[1] Feds Call For Less Harvest Of ESA Fish--Everywhere

A senior Bush administration official blindsided a convention of 300 wild salmon worshippers last week to announce a new initiative that will look at ways of reducing the harvest of ESA-listed salmon both in the Columbia River and the ocean between Astoria and Alaska.

James Connaughton, chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, addressed the Salmon 2100 Conference in Portland, where an assortment of academics, biologists and salmon recovery addicts gathered to hear different prescriptions on how to preserve and improve salmon numbers over the next 100 years, or whether it was even possible to keep them going.

But no one but Connaughton suggested cutting harvest levels. Most of the discussion was on a loftier plane and dealt with various ways that steadily increasing numbers of Northwest residents might be able to reduce their collective ecological footprints and maintain "fishable" populations of salmon.

However, the CEQ chair stayed firmly within the bounds of the 4 H's - the realms of habitat, hatchery, hydro and harvest reform. He said the feds would also scrutinize 180-odd hatchery programs in the Columbia Basin in order to close the ones that don't contribute to the recovery of wild stocks, and only maintain others if they didn't allow for large numbers of ESA-listed fish to be caught incidentally.

Noting the billions already spent on habitat and hydro improvements, Connaughton said the power system was not off the hook, but added, "we still allow ourselves the luxury of eating threatened and endangered salmon that may be needed for recovery. Although I recognize the complexity and broader equities of the matter, something still seems curiously out of synch here. These are salmon on the list of threatened species under the Endangered Species Act."

He said the current ocean harvest will be scrutinized along with latest 2005-2007 inriver harvest agreement, and when talks come up in 2008 with the Canadians over salmon treaty issues, the U.S. will push for reduced interceptions of ESA-listed stocks like the Snake River and Puget Sound chinook.

He said that maintaining the treaty tribes' fishing rights is still an unshakable premise of the feds' position and noted that the tribes have already made a significant contribution towards recovery by limiting their own harvests. "We need to make sure everyone else limits their harvest," Connaughton said.

At an informal press briefing after his presentation, the CEQ chair, along with regional NMFS administrator Bob Lohn, explained things a bit more in depth.

Lohn acknowledged the near-term problem of sorting out catches with Canada, since their biologists have already decided the coded-wire tagging program, developed many years ago to track catches, has been severely compromised by the recent U.S. effort to mass-mark hatchery fish to allow for more sport catches.

But Lohn was hopeful that a new form of sampling catches using DNA analysis similar to the Canadians' method could eventually be adopted region-wide. Lohn said the Canadians DNA work has led them to reduce harvest effort on their own weak stocks off Vancouver Island by concentrating fishing efforts both earlier and later in the fishing season when the fish are less likely to be around. But that has meant that Canadians are probably catching more U.S.-bound salmon than current models estimate, Lohn said.

And though Connaughton's presentation downplayed any possible reduction by Columbia River tribal fishers, both he and Lohn said later that if the new harvest assessments show that overall rates must be cut, then both tribal and non-tribal shares will be reduced, with the U.S. v. Oregon process utilized to reset allocations between the different parties in the Columbia.

They also stressed the possibility of using more selective fishing methods that might keep catches of hatchery fish relatively high while reducing impacts to listed fish.

Connaughton said all runs of listed fish have increased since 2000, with upper Columbia spring chinook up 15 percent, and Snake River fall chinook boosted to better than 300 percent. He said survival of young fish is equivalent to that of the 1960s, before the lower Snake dams were built.

However, he pointed out that about half of the Snake fall run is harvested before it gets back to Idaho, with about 60 percent caught in the ocean off Alaska, B.C., Washington and Oregon.

Canadian analyses of DNA from their recent catches shows that nearly 90 percent of the chinook caught by B.C. trollers off Vancouver Island were U.S.-bound fish, and nearly 20 percent were headed for Puget Sound. More than 40 percent were lower Columbia chinook, and almost 7 percent were made up of other threatened Columbia, Snake River and Willamette spring and fall chinook stocks.

Though some angler and conservation groups are actually suing the feds to reduce the take of listed fish, the government's biggest chore will be to get regional buy-in for their new initiatives from other large stakeholders who feel they are unfairly singled out when it comes to making sacrifices for tiny numbers of fish. In 2005, the Snake fall chinook run (hatchery and wild) made up less than 4 percent of all the 416,000 fall chinook that passed Bonneville Dam.

Sportfishing industry spokesperson Liz Hamilton said sports fishers don't want to be held to a different standard than others, and Nisqually tribal member Billy Frank Jr., representing the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, told the Salmon 2100 crowd that if all harvesters were closed down, "you wouldn't get any more fish back."

But that's not how the federal government feels these days. CEQ chair Connaughton also told reporters that another reason new harvest and hatchery assessments are in the offing is because of "emerging" lawsuits over harvest issues.

Another one of those lawsuits emerged on the very day he spoke at Salmon 2100. The Salmon Spawning and Recovery Alliance, Washington Trout, Native Fish Society, and Clark-Skamania Flyfishers filed a notice of intent to sue NOAA Fisheries and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over the federally-approved Puget Sound salmon harvest plan, charging that harvest rates on chinook are too high for the fish to recover.

Seattle attorney Svend Brandt-Erichsen, who is representing the groups, said the harvest plan doesn't measure up to the recovery criteria for some of Puget Sound's listed chinook populations set by the technical recovery team.

As for the feds' latest initiative to re-assess all the harvest BiOps, Brandt-Erichsen seemed pleased, even though the process is expected to take a year, and talks with Canada aren't officially scheduled until 2008. He represents many of the same plaintiffs in another lawsuit that calls for reconsultation of the BiOp that OK'd harvest levels set by the salmon treaty between the two countries. Brandt-Erichsen said the treaty allows the parties to implement additional conservation measures sooner than 2008 if a new evaluation suggests that greater harvest restrictions should be put in place. He said newer analyses have shown that there are flaws in the assumptions that govern harvest allocations between the two countries and they need to be corrected.

"We are pleased to see the harvest issue on the table with the rest of the H's," said Brandt-Erichsen. "It's part of the problem and needs to be part of the solution."

Idaho Senator Larry Craig (R) supported the Administration's initiative, though he didn't agree with everything in Connaughton's remarks. "Our past practices have focused on keeping the fish in the river and in abundant numbers so that we can have our cake and eat it too," Craig said in Jan. 25 remarks on the floor of the Senate. "In no other place in the world, do we treat an ESA listed species this way. We don't raise Bald Eagles only to use their feathers for our clothes, so why do we spend hundreds of millions of dollars--each year--to recover the species, and then allow a majority of them to be killed through harvesting? The people who pay for these absurd practices are the Northwest ratepayers." -Bill Rudolph

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