOAA Fisheries declined to appeal the original decision and decided to revise its hatchery ESU policy instead, a task which is still unfinished. The draft policy that will determine whether a hatchery stock will be designated as part of a listed ESU spells out four categories for hatchery populations that are differentiated by how much each group has been derived from native, local stocks and how much it has been genetically affected by artificial propagation.

"I haven't heard a peep out of the hatchery folks lately," said NOAA Fisheries spokesman Brian Gorman. He noted that at some point the new hatchery policy will be used to help determine the final status updates of these salmon and steelhead ESUs, along with consideration of conservation work under way to improve fish runs and voluntary efforts by watershed groups and others.

A BRT majority voted to maintain the Puget Sound chinook ESU as "likely to become endangered," with a few votes supporting a more stringent listing and a few voting for a less stringent listing. The scientists said "though populations in this ESU have not experienced the sharp increases in the last 2-3 years seen in many other ESUs, more populations have increased than decreased over the 4 years since the last BRT assessment."

The BRT's conclusions will not be subject to public comment because the document is technical in nature, Gorman said. But the revised hatchery policy will be open for public review. He said any potential changes to the status of any listing would probably be completed by December and take effect by early spring or summer 2004. -Bill Rudolph

[2] THIS YEAR'S SPRING CHINOOK RUN STARTS WITH BIG MYSTERY

Lower Columbia River gillnetters were in shock after state harvest managers shut down a short but lucrative fishery targeting what were supposed to be mainly hatchery fish heading for the Willamette River.

Traditionally among the earliest arrivals of the many spring runs in the Columbia, the Willamette fish turned out to be a decided minority in the gillnetters' fish boxes during the two-day effort. Instead, more than 80 percent of the early run was estimated to be chinook headed for the Snake River.

The perplexed managers could not even speculate on what might have caused the flip-flopped season. "It's so bizarre and unexpected," said Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife Harvest Manager Pat Frazier. He said a combination of monitoring fish visually and through coded wire-tag recoveries led to discovery of the phenomenon. "It's usually just the opposite this time of year, with the Willamette fish making up about 80 percent of the run," Frazier said.

The gillnetters got only two days of fishing in before the season was closed and were griping to everyone in sight about it. Don Riswick, 85-year-old editor of Columbia River Gillnetter, house organ of the 117-year-old Columbia River Fishermen's Protective Union, said harvesters were getting $6 per pound for the big spring chinook. About 500 of the big fish, large from spending three years in the ocean, were landed before the gillnetters were shut down. "It's impossible," he said. "I've been fishing here since I was 13, and have never seen anything like it. It can't be like they say."

Harvest managers stuck to their guns and kept the fishery closed under heavy protest.

The fishermen were using larger mesh nets than they will be able to use later this spring, when they will fish with tangle nets to allow for the live release of wild chinook and steelhead. They are only allowed to keep hatchery chinook marked by a clipped fin that delineates them from wild fish listed under the Endangered Species Act.

According to Frazier, about half the fish caught so far were marked as hatchery fish, so the other half of the catch had to be released. Since managers have estimated that about 50 percent of the fish released from the nets will die anyway, the two-day fishery has already used up half of the commercial fishers' allotted impact on the upriver spring chinook, which is split between non-Indians (2 percent) and tribes (9 percent).

Frazier said a test fishery the following week showed about a 50-50 split between Willamette and upriver Columbia chinook, but large numbers of steelhead were showing up as well. "For every marked chinook, there is one unmarked steelhead," Frazier said, which means that fishermen won't be able to fish their tangle nets until the proportion of steelhead encounters goes down, even though post-release mortality is about half that of the smaller mesh nets.

A small test fishery earlier this week came up with 8 of 13 chinook of the upriver Columbia stock, with little sign of any big Willamette run. Harvest managers are expecting 145,000 upriver spring chinook this year, with about 25,000 wild Snake fish mixed in.

A whopping 110,000 springers are predicted for the Willamette, with most expected to come from a strong return of 3-ocean fish--those that spent three years in the ocean. About 85 percent of the Willamette hatchery fish are estimated to be marked, but only about 50 percent of the upriver hatchery springers.

With so many unclipped hatchery fish migrating through the basin, it has been hard to accurately count wild stocks at some dams. In this year's annual report on the basin fisheries, harvest managers reduced their earlier estimate of the number of wild spring chinook counted at Lower Granite Dam in 2001 from over 49,000 chinook down to 17,175 fish.

ODFW's Frazier said it's likely that the 2002 wild Snake count (34,488) will be revised in next year's report as well. -B. R.

[3] SPILL AT BONNEVILLE DAM OK'D TO AID HATCHERY RELEASE

Federal agencies have agreed to spill water at Bonneville Dam to improve survival of hatchery chinook being released this week. If the fish show up on time, the 36-hour 50K spill is slated to begin Mar. 10 at 6 PM to help young fall chinook released from the USFWS hatchery at Spring Creek, upstream of the dam.

Deteriorating financial conditions at BPA had earlier led the agency to pretty much nix the Spring Creek spill option this year, as part of a suite of changes to hydro operations the agency wants to implement this year.

But fish managers pressed hard to use the spill to help some of the 7 million fall chinook that are scheduled to be released Mar. 8 from the hatchery. The managers said spill is the safest way for the fish to pass the dam. They discounted BPA analyses that predicted the benefits would add only a few hundred more adult tule chinook to inriver fisheries when the fish returned.

The fish managers also said the tules were important to ocean fisheries and served as an "important buffer" to ESA stocks in the ocean.

BPA figures the 36-hr spill will cost $3,000 for each extra adult tule created by the strategy. Normally, the fish managers ask for 10 days of spill, but cited the below normal water forecast (73 percent) for their reduced request. Ten days of spill would have raised spill costs per fish to $150,000.

Unfortunately, the fish are close to spawning by the time they return to inriver fisheries and are worth only a few cents a pound to commercial fishermen. During last year's huge run, it was reported that both tribal and non-tribal fishermen dumped tules overboard to make room for the more profitable upriver brights. Spring Creek hatchery was swamped with 60,000 excess fish last year, after 8,000 were taken for broodstock. Most of the extra fish went to federal prisons where they were served to inmates.

Sources say fish managers have agreed that the amount of next week's spill will reduce the hydro system's BiOp-mandated spill obligation by an equal amount later this year. BPA is currently "leaning hard on the system" to make up for the temporary loss of power from the region's lone nuclear plant, which is expected to be out of service until Mar. 14

Power Planning Council Montana member John Hines was disappointed with the spill announcement. "Given the state of the hydro system for being able to produce water for both anadromous and resident fish needs and the financial needs of BPA," Hines said, "one has to question the implementation of a water policy that focuses on this overabundance of hatchery fish."

At a meeting of federal agencies last Friday morning to discuss the spill issue, BPA head Steve Wright was the only representative to voice concern. Though he said he was prepared to agree with the spill proposal, he voiced doubts about the lack of quantitative data on the fish in question and their response to the spill. -B. R.

[4] NOAA FISHERIES ANNOUNCES NEW DIVISION TO FOCUS ON FISH RECOVERY

NOAA Fisheries has announced the formation of a new division to be based at its Portland office and focus of developing recovery plans for ESA-listed salmon and steelhead in Washington, Oregon and Idaho.

The new office will be headed by Rob Walton, currently assistant director of the Public Power Council. Walton will become assistant regional administrator for salmon recovery.

"Rob Walton beings a remarkably broad range of experience to this job," said NOAA Fisheries NW regional administrator Bob Lohn. "His work in the Northwest and Alaska and his working relationships with policy and scientific leaders in the Northwest including the states, tribes, industry and environmental groups give him a superb background for the job.

The new division, initially with a staff of about 15 individuals garnered from other NOAA Fisheries divisions, will also coordinate subbasin salmon plans, inland fish harvests and hatchery policies.

Walton said he was "excited at the prospect of switching careers to work for NOAA Fisheries," and will take the reins in April. He has spent the last 12 years with the Public Power Council. -B. R.

[5] STREAM RESTORATION MEASURE TO GET SEATTLE VOTE

Seattle voters will get to decide next fall if more money should be spent to restore the city's creeks. The Seattle City Council rejected adoption of Initiative 80, which calls for more public and private spending on urban creek restoration, instead voting unanimously Feb. 24 to place the measure on next September's ballot.

Voters will then get to sift through conflicting claims and decide whether to boost the annual $3 million to $4 million now spent to restore creeks by taxing themselves $5 per household to help fund creek restoration, a move that would generate another $1.2 million or so.

The most controversial part of the "Save Seattle Creeks" initiative calls for large developers to "daylight" on their properties creeks that may have been flowing through pipes for many years and restore them to their original course. Initiative 80 also requires the city to adopt a long-term plan that eventually restores creeks on public property.

"We don't argue with the dream expressed in this measure," said city council member Margaret Pageler, "but the awkward and ambiguous language of this initiative could cost the city millions of dollars in legal fees and red tape, and ultimately take resources away from continuing efforts to restore Seattle's streams."

A less draconian alternative produced by the Mayor's office was nixed by the council. It would have imposed no new requirements for private development and focused restoration on fresh water and marine habitats to benefit ESA-listed chinook and other species.

The initiative was initially presented to the city council last November, but 32 percent of the signatures were ruled invalid. Supporters scrambled to gather enough legal ones by Jan. 14. A few days later, the views of Pageler and I-80 spokesman Knoll Lowney were posted on the city's website.

Pageler, who chairs the Water and Health Committee, said the city gets more bang for its buck by taking part in a two-county, 20-city effort to restore habitat in the Green-Duwamish watershed, where ESA-listed wild chinook are found, and another effort targeted at the Cedar River watershed and the chinook corridor through Lake Washington to the Ballard locks.

She said the $4 million to $7 million a year the city now spends on restoration is enough. "Restoring things to pre-human condition? Where do you stop?"

Lowney said said I-80 would set up a vision for salmon recovery in Seattle's five main creeks, get the city to stop using pesticides within 200 feet of the creeks and speed up the city's creek restoration program. He said one of the most important parts of the initiative is bringing major developers into the restoration effort.

But a Municipal League review of both proposals, released in early January, suggested the council craft a new alternative from the best ideas of both I-80 and Mayor Nickels' alternative. The league "had concerns about I-80's regulatory approach, with its potential cost impacts and with the ambiguity of some of its language," the review committee said in a letter that accompanied the report.

The report said I-80 language that would force private developers to daylight creeks and establish 50-foot buffers "could potentially require that entire developable properties be converted into creek corridors at private expense." Potential costs were highly uncertain, the report said, taking issue with claims by I- 80 proponents that most restorations would have no more impact than the cost of plantings.

Seattle city staff pegged its potential long-term costs in the billions of dollars, a figure that I-80 proponents disputed, saying the city's analysis was deeply flawed.

Rehabbed reach of Longfellow Creek - Cost $3,300 / ft .

Several weeks before the vote, the Seattle Post Intelligencer reported that many salmon in one of the city's showcase streams died before spawning last fall. The scene of the carnage was Longfellow Creek in West Seattle, a tributary of the Duwamish, where nearly 90 percent of pre-spawning coho died from unknown causes. It's suspected that toxic runoff from streets may be to blame after a dry October allowed oil, grease and other pollutants to build up on city streets. The creek is included in a study by NOAA Fisheries scientists, who are comparing it to a relatively healthy creek in eastern King County where less than one percent of pre-spawning coho died.

NOAA Fisheries scientist Tracy Collier told NW Fishletter that tissue samples are being tested in the agency's Seattle lab this winter, with a peer-reviewed report due sometime in the future. He said a workshop is planned in April to discuss laboratory results and research priorities for the coming year.

The high mortality rate for pre-spawning coho in Seattle's urban streams seems limited to that species, according to data gathered by the conservation group Washington Trout. The group has conducted weekly spawning surveys in five urban streams for some years now.

In 2001, about 56 percent of the coho died before spawning in Longfellow Creek; in 2000, the rate was nearly 80 percent. The coho run has averaged around 250 to 300 fish for the past several years, with a large preponderance of wild fish now appearing in the stream. About 70 chum salmon were counted there last year, but only one was seen in 2001.

The dying fish were observed in an area of the creek where the city has spent over $4 million to restore about 1,200 feet of the stream between a steel mill and the West Seattle golf course. The work was part of a joint effort involving several city agencies and the community that first saw salmon come back in 1995, after more than a 50-year absence.

But just getting to the restored area is no picnic for the fish. The Post Intelligencer story failed to mention that the salmon must navigate a 3,000-foot-long pipe that runs from the Duwamish River to the south side of the parking lot at the Seattle Steel Mill before they reach daylight and the restored area of Longfellow Creek, or that they must swim through another pipe to reach the gold course, where about 40 percent of the stream's coho redds have been counted in recent years.

In 2007, the city expects to begin spending another $4 million to remove several barriers to fish passage in the area of the golf course. Above the golf course, $3.8 million has already been spent to improve another 3,500 feet of the creek, which included planting more than 8 acres with native vegetation.

Longfellow Creek is about three miles long and flows north from headwaters that are channeled through two pipes 40 feet beneath a K Mart parking lot. From there, it flows alternately above and below ground in a northerly direction towards the Duwamish River, itself a designated EPA Superfund site.

Seattle has spent nearly $25 million since 1999 on urban creek restoration and plans to spend another $10 million to $20 million in the next biennium on aquatic projects focused on salmon restoration.

The city council may also vote to place an alternative measure on the September ballot. A draft written by members Richard Conlin and Heidi Wills is now being studied by the council. Click here for more information on the urban creek controversy. -B. R.

[6] METHOW BASIN REDD COUNTS IN: ANOTHER FANTASTIC YEAR

The Methow River Basin in northeast Washington was home plate to another big run of spring chinook last year. The return wasn't as big as 2001's huge year, when over 4,500 redds were counted in the basin, but 2002's nearly 1,200 redds was a far cry from the miserable mid-1990's--only 15 redds were counted in the entire basin in 1995, but that was a year when most of the few fish that returned after a devastating El Nino were captured at Wells Dam for hatchery broodstock. In the Chewuch, a Methow tributary, 301 redds were counted in 2002. Over 1,000 redds were counted there in 2001.

There were still plenty of hatchery fish mixed in with wild spawners, said WDFW's Heather Bartlett, because of an earlier agreement with local residents and tribes to let "extra" hatchery fish into the basin to spawn naturally. Bartlett said worries over the potential negative effects of the out-of-basin Carson stock mixing with the may be overstated, because there is little evidence in the past 30 years that the Carson fish have had much effect on the native chinook strain.

NOAA Fisheries' draft status update released just a few weeks ago said that about 80 percent of the 2001's 9,000-fish return was made up of hatchery fish, according to carcass surveys on the spawning grounds. This year's survey isn't quite finished, but Bartlett said she wouldn't be surprised if it was close to 2001's percentage. Federal biologists say there is little information to assess the long-term impacts of these large numbers of hatchery fish on the productivity of the wild stocks, but last April they set an interim delisting goal for ESA purposes of 2,200 wild spawners for the Methow. -B. R.

[7] ANNUAL FLAP OVER FISH REPORT CARD MAKES MORE HEADLINES

A public relations gimmick used by environmental and fishing groups last year has again made headlines in regional newspapers. The groups, led by the Save Our Wild Salmon (SOS) Coalition, have given the federal government another "F" for failing to implement its plan to save Columbia Basin salmon. They claim government agencies have failed to implement more than 70 percent of the 150 measures spelled out in the 2000 hydro BiOp.

"After this type of failure, the Bush Administration will need to prove to the American people that its commitment to salmon is genuine," said former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt.

BPA countered with its own press release on the same day and gave itself a "B," saying it is successfully implementing 176 of the 199 actions in the BiOp, or 88 percent. In 2002, it took the agency two months to respond to the group's failing report card.

"The SOS report card is more of a fish tale than a factual summary of where we are. We are working hard to ensure a successful ESA report from NMFS and the US Fish and Wildlife Service as part of our 2003 check-in later this year," said BPA senior policy advisor Lorraine Bodi.

US Army Corps of Engineers spokesman Witt Anderson said he believed the action agencies' performance would be even better than that, closer to 95 percent, which he noted would be reflected in a NOAA Fisheries "findings" letter to be released soon.

Last year, after SOS issued a scathing review of the agencies' salmon recovery activities and said only 25 percent of the required actions were being implemented, NOAA Fisheries (then NMFS) issued a findings letter in July that pointed out only 14 of the 199 actions were behind schedule or modified, which made it harder to meet BiOp objectives. -B. R.

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Link/Document Annex
Works Cited

LINKS/DOCUMENTS FROM NW FISHLETTER 158:: Below are listed links and documents referred to in the text of NW Fishletter issue 158.

• Draft Report, ESA Updates on Salmon and Steelhead, NOAA Fisheries, February, 2003
• Yes For Seattle
• Longfellow Creek Community Web Site
• The Seattle Channel

THE ARCHIVE :: Previous NW Fishletter issues and supporting documents.

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